Charl08 reads Voices and Visions in 2025 #6

I'm Charlotte, based in the northwest of England. I work in higher education (although I've handed in my notice, so this will probably change). I'm currently "between jobs". I enjoy reading, going to art galleries and museums and (when funds permit) travelling. Last year I went on a short break to Portugal, but because of the job news I'm probably going to stay closer to home for a bit.

The categories

I went to the Medieval Women: Voices and Visions exhibit at the tail end of last year in the British Library.

The exhibition was fascinating, many of the exhibits were beautiful. As there were lots of connections to books and writers I thought I could use them through this thread, and hopefully look at some of them a bit longer.

Reading my own books
Familiar Faces
New to me
Prizewinners
Women in translation
Graphic novels / manga
African Writers
History / Memoirs

Plus: Cat reads


https://www.artfund.org/explore/get-inspired/features/women-of-the-middle-ages

Ed. Most of the images are my photos of images in the book of the exhibition, Medieval Women (highly recommended btw!)

Reading my own books



"An anchoress entering her cell, from a Pontifical including an order for the enclosure of anchoresses; England, 15th century: Lansdowne MS 451, f. 76v."

Pretty sure anchoresses didn't get to just order stuff on amazon...

Try and read 10 books per month.

Target achieved in January? Yes! (10)
Target achieved in February? 1 short...
Target achieved in March? Yes! 10 read.
Target achieved in April? Yes +1
Target achieved in May? Yes.
Target achieved in June? 11 read
July? 8 read.
August? 12 read.
September? 10 read
October? 5 read (oops)

On a Woman's Madness
Death of an Englishman*
Rescue
The House of Marvellous Books*
Isola
Affinity
Everybody's Protest Novel: Essays
To the Friend Who Did Not Save my Life*
The Revolutionary Temper
The Bells of Nagasaki*

Sex and Lies
The Bookseller's Tale
The Slave Book*
Algeriennes

November? 14 read

All the Lights
Persian Girls
A Kind of Anger
A Family Matter*
Blue Aubergine*
Mudlarking*
The Glass Palace
Whispers of the Dead*
Shy Creatures

December? 9 read

Currently reading my own books: (to different levels from having picked up recently to not having read in months)

Medieval Women: Voices & Visions: The Book of the British Library Exhibition
Everybody's Protest Novel: Essays (James Baldwin Centennial)
American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748–1789
The Bookseller's Tale
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Persian Boy: A Novel of Alexander the Great
And Wrote My Story Anyway
The American Beast: essays
A Woman Is No Man
Wake Me When I'm Gone (kindle)

* Means I only bought them this year. (Don't judge me!)

New to me (authors I've not read before)

I'd not heard of the erotic poetry of Gwerful Mechain, - the exhibition included a modern copy of 'Cywydd y cedor' (Poem to the Vagina) Wales, 18th century

From the notes: "Candid eroticism, audacity and humour characterise the poetry of Gwerful Mechain (d. 1502). She was one of the most extraordinary female voices in medieval Wales, although surviving copies of her works date from a much later period. This, her most popular poem, pokes fun at men who praise all women's body parts except for what she considers the best one...."



........
15. No Country for Girls (crime fiction)
16. The Bridge of San Luis Rey (literary fiction)
17. Picks and Shovels (thriller)
18. Well This is Awkward (comic fiction)
19. Quiet Types (romance fiction)
20. See Them Run (crime fiction)
21. The Correspondent (comic fiction)


Familiar faces



Witches.
.......
21. Once the Deed is Done (lit fiction)
22. Perspectives (lit fiction)
23. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (lit)
24. I'll be Right Here (lit fic)
25. The Prey (crime)
26. The Detective Up Late (crime)
27. A Question of Guilt (crime)

Prize winners (and nominees)

"In February 1477, at the village of Topcroft in Norfolk, Margery Brews dictated a letter to her suitor John Paston III, calling him her 'right well-beloved valentine' and expressing the depth of her love. While John's reply to Margery does not survive, her words form the oldest known Valentine's letter in English.... "
(From the chapter by Calum Cockburn)

......
11. The South (Booker Longlist)
12. Universality (ditto)
13. What the Wild Sea Can Be (Women's Fiction NF shortlist 2025, Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist – 2024, James Cropper Wainwright Prize Shortlist – Conservation Writing – 2025)
14. Audition Booker longlist
15. One Boat Ditto
16. Misinterpretation Ditto
17. Love Forms Ditto
18. Endling Ditto
19. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny Ditto
20. The Rest of Our Lives Ditto

21. Flesh Ditto
22. Question 7 (Baillie Gifford NF winner 2024)

Women in translation


Colophon of Estellina Conat, from her printed edition of Jedaiah Ben Abraham Bedersi's Behinat ha-'Olam; Mantua, 1476-80

The first known female Hebrew printer/ typesetter and one of the first known female printers in any language.
.......

July
1. A Book, Untitled (Armenian)
2. The Women Who Changed Art Forever (Italian)
3. Still Born (Spanish, Mexico)
4. Satisfaction (French)

August
1. Wildcat Dome (Japanese)
2. Supporting Act (Swedish)
3. Daughters (German)
4. Chicanes (French)
5. Shame (French)
6. Dead End Memories (Japanese)

September
1. Disoriental (French)
2. About Uncle (French)

October
Oops

November
1. On a Woman's Madness (Dutch, Suriname)
2. Sex and Lies (French, Morocco)

December
1. The Sea Cloak (Arabic, Gaza)
2. Blue Aubergine (Arabic, Egypt)

Graphic novels and manga



Art by Sibilla von Bondorf (d c1524), a nun in the Order of Poor Clares,
Detail from "St Clare and a group of nuns mourning St Francis of Assisi, from The Life and Miracles of St Francis of Assisi; Freiburg, 1478: Add MS 15710, f. 184v."

Reminds me of Lucie Attwell...
.......
11. Everything is Temporary
12. The Last Soviet Artist (travelogue / memoir)
13. Fugitive Days (fiction)
14. Feeding Ghosts (memoir)
15. The Women Who Changed Art Forever (art history)
16. Checked Out (memoir)
17. Florrie: a football love story (Historical fiction)
18. Pearl (Historical fiction)
19. Fierce (fiction)
20. Daybreak (zombies)

21. Hawking (science / biography)
22. Here (fiction)
23. This Slavery (adaptation of radical 19c novel)
24. The novel life of Jane Austen: a graphic biography (biography / literary history)
25. Bloody Mary: a graphic biography (history)
26. To Broadway: a graphic novel (fiction)
27. Algeriennes (fictionalised historical)
28. This Might Surprise You (health memoir)
29. Alone in Space (collection of author's early work)
30. Murder Book: a graphic memoir (memoir linked to true crime)
31. Spent (autofiction)

African writers

Noting this here:
https://brittlepaper.com/100-notable-african-books-of-2024/

January: Green Lion (South Africa)
February: How to be a Revolutionary (South Africa)
Ghostroots (Nigeria)
March: A Soft Landing (South Africa)
April: The Lion's Den (Zambia)
Crooked Seeds (South Africa)
May: Muriel at Metropolitan (South Africa)
June: Sand Roses (Algeria)
Lakiriboto (Nigeria)
July: N/A
August: Jesus is Indian (South Africa)
September: N/A
October: The Heart of Redness (South Africa)
Wake Me When I'm Gone (Nigeria)
November: The Slave Book (South Africa)
December: Blue Aubergine (Egypt)

History, memoir and other NF categories

"The author Christine de Pizan instructing her son, from 'The Book of the Queen'; Paris, c. 1410-14: Harley MS 4431/2, f. 261v."
......

15. 38 Londres Street (history / law)
16. Free: coming of age at the end of history (memoir)
17. Agrippina (history)
18. Dandelions (memoir)
19. Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum (collective biography)
20. Republic: Britain's revolutionary decade (history)

21. Chicanes (art criticism)
22. Shame (memoir)
23. What the Wild Sea Can Be (environment / marine life)
24. The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes (fashion / women's history)
25. Hidden Hands (literary history)
26. Language City (linguistics / sociology)
27. The Bookseller's Tale (books about books - memoir)
28. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother's secrets (memoir / family history)

Plans for Colourcategory reading... (aim is to read from my own shelves here)

January - green
The Wind Knows My Name
Lucie Rie

February - Gold
Private Revolutions

March: Pink
Miss Spring Fragrance
The Lark

April: Brown
Nina Hamnett
Le Silence de la Mer

May: – Red
The Little Red Chairs
June: – Yellow
On the Calculation of Volume
July:– White
Dandelions
August:– Grey
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
September:– Silver
Impossible Saints
October:– Black

November: – Blue
Possibles from my own books: Blue Aubergine

December:Purple Persian Girls

Read:

November 28 (279)

1. On a Woman's Madness (Women in Translation / reading my own books)
2. Picks and Shovel (New to me)
3. Flesh (Prize winners)
4. Death of an Englishman (Reading my own books)
5. Rescue (Reading my own books)
6. The House of Marvellous Books (Reading my own books)
7. Isola (Reading my own books)
8. Affinity (ditto)
9. Well, This is Awkward (new to me)
10. Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (familiar faces)

11. I'll be Right Here (familiar faces)
12. Everybody's Protest Novel: Essays (Reading my own books)
13. To the Friend Who Did Not Save my Life (Reading my own books)
14. Saltwater Mansions (NF / Memoir)
15. Dating Dr Dil ( new to me/ reading my own books)
16. Question 7 (prize winners)
17. The Revolutionary Temper (Reading my own books/ NF)
18. Quiet Types (New to me)
19. Kill Shot (Familiar faces)
20. Language City (NF)

21. The Bells of Nagasaki (Memoir / reading my own books)
22. Sex and Lies (NF / reading my own books / women in translation)
23. Bloody Mary: a graphic biography (GN)
24. To Broadway: a graphic novel (GN)
25. The Bookseller's Tale (Reading my own books/ memoir)
26. The Prey (Familiar faces)
27. The Slave Book (African authors/ reading my own books)
28. Algeriennes (GN / reading my own books)

Library books read this month: 10

December 20 (299)

1. All the Lights (new to me / reading my own books)
2. The Detective Up Late (familiar faces)
3. This Might Surprise You (GN)
4. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother's secrets (NF - memoir)
5. Alone in Space (GN)
6. See Them Run (crime fiction, new to me)
7. Persian Girls (Reading my own books, colour category)
8. A Question of Guilt (familiar faces)
9. A Kind of Anger (Reading my own books)
10. The Correspondent (new to me)

11. The Sea Cloak (Women in translation)
12. A Family Matter (Reading my own books)
13. Blue Aubergine (African writers / women in translation)
14. Hollow Grave (new to me)
15. Mudlarking ( NF / reading my own books)
16. Murder Book: a graphic memoir (GN)
17. The Glass Palace (Reading my own books)
18. Whispers of the Dead (Reading my own books)
19. Shy Creatures (Reading my own books)
20. Spent

Library books read this month: 8

Looking towards the end of the year....

Reading my own books (105/120)
Not done too badly here, but would like to make 120 by the end of the year.

Familiar Faces / New to me
No specific target here. Interesting to see the mix of new-to-me and authors I am returning to.

Prizewinners
Mostly Booker and Women's Prize longlist books here. I'm not too worried about the ones I've not got to (except for the ones I've bought!)

Women in translation
This has gone well. Pleased that this category has motivated me to pick up some Peirene novellas from my subscription, too.

Graphic novels / manga
No specific target here. Nice overlap with the category above.

African Writers
Could do better! Zakes Mda in particular took me *ages* to finish. I really struggled to get into the story, even though the historical setting (the cattle killing / millennial movement) was something I was interested in.

History / Memoirs
I need to accept these big historical chunksters take a long time for me to read compared to fiction. Some fascinating books here though.

Plus: Cat reads
I was doing well until I got derailed by October!

Happy new thread, Charlotte!

>12 katiekrug: Thanks Katie!

Happy new thread

>14 lowelibrary: Thanks April!

Happy New Thread,🧵, Charlotte .

Happy new thread, Charlotte, and good luck with finding a new job.

Happy new thread.
Be nice if that also had a new job to go with it. What are you looking for, or will you know it when you see it?

happy new thread, and good luck with the job search.

Happy new thread, Charlotte. I love your categories and am thinking maybe I should do something like that next year...

Yes, and good luck with the job search.

Thanks for all the good wishes Deborah, Birgit, Helen, Rhonda and Beth. No progress to report. Full of some weird kind of winter bug so not a lot happening here.

Kill Shot (Familiar faces)
I've mostly read Gary Disher's newer series about the city detective moved to an outback one man station. In contrast this one is focused on the "baddie", a man who steals high value items to order. Very twisty. I.rathwr empathised with the detective trying, largely unsuccessfully, to work out what was going on.

'You're a tick boxes kinda guy,' his wife used to say. And according to one of his annual performance reviews, 'a pedestrian determination' was the 'hallmark' of his 'approach to policing'.

Admin were thinking of bringing in self-assessment; if they did that, Muecke was tempted to write, 'Still standing.'

Language City

With the push of a door, we're out of the Seke village and into the street. You can get used to the scale and speed of the city, but never all of its contrasts, proximities, and juxtapositions. Barely even visible under quasi-permanent scaffolding, 380 sits unnoticed off a bustling commercial strip, two blocks from a subway stop, in a neighborhood where Brooklyn's biggest ethnic blocs back up onto one another.

Sometime in the late twentieth century, almost by accident, this became one of the most diverse places on the planet. It all looks very ordinary, but this square mile is home to a Ghanaian evangelical church, a Russian banya, a florist/bar for hipsters, a Juhuri-speaking synagogue for the Jews of Azerbaijan and Daghestan, Dominican hair salons, Pakistani auto body shops, Haitian dollar-van stops, an orga-nization of Darfuri refugees, a Cambodian Buddhist wat, an Albanian mosque, a Panamanian bar, and a restaurant where Uzbek Uber drivers swig bottles of Jameson while savoring fine kebabs. Certain worlds here intersect, but most never do and never need to.

This book is deserving of all the nominations and prizes it's been given. Written by the co-director of a NYC based organisation that works to document and preserve languages, it reflects specialist expertise and what seems to be a genuine enthusiasm for working with "ordinary" language speakers. Told through six pen portraits of key individuals working with the ELA, one of the strengths is just how different each language story is (as well as the similarities in the challenges they face in a new place).

With all her languages, Rasmina is almost an unofficial, unpaid interpreter and ambassador between 380 and America, like so many "1.5 generation" kids in other communities." "Any time my mom has an appointment, they'll call me," she says. "I'll just speak like I'm my mom." She took her whole extended family to vote in the last election. She helped supervise four Seke kids as they struggled with remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. For others, she fills out unemployment forms, deals with repairs, translates prescriptions, and goes to parent-teacher conferences either with or instead of the parents.

"It's what a lot of immigrants go through," she says. "Many take their kids to their appointments, and if their kids are not available, they'll reach out to me.....

She draws the line when aunties, like aunties everywhere, try to follow their kids onto social media: "The social media is getting to them. They're very addicted now. Every day somebody's mom is like, 'Make me Instagram, make me TikTok,' and I say, 'No thank you!'.

The Bells of Nagasaki (Memoir / reading my own books)
This was an impulse purchase, it's a beautiful small hardback edition of a book originally published in the 1940s by a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bomb. Nagai was a doctor radiographer working in a teaching hospital at the time of the blast, and the bulk of the short book recounts his experiences with colleagues trying to treat the survivors. As you would expect, it's a pretty brutal read.

The introduction discusses the context, suggesting that there was difficulty getting the memoir past the US censors and that the religious chapter (Nagai was Catholic) was part of an attempt to get past that. In effect, this chapter justifies the dropping of the bomb, clearly a controversial position.

According to Nagai, even shortly after their direct experience of the bomb, he and his scientific colleagues were fascinated by the "progress" the bomb's existence demonstrated.

"What do you think of using alpha rays or radium or some such thing?"

"Or couldn't they have used the mesotron of the cosmic rays?"

"Ah! I've got it! Yes, that's it! Fission!"

"Yes, yes! Fission! The phenomenon discovered by Madame Meitner."

"Madame Meitner? The name doesn't sound familiar. What nationality is she?"

"She's Austrian. She did her research in Copenhagen. She's also one of the scholars expelled by Hitler. She used to be an assistant to Dr. Hahn. But she must be an old woman by this time, well over sixty. Her research has some connection with the work of Professor Fermi of Italy. She found out that if you make a slow-moving neutron hit a uranium nucleus, the latter breaks in two. A fast-moving neutron is no good because it passes through the nucleus and nothing happens. If the slow-moving neutron creeps into the atomic nucleus and stays there for a while, the nucleus suddenly breaks in two and separates. Then the great atomic energy latent in the nucleus is released and bursts out."

"Wow! That's brilliant! It can be done with the neutron alone."

Language City sounds like my kind of book -- I love books about words and language. You might like Anton Treuer's book The Language Warrior's Manifesto. He's done a lot of work with the Ojibwa language.

>23 charl08: This does sound brutal.

Sex and Lies

Everyone is hiding. Everyone is a hypocrite. We're living in a kind of doublethink, at every social level...

Short book that packs in a lot to think about. Leila Slimami, novelist and journalist, invited women to speak about their experiences of living in Morocco under punitive regulations and state controls of their personal lives. Including accounts from a wide range of women, with comment from Slimani drawing the wider political context. To pull out just a couple of examples, an account from a lesbian woman about the hidden lgbt community, who laughs about trying to get into a local digital group and being blocked because she used a real photo rather than using a film actor as a profile pic like everyone else. A doctor reflects on having to do "virginity" tests, and how her job comes with privilege but also barriers to relationships. A campaigning journalist discusses how her open writing about sex and relationships in a newspaper column comes with a lot of criticism.

From the conclusion:

All these testimonies also confirm the central role that women play in these issues. Despite our legislative advances, despite the progress made by Moroccan society, women's bodies are still controlled by the group. Before she can be an individual, a woman must be a mother, a sister, a wife, a daughter. She is the guarantee of family honour and, worse of the nation's identity. Her virtue is a public matter. Therefore, we still need to invent the woman who belongs to no one...

Bloody Mary: a graphic biography of Mary Tudor

A graphic-novel-style biography of Queen (Bloody) Mary. I know very little about the Tudors apart from the usual. I liked the way the author represented public opinion, as well as showing the battle of wills between Mary and her father over religious belief.

>24 BLBera: I restrained myself from telling the librarians when I returned Language City that it was so wonderful that they all should read it toute suite....

Lots of reading that you are doing , Charlotte. Enjoy!

Hi there! Happy new thread. Good luck with the job search. And the reading. : )

Hi there! Happy new thread. Good luck with the job search. And the reading. : )

>28 vancouverdeb: I think it's more that I've finished quite a few all at once that I've been reading for a while - a bit deceptive on the stats.

>29 Berly: >30 Berly: Hi Kim, lovely to see you. Sending my good wishes for your health.

Another GN came in at the library.

I just loved To Broadway - beautiful illustrations and a thoughtful storyline bringing together the joy of movement and dance. It also looks at the experience of Broadway in the 1950s and how some creatives were exploring how to express and confront less joyful aspects of mainstream theatre, including founding 'off-off-Broadway' and the foundation of a Black dance company.

Notes at the back explain how the fiction was inspired IRL.



The chapter breaks have lots of white space and line drawings of Ulli dancing:



Kerouac's not-terribly-inspiring life guidance:

Happy new thread Charlotte!

>22 charl08: When we lived in New York, a friend lived in Brooklyn and took us to a street that had a place of worship of each of the major religions along it.

>33 humouress: This book did make me want to travel to NYC, even though the author does get a bit cutting about romanticising cosmopolitanism (not his words). I suspect me wanting to go visit some of the places he mentions fits this.

The Bookseller's Tale

Lovely book. I can't think of a single LT member I've "met" online I wouldn't recommend this to...

How many of the authors on the cover can you name?

The Prey (Familiar faces)

I thought I was getting a scandi thriller, but "creepy" on the cover should have tipped me off really. I'm not so keen on 'evil hauntings' so the characters finding out their link to the violent death of a small child and her "revenge" wasn't my cup of tea. Wrapping this up with a more earth-bound criminal act seemed a bit like cheating to me!

27. The Slave Book

The Slave Book

This is one of the books I bought earlier in the year. It is is referenced in Barbara Boswell's book about Black women writers in South Africa.

The plot centres on a Muslim family sold in Cape Town to an unscrupulous wine farmer, who buys the stepfather and daughter, and not the mother /wife, splitting up the family. The farm is dependent on slave labour to run, and the farmer is worried as new English laws mean that emancipation is on the horizon for his workers. A beautiful young woman, Somiela arouses jealousy from the farmer's wife and his daughter, and interest from the farm workers. Her stepfather refuses to obey the farmer and is put in chains, against regulation. The farmer's eldest daughter gets married, and this relationship brings another suitor for the young woman (and more conflict).

I found this an interesting read, but it does include a lot of historical detail (for example about the technical detail of negotiating the end of slavery, and "apprenticeships"). I don't think I'd read about the early Muslim communities in Cape Town before in fiction, either. It was a reminder to me of how books can be a way to think about the experiences of others: one character goes to discuss marriage outside his faith with his sister, who says I don't want you to go to hell, or me to go there for advising you (ie if she said she accepted the marriage against her own faith). A reminder of the power of people's belief and religion in shaping communities.

In her chapter discussing the book, Boswell notes the innovation of Jacobs' work, in addressing the key role of Muslim slaves in the formation of Cape society, the gendered nature of slavery and that "the slave experience had, for the first time, been creatively imagined and remembered by black women."

Boswell also relates this to US writers writing from the perspective of enslaved people, and the link between these novels and contemporary politics. However, she also points to accusations of colorism within the book by other critics.

I want to get hold of the other book she discusses in the chapter -Unconfessed, but think I will wait until I've caught up with my existing stack. Of those she discusses, I still have Mother to Mother, Daughters of the Twilight and And they didn't die to read, as I found those online relatively cheaply.

>36 charl08: I loved The Prey earlier this year, Charlotte! She has a new book coming out in early January, and I am keen to read it. I think it is already out in the UK.

The Booksellers Tale sounds interesting too.

>38 vancouverdeb: It was a bit *too* creepy for me, Deborah. She's clearly winning with most readers though, judging by all the 'bestseller' labels on the book.

The Bookseller's Tale is so interesting - my Dad has picked it up (he attempted to do this before I'd finished and I was not impressed...)

I have been writing job applications in the library to the sounds of "The Wheels on the Bus" from the toddlers' group going on next door. Very cute.

Finished a couple of books:

Algeriennes
Hard-hitting graphic novel drawing on historical events in the Algerian Revolution. Given the (still) contentious questions of 'history' I wondered how much the insistence on 'fiction' is due to people wanting to be anonymous. A young French woman tries to find out about the conflict from others when her father (a conscript) won't talk about his experiences. She hears from her own mother, the daughter of a 'harki' (an Algerian who fought with the French), a woman who became a fighter when her father was captured, and a successful Algerian politician who was tortured by the French. As I'm writing this I'm thinking about the white saviour narrative, as the last character is 'rescued' from torture by a 'good' soldier.

I have read a bit about women's experience in anti-colonial wars, and the ways their experiences often reflected (colonial, ironically) patriarchal structures of power.

And always interested in discussion of how we remember history!

All the Lights

Short stories translated from German. All very bleak, lots of alcohol, violence, not much hope. A boxer in a foreign bar has to run away from his supporter's opponents. An ex-prisoner carries money to his cell-mate's daughter, who doesn't have an office job after all. A man convinces himself that if only he could speak Lithuanian, the young woman he buys sex from would reciprocate his feelings. I had to put this down and read other things in between stories, it was just so dark. The opposite of Marzahn Mon Amour.
Although as true?

And he's still thinking about it as he walks down the road to the village. He stops at the old Konsum cooperative shop and looks in the window at the empty room. The shop's been closed for years now, and there's nowhere to shop in the next village any more either. He doesn't like the big supermarket in the middle of the fields just outside town. They used to meet here outside the Konsum when they came home from work, from the cooperative or the fields. They used to drink beer and talk, sometimes they drank beer and didn't talk, before they went back to their farms and into their houses. Fred, Wee Henry, Walfried, Jochen Schuster and Jochen Meyer - all long gone now or dead.

He wants to remember their faces and their voices, here outside the shop, but there's nothing, and he starts walking again.

(For some reason Marzahn Mon Amour was not on my catalogue already. How did I miss adding this back when I read it?)

The Detective Up Late
Another great addition to the Sean Duffy series, set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. A young woman has gone missing, and the team throw everything at Duffy's "Last Case".

Nasty?" Crabbie asked. "Murder?"

"You never know."

"What's the motive?" Crabbie wondered.

"She started blackmailing them? One of them was a psycho? She met a Ripper? One of those satanic paedophile conspiracies of the great and good you read about in the Sunday papers," Lawson said eagerly.

"Well, that's certainly covering your bases," I replied.

"An, escort? Are you sure, Sean? The report said she was fifteen, if I remember rightly," Crabbie muttered.

"I'm afraid that's what it looks like, buddy."

He frowned and shook his head. His eyes told the story. The world was going to hell and there was nothing he could do about it. I nodded. Nothing any of us could do about it really. Big picture. Long view. In geological time we were all dead and forgotten. The letters they had carved onto Boltzmann's grave as a permanent tribute, "S = k log W," were already decomposing into the stone.

"What are you thinking, Sean?" Crabbie asked.

"Heat death of the universe, entropy, decay, the utter pointlessness of police work."

"The usual then?"

Ed to fix title.

This Might Surprise You
GN memoir that explores the author's experience of breast cancer. Diagnosed young (37) she navigates childcare and work with her chemotherapy.

The NHS comes our if this fairly well and (at least at the end of the book) the ending is upbeat. Given the subject matter, it is not an easy read, but Gullen does find humour in her experiences.

There's also a lovely thread through the book about all the support she received: sometimes from the most unlikely places. Reminded me of when I was in the last throes of editing a stack of thesis pages a foot high in a cafe and a person I'd never met stopped and said something like "you will get there". I was clearly at the end of my tether, and it was just so kind.*

There's a preview here: https://issuu.com/bloomsburypublishing/docs/this_might_surprise_you_by_hayley_gu...

*I am aware this is not the same as a health crisis!

Missing Persons or my grandmother's secrets

On the stories her mother tells her:

The family stories are all sewn up, with no space for me, no space for questions. She has built her sense of herself through these stories and at this stage - she's over ninety, and she's definitely packing up her things and preparing to leave questions aren't helpful. I ask them anyway, my sceptical, disenchanting questions. I go further and I actually check facts, looking up people in the General Register's Office and decennial census, the state's great social-bookkeeping endeavours, one documenting births, marriages and deaths and the other providing snapshots of households in time. Sometimes I come back to her with evidence that proves that what she remembers or what she heard can't have happened that way. She is never pleased about this. Yet she keeps feeding me stories.

Lately, she's taken to telling me a tale about another lost child: a baby born to her mother before she married in 1920. A baby that was given up, or given away, around the time of the First World War. There's definitely something not quite right about this story. It has all the trappings of a fable, but one in which my real-life mother has a walk-on part.

In the absence of much evidence outside her family's memories, the author discusses what family secrets meant in Ireland. She thinks about what is left out and what is remembered. Some of these stories are linked to the mother and baby home scandals of recent years, as her uncle's partner was placed in one.

I had missed that the official investigation managed to make it about family failure rather than institutional abuse...(yikes)

When the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby homes came out there was an outcry, because of its assessment that those who bore the greatest responsibility for the horror and cruelty experienced by so many women and their children were not officials of the Catholic Church and the state, but the women's families instead. Women who became pregnant outside marriage were not forced into the homes, the commissioners argued. Abandoned by the fathers of their children, and by their parents, they had had nowhere else to go...

Wow! You are finishing the year strong. You got me with The Slave Book and The Bookseller's Tale.

I might have to gift myself some books.

You got me with Blood Mary: a graphic biography of Mary Tudor as I found it at the library. I wasn't as lucky with the booksellers book. Maybe it hasn't made it here yet.

Best of luck with your job search. I hope you find something that you actually like!

>45 BLBera: Thanks Beth. I am finding that Boswell's book is a really handy structure for expanding my knowledge of South African fiction.

>46 Familyhistorian: Glad your library had a copy. I didn't realise how little I knew about Mary until I started reading this. I suspect this is to do with the state being protestant? I was aware how Elizabeth was treated after her mother was executed. Although maybe that's because she's such an iconic queen? So many questions, and it's not even 11 yet.

>The Prey was creepy, but in a good way for me. My sister is big fan of Helen Fields books, but I tried one and I had to stop as it was to gruesome for me, so I know what you mean, sort of .

>48 vancouverdeb: I just didn't like the supernatural theme at all. Boring if we like everything the same though, eh?

Alone in Space (GN)
A collection of Tillie Walden's early work. I can't say I'm a fan of her more speculative fiction, but the contemporary YA stuff is a favourite.

See Them Run (crime fiction, new to me)
With more time I've been browsing local charity shops bookshelves, and this one, the first in a series about a police detective based in St Andrews, caught my eye. I think I've been to St Andrews about three times, but I enjoyed the Scottish references nonetheless. I did find I kept skimming, and would miss key points and have to go back, so need to pay more attention.

Persian Girls (Reading my own books / colour cat)
I'm not sure where I came across this one, a memoir based on the author's childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran.
Rachlin was 'given' by her mother to her sister, who had no children herself. Her new mother was dedicated and loving, and she grew up in a small neighbourhood where she felt comfortable and safe.

Her father decided he wasn't going to put up with his daughter outside his control and turned up at her school in Tehran and dragged her back 'home'. Nachlin spent the rest of her childhood feeling out of place and unloved, and desperate to return to the woman she called 'mother'. As she grew older, she began to understand the impact of the state's limits on women's rights. Her sister tried to avoid an arranged marriage and was forced to marry an unstable (but wealthy) man. Her classmates were engaged to men much older than they were, and dropped out before finishing school. Determined to avoid this, she studied and was able to persuade her father to support an application to college in the US. As she left, tensions and protests increased, and she eventually found herself entirely cut off from her family by the political break between the US and Iran.

I thought the early sections of this book were really powerful, her memories are described vividly. It seemed to lose direction once she arrived in the US, however. This perhaps reflects her own sense that she was only able to write about the past, rather than her partner, daughter and work in the US.

A faint smile appeared on her face as she said, "The irony is that, as much as I feared the hospital, I felt certain sense of freedom there, too. We said what we wanted. There was one woman my age who always took her clothes off and danced naked. We put on a play in the large reception room, when it was empty at night and no one stopped us. The nurses and orderlies left us alone."

My knees felt weak as we strolled, from all that Pari told me. We passed a sprawling building with a high wall around its courtyard. "That's where Mansour took me," Pari said.

"Pahlavi Sanitarium for Women" was written on a tile plaque on the wall next to the compound's wrought-iron gate. When the gate swung open and a guard let visitors out, I got a glimpse inside the courtyard. Patients wearing drab beige robes were sitting on benches, looking downward or staring into space. Some wandered around aimlessly.

The sun was beginning to set and the sky was full of streaks of red and purple. A pair of crows sat on a bare tree branch, and the muffled voice of the muezzin from a mosque reached us. We walked home in silence.

A Question of Guilt
The approaching-retirement detective Wisting here tries to reinvestigate a murder case. This is sparked when he receives anonymous messages in the mail pointing to holes in the original case. Rereading the files, Wisting notes that no one looked at other potential suspects. An American student, a young photographer and even a later convicted criminal were all seen in the area.

The original lead is going for a senior police job though, and doesn't want anyone pointing out his past mistakes...

Persian Girls sounds really good. I think I may have a copy somewhere...Maybe it's time to read it.

>53 BLBera: I really liked the early section of the book where she talked about her childhood.

I've recently discovered Eric Ambler thanks to the British Library re-publications, so was really happy to see A Kind of Anger in the charity shop last week. Published in the 1960s it reminded me of To Catch a Thief, lots of driving on fancy cars around the French Riviera. A journalist is sent to try and track down a young woman caught up in the dramatic murder of her partner, a political refugee.

'Have you any idea, any idea at all, my friend, how much you have changed during the last few days?'

'I've had other things to think about,' I said impatiently. 'I still have.'

He took no notice. 'When one compares,' he went on, wide-eyed with amazement, 'the brooding young man with the haunted eyes and the aura of death, the man who sat in this very room a week ago apologising for the iniquity of his existence when one compares that man with the arch conspirator hunted by the police, who risks assassination by hired gunmen and makes daring, ingenious plans to sell secrets to the representative of a foreign power, one can only...' He broke off, overcome again by helpless laughter.

Even Lucia laughed then. In the face of all that merriment, I summoned a sour smile.

"The circumstances last week were rather different,' I reminded him.

He shook his head vehemently. 'Oh no,' he said when he could speak again. 'Oh no, that's not the answer. I thought I knew what made you tick. "A new kind of anger," I said. How wrong I was! Your kind of anger is as old as the hills. You've just bottled it up all these years just like the man who becomes a policeman instead of a crook. Or is that sublimation? It doesn't matter. The point is that you have a taste for larceny. It agrees with you. Therapy!' He started to giggle. 'Instead of giving you all those shock treatments, you know what they should have done? They should have sent you out to rob a bank!'

Reading (or at least finishing books) has been affected by family stress and prep for an interview (wish me luck!) I think. I've been thinking about moving for a job too: not sure what 2026 will bring...

I so enjoyed reading The Correspondent though: I am not sure who recommended it here, but thank you. I returned it to the library and couldn't resist raving about it to the librarians behind the desk. An epistolary novel that follows the correspondence of a retired lawyer as she resists the move to email. Letters to famous writers accompany short letters to her kindly neighbour and lengthier, emotional ones to her brother in France.

This one made me laugh but was then followed by a strong "aw" moment

Mr George Lucas c/o LucasFilm Ltd.
Letterman Digital Arts Center
1 Letterman Dr.
Presidio of San Francisco, CA 94129

February 24, 2017

Dear Mr Lucas,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. Typically when writing a letter to a celebrity I have a great deal to say, but in this case I find myself at a bit of a disadvantage because I have never seen the Star Wars movies. I feel foolish here, knowing they are an American institution, it's just that I rarely watch television and I don't enjoy science fiction, but I'm sure your work is very, very good to have rendered you so extremely successful.

I am crossing my fingers that your staff has passed along this message in a bottle I am rather chucking into the Pacific. I am an old woman and I find myself in a strange situation of hosting a high school-aged boy at my house for a few months. This child is extremely intelligent, but he is deeply sad. He is not my grandson, but you might assume he was if you saw us together. He has come to stay with me in order to convalesce...

I did wonder how having real authors like Didion worked, legally.

Good luck with your interviews! May 2026 be filled with wonderful!

The Correspondent does sound good. I got an ebook when it was on sale.

I really loved The Correspondent too, Charlotte. I also got the BB, maybe from Mark or Joanne ? I'm not sure. Best of luck for the interview.

>56 BLBera: Thanks Beth. I might have to wait until January, so I am trying to be patient.

My sister has got organised with sending Christmas cards with (or mostly, on behalf of) for my dad. I have found the cards I meant to write and send last year....

>57 vancouverdeb: It was a lovely read. Thank you for the good wishes. Hoping I can switch off over Xmas and get back to the search in Jan.

I read two very different, both heartbreaking books.

11. The Sea Cloak (Women in translation)
From 2019, the collected stories of a Palestinian writer. She describes broken families, living with the settlements, and forced marriage. It's not cheery, and of course predates all the events of the past two years.

Thirteen-year-old Sara sits in the corner of their family's one-room shack, the walls of which are made of mud, roofed by sheets of corrugated iron. Beneath her, spread across the floor, is a cold, plastic mat; she supports herself with a pillowcase stuffed with old clothes, her head deep in her school notebooks, revising. All her spare time is spent this way: her eyes down - studying, or up dreaming. Of travel, of going to university in Cairo, of escaping Jabalia. The camp's sandy alleyways have so far only led her round in circles, like a maze, always back to where she started.

The only route that didn't feel like it was a trick was the one to school each morning. She strode towards it, proudly, rebelliously, convinced it would lead her out of there, in the end, to finish her studies elsewhere.

She cannot hear the chaos of her five sisters