Everything I Read in November

On the 8 books I read in November...

November was the month of my honeymoon— not for the entire month but I had two weeks off work and considerable travelling ahead of me, so I wanted to read a fair few books while I had the luxury of uninterrupted time.

I’m pretty happy with the number of books I managed. Most of them were consumed during the honeymoon itself, and then during my first week back at work I don’t think I read more than 50 pages total. The re-entry into normal life was brutal. But I’m now on week two and trying to find that steady rhythm again, rebuilding the reading habit that temporarily collapsed under the weight of jet lag and accumulated emails.

My only fear looking ahead is that I have to sit my final insurance exams to get promoted, so over the coming months reading might become something I struggle with again. I’m genuinely hoping I can adopt a revision schedule that doesn’t require dropping all the habits and routines I’ve built up recently. We’ll see. Previous experience suggests this is optimistic, but I’m determined to try.

In terms of statistics, I read 8 books this month. Two were physical, one was audiobook, and the rest were on Kindle. Overall there was a 3.25 average rating, which sounds about right. I read probably my lowest rated book of the year this month, but I also found some genuinely good ones. The overall mood was reflective, emotional, and dark — is there anything new there? I’d wanted a lighter month, you know, proper honeymoon reading for the wedding, but I just gravitated toward my usual type. Apparently even getting married doesn’t change your fundamental reading preferences.

If you want to see my mini reviews throughout the month, you can find me on StoryGraph. Or if you like terrible interfaces, I do also update Goodreads, though it’s decidedly not my preferred platform.

A quick side note before I get into the deeper dives of the novels I have been toying with the idea of doing a set of notes in relation to books I read. In sum, I have a little pocket moleskin where I write thoughts I have when reading novels. These are fragmented and a couple of words that form my main reviews. But I love the fragmented nature of these reviews. Shall I share them as notes? I feel like they don’t warrant their own newsletter but I want to share these scattered thoughts as I find the mode so fulfilling but also insightful to whom I am as a reader and also the experience I have with a novel. Or do I just include them here? Food for thought over the month to start in the new year!

In The Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado (4.0/5.0)

“shitty ikea knife”

This was one of the books featured on my “25 to read in my 25th year on Earth” newsletter.

25 books for 25

A few of you warned me it was a difficult read and advised against picking it up on my honeymoon, so I decided to read it the week before instead. I did want to read it, just perhaps not immediately after my wedding.

I really enjoyed the reading experience of this book. “Enjoyed” might not be the right word given the subject matter, but the writing style absolutely kept me engaged throughout.

The mundaneness that situates Machado’s writing is precisely what makes In the Dream House so potent. I’d been warned it was difficult because of its focus on relationship abuse, yet I didn’t find it overwhelming in that particular way. What I encountered instead was an exceptionally crafted memoir—one that uses personal trauma not only as testimony but as a lens through which to examine society’s blind spots and systemic failures.

Machado’s use of pathetic fallacy is striking. The grey atmosphere mirrors the emotional fog of the relationship, creating this pervasive sense of being unable to see clearly even when you’re trying desperately to understand what’s happening to you. Her deep dives into film, genre conventions, and queer representation add rich intellectual layers, turning the memoir into cultural excavation as much as personal narrative.

The structural playfulness is one of the book’s greatest strengths. Machado’s interactive instructions, sending you to a different page, breaking the linearity we’re accustomed to, force you to confront how stories of abuse resist tidy chronology. You can’t read this book in a straight line because abuse doesn’t happen in a straight line. It loops back on itself, contradicts, revises, makes you question your own memory of what you just read.

It’s a read worth its high rating and copious recommendations and I will a detailed notes beyond for it soon.

Great Granny Webster, Caroline Blackwood (3.5/5.0)

“The house had both the melancholy and the magic of something inherently doomed by the height of its own ancient colonial aspirations.”

This was an engrossing read and I loved the vibe and setting completely. For me there’s something about the Victorian era, particularly summers near the beach, that creates the perfect atmosphere for unsettling fiction. Like Rebecca, it’s an incredible setting for cultivating unease beneath beautiful surfaces.

I tend to struggle with shorter books and novellas because I often feel like I need more space and time to really immerse myself in a world. That said, while I could have happily read more about Great Granny Webster, this novel was still fantastic. What really drew me in was the vivid and powerful sense of place.

