Everything I Read in May

On a rough reading month...

Last month I read nineteen books and the month before that eighteen. I had built up a strong reading habit. This month has been rough. Picking up a book has been almost impossible most days, and all I could do was rot. But reading and writing is what I do, and I had arc commitments to honour before the end of the month, so that is where most of the determination came from.

In terms of numbers: six books, 1159 pages. I am gutted I did not get to read beyond the arcs, because I had curated a wonderful May reading list. But I also know I need to give myself grace. I hope for a stronger June because I miss reading!

I’ve also found recently that I am preferring physical books again, which is not necessarily an issue but it’s an issue cost to number of books I read — and I know there is the option for library books but as someone who annotates I have always found that impossible to do without feeling guilty!

Awake Awake, Fiona Mozley

“All is recollection save for the slender membrane of now. Every present thought, every present feeling, collides with a league of their familial ghosts. And if our lives in this moment seem flimsy, that is because they are. We dwell on that slim edge of experience while the waters of all that has been foam and swell.”

Mozley’s novel pulses in and out of past and present. The past is deeply rooted in British history and politics; the present is Mary’s ongoing psychoanalysis sessions. The first two hundred pages were disorienting, but the final hundred pulled everything together with a quiet potency, centred on friendship and the ways people show up for each other when it matters.

Each line feels underline worthy, the kind of prose that makes you slow down because you do not want to miss anything. The novel is also meticulously researched, steeped in the detail of the Blair era and the Iraq war protests. These historical moments sit inside the narrative unevenly, sometimes feeling slightly out of place, other times illuminating exactly why a character made the choices they did.

What grounded the novel for me, more than anything else, was place. York. The city that all the characters are eventually drawn back to, no matter how far they have wandered or how many countries the novel passes through. York is stability here, and care, a place that holds these people even when they cannot hold themselves. It is also, as Mozley seems quietly aware, a city that rarely gets to be the centre of anything in fiction. It deserves to be.

I have Elmet on my shelves and plan to pick it up soon.

Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood

This was the only Atwood novel I had not read, besides completing the MaddAddam trilogy. I started it a few years ago, gave up, and finally returned to it as an audiobook. Now I wish I had read it during my MA, when I was writing my thesis on The Robber Bride. It would have fitted rather neatly.

It was quintessentially Atwood. Witty and witchy in equal measure. This felt like a cultural novel as much as a literary one, an interesting dive into the gothic romance genre that dominated the 1970s. I can genuinely imagine Atwood writing these under a pen name, and in many ways that is exactly what she does inside the novel itself.

It was an enjoyable listen. Though I do think it was quite fragmented, and I suspect that is either the point or the flaw, depending on your patience for it.

Ghost-Eye, Amitav Ghosh

“Bengali cookery is a domestic art, practised in secluded niches of the household by people who rely on memories that are stored not in their heads but in their hands and fingers: their methods cannot be easily reduced to printed instructions for the very fact of their being committed to paper often vitiates their authenticity.”

I took a South-East Asian Diaspora course during my postgraduate and have not really returned to that literature since. Ghost-Eye might be one of my favourite reads of the year. It is so vividly woven with history and culture, and there is a magical realism element to it, characters reincarnated across time, and yet it never quite feels like magical realism. It just feels like realism. Like this is simply how the world works.

The novel moves between the pandemic and 1969 Calcutta. I am not normally a reader drawn to environmental literature or extended descriptions of food, but Ghosh handles both with such care that I did not notice my own resistance dissolving. The primary food of the novel is fish. I have little knowledge of fish in general, let alone fish native to Bengali culture, and yet I could picture their size, their texture, their status within different households. I felt genuinely immersed.

What stayed with me most was the displacement. The narrator’s experience of living in a diaspora, of being at a remove from a home that is also changing, being altered by nature and time and forces entirely outside of anyone’s control. That double displacement, from culture and from land simultaneously, is something Ghosh renders with a quiet precision I am still thinking about.

Ask Me Again, Clare Sestanovich

I picked this up as an audiobook and it started out strong. There was a pull between the two main characters, a soulmate quality that kept me listening. And then everything just went flat, which is quite a feat for an audiobook in my experience. There seemed to be no core to it, no message beyond the back and forth of two people who clearly like each other and are being difficult about it. I kept waiting for the point and it never quite arrived.

Little Wild, Laura Evans

The setting was probably my favourite part of this novel. 1937 Suffolk felt heavy with pre-war anxiety while still being expansive and almost dreamlike because of the landscape. There is a constant sense of isolation and dread underneath everything that really worked for me.

The narration was interesting too. We are stuck inside the perspective of someone who is clearly unreliable and entirely consumed by the girl she once lived with. I know some readers would read the relationship as mutual, but to me it felt wholly one-sided, more fixation than romance. That tension carried a great deal of the novel in the early stages.

But somewhere along the way it began to lose me. The writing is beautiful and strange in a way that kept me turning pages, but it also dragged, and I kept waiting for something more substantial to emerge from all the witchy undertones. The ambiguity at the end felt more frustrating than intentional. I wanted answers and did not get them.

What I did love were the discussions around the classics. The whole novel reminded me of Wuthering Heights, not just because of the bleak countryside setting but because of the compulsive, consuming love at the centre of it. That comparison did a great deal of work in keeping me generous towards it.

Articles and Long Form Writing

Given that my Substack is dedicated to close reading I thought I’d add in here a reminder of all the long form non-fiction pieces I’ve read over the month normally shared in my Coffee and Commonplace.

1. London Review of Books Vol 48.8

2. London Review of Books Vol 48.7

3. New York Review of Books May 14

Throughout June I shall read the relevant LRB and NYRB publications and also the new Granta.

Currently Reading

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

I think I only read around 20 pages of this in May. I do want to finish it before the year is out, maybe even summer, so I will try and get back into reading 10 pages a day.

Death Do Us, Ruthy Mason

This is my last arc to read for May that comes out in June — I like to read my arcs one month in advance of their release. It’s categorised as a thriller and I am already getting the eery feeling. It’s a feminist body horror set in London which makes it all the more engaging for me. I expect it to be a commentary on engagement and wedding culture, something I went through last year, and I am interested to see where the critique goes.

The Ten Year Affair, Erin Somers

This is my current audiobook listen. I’ve seen it get some good reviews and is presented as one of the best adultery novels since Madame Bovary so I am hoping it will be a thrilling listen.

What I did not get around to

1. That Mad Ache, Françoise Sagan

2. The Deserters, Mathias Énard

3. Is Mother Dead, Vigdis Hjorth

4. Prophet Song, Paul Lynch

5. She Who Remains, Rene Karabash

6. Iza’s Balad, Magda Szabó

7. Angel, Elizabeth Taylor

8. Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti

9. Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette

10. Panenka, Rónán Hession

11. Sick Notes, Gwendoline Riley

12. To Rest Our Mind and Bodies, Harriet Armstrong

My June TBR

1. That Mad Ache, Françoise Sagan

2. Is Mother Dead, Vigdis Hjorth

3. The Door, Magda Szabó

4. Lili is Crying, Hélène Bessette

5. Panenka, Rónán Hession

6. The Summer Book, Tove Jansson

7. Retro, Jessica M. Goldstein

8. Letters from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories, Stefan Zweig

9. Contrapposto, Dave Eggers

10. The Anniversary, Andrea Bajani

11. Sublimation, Isabel J. Kim

12. Bedlam, Jennifer Higgie