British seaside towns, particularly Hove, have such a specific atmosphere, especially as places where the Victorian wealthy would retreat during warmer months. There’s always something both unforgettable and eerie about that setting for me. The faded grandeur, the sense of being slightly out of time, the peculiar loneliness of resort towns outside their season.

The house in the story, with its foreboding presence, plays a significant role in highlighting generational decline and the weight of colonial history. I wouldn’t say this makes it overtly spooky or gothic, but there’s certainly something about the uncanny here that could be critically examined. The house holds memory in a way that oppresses the living.

Although you’re probably meant to dislike Great Granny Webster, I ended up quite liking her. In fact, I enjoyed all the characters and the way family history was passed down to the narrator through oral tradition and second-hand accounts. There’s something compelling about characters who refuse to be simply villains, who remain human and occasionally sympathetic even when they’ve clearly caused damage.

The writing was bouncy and gripping throughout. I’m definitely interested in reading more by Blackwood, particularly her other work exploring family dysfunction and British class decline.

Outline, Rachel Cusk (3.0/5.0)

“He had been keen to give me the outline of his life story, which had begun unprepossessingly and ended—obviously—with him being the relaxed, well-heeled man who sat across the table from me today.”

I don’t know where I stand with Cusk at this point. I either find her brilliant or I can barely make it through a chapter. I of course recognise the value of her writing, the precision of her observations, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I enjoy reading her.

I’ve created a reading list to help me understand her project better, but I’m increasingly suspicious that I simply don’t care for this particular brand of middle-class dialogue and the assumptions it makes about what constitutes interesting conversation.

Rachel Cusk is definitively hit-or-miss for me. I value the clarity and sharpness of her insights, yet sometimes the execution falls flat. Unfortunately, I felt this way about her infamous Outline.

As the title suggests, the novel is built on outlines—sketches of people from fragmented encounters and the faint impressions they leave behind. It’s a premise I can absolutely get behind in theory. The idea of building a portrait of the narrator through what she chooses to listen to and record about others feels conceptually interesting.

I found myself loving individual lines, even whole passages. Cusk has an almost surgical precision when articulating emotional or social truths. Her ideas are often intellectually electric, the kind of observations that make you stop and think about how accurately she’s captured something you’ve felt but never articulated.

But as a novel, Outline never quite cohered for me. The quotes stand out brilliantly in isolation, but the collective experience didn’t fully land. For all her brilliance, Cusk’s writing style here simply isn’t one I connect with on a narrative level. I kept waiting for something to cohere, for these fragments to build toward something, and they never quite did in a way that satisfied me.

I suspect this is partially a me problem — Cusk is clearly doing something intentional with form and withholding that works for many readers. But I finished it feeling admiration without enjoyment, which is a peculiar and slightly frustrating reading experience.

The Wedding People, Alison Espach (4.0/5.0)

“Good writing is driven by a question … and the essay is the writer’s best attempt at answering that question. So let’s start there, with that question”

As you might know from previous newsletters and notes, I was searching for the perfect honeymoon read. And I think I actually found it. I was genuinely nervous about this because I don’t typically read romance, and I’ve already exhausted all of Emily Henry’s backlist. I didn’t want to pick something that wouldn’t be my cup of tea, but this absolutely was. The dark undertones and sarcastic humour were perfection.

I was not expecting the darkness and sardonic edge to this book, and I loved it completely. I loved the way all the characters complemented each other and developed into better versions of themselves. The contrast between the new bride and the divorcee created such rich thematic territory. There was also thoughtful exploration of mother-daughter dynamics that felt earned rather than tacked on.

Literature pervades this book. The protagonist is a Victorianist which delighted, but I found it particularly interesting how she grapples with modernism and keeps returning to Mrs. Dalloway. And I now have decided to return to Mrs Dalloway. That novel follows us throughout, so there must be deliberate parallels Espach is drawing. I’m curious about mapping those more carefully. There’s also the way Victorian orphan narratives parallel the protagonist’s own history of being an orphan, which adds another layer of literary self-awareness without becoming overly meta.

The writing was exceptional. I loved the dialogue and the way it bounced between characters, the sharp observations, the emotional honesty beneath the humour.

So why is it missing that one star? I might have wanted just a little bit more angst, and honestly? Maybe an affair. I’m not proud of this, but I wanted things to get messier than they did.

Seduction Theory, Emily Adrian (2.0/5.0)

I was cautiously excited about this one. I think I saw someone on Substack recommend it, and I haven’t read many contemporary releases this year. I wanted to give it a fair chance.

But this was absolutely forgettable.

Halfway through I checked the reviews and discovered it was giving “marmite”—p eople either loved it or hated it with no middle ground. I landed firmly on the “not good” side. There was just nothing to this book beyond words on a page. Little reason for this novel to exist, no emotional core, nothing that made me care about anyone or anything happening.

I felt nothing while reading this, which is perhaps the worst indictment I can offer. Even books I dislike usually provoke some reaction—frustration, boredom, irritation. This just slid past without leaving any impression whatsoever.

The campus novel setting should have worked for me. I’m always willing to revisit academic environments through fiction, but the execution was flat. The characters were underdrawn, the stakes nonexistent, the prose serviceable at best.

I’m genuinely baffled by the people who loved this. We must be reading completely different books, or looking for completely different things in our fiction.

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, Yumi Sakurazawa (3.0/5.0)

When purchasing the physical copy of The Wedding People, I saw this one and they were on a deal together, so I thought why not? I’m consistently drawn to Japanese authors — there’s something about the way they approach language and structure that satisfies my brain.

I read all of this while at the airport going home, and it was a pleasant, undemanding read.

This book features two novellas. The titular story felt classic in form, somewhat reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes. It was interesting how the author explicitly told us the detective technique at play rather than obscuring it, which created a different kind of pleasure. Watching the method unfold rather than trying to solve the mystery yourself.

While I did enjoy the first story, the second genuinely caught my attention. It held all the traditional conventions of gothic literature: the uncanny, obsessive focus on eyes, clear influences from both Poe and Freud. I particularly liked the epistolary form and the decision not to include the brother’s responses. We only see the narrator’s absolute submission to his replies, which creates this unsettling one-sided intimacy.

Apparently this is part of a wider detective series, so perhaps it reads better in order like Christie’s work. I might return to explore more if want something of a similar vibe.

Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins (3.0/5.0)

I placed a hold on this on Libby ages ago and it coincidentally came available during my honeymoon, so I had to pick it up despite the timing. I’ve of course watched all the Hunger Games films and loved The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, but I’ve only read the first book — which was assigned for university and I disliked Katniss’s treatment towards her mother so intensely that I never felt the urge to read the rest.

This was an interesting listen. I liked connecting the dots between all the different novels, and it’s clear that Collins has a meticulously planned larger picture. I think she’s an incredible dystopian writer who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the political message she’s conveying. She should be discussed alongside Atwood and Orwell as someone issuing genuine warnings about authoritarianism and spectacle, not dismissed as merely YA.

The prequel structure works well for deepening our understanding of Panem’s history without simply retreading the original trilogy’s emotional beats. Collins is doing worldbuilding here, exploring how these systems develop and perpetuate themselves across generations.

The Mark, Fríða Ísberg

“How is an AI supposed to see through roofs?”

I spotted this in a bookshop display and immediately added it to my TBR when I realised it was a dystopian novel.

What struck me most is that it’s one of those dystopias that doesn’t feel overtly dystopian at first — and that subtlety is exactly what makes it so unsettling. The world is built on rigid power dynamics, and the story quietly exposes how deeply those hierarchies shape everyday life. I was especially affected by the treatment of younger characters, who seem to shoulder the brunt of the system’s expectations and cruelty.

In this society, everyone is divided into “marked” and “unmarked,” and an empathy test determines your access to everything from stable housing to a respectable job to the faint hope of a secure future. It’s a sharply socioeconomic novel, and that theme comes through most poignantly in the character of Tristan. I found myself unexpectedly protective of him. Ge’s determined to resist the test, to hold on to some shred of autonomy, yet eventually he’s pushed into taking it simply to survive.

The writing itself is very approachable, and I really enjoyed how the narrative threads gradually weave together. By the end, all the characters’ paths intersect in ways that feel both inevitable and deeply satisfying.

Books I didn’t get around to

1. Ruth, Kate Riley

2. Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector

3. The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman

What I Want to Read in December

1. No One You Know, Emma Tourtelot (arc)

2. Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett

3. Mrs Dalloway, Virgina Woolf (physical)

4. Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami (physical)

5. Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector

6. Last Summer in the City, Gianfranco Calligarich

7. In The Cafe of Lost Youth, Patrick Modiano

8. Theory and Practise, Michelle de Krester

9. Flesh, David Szalay

10. Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart (audio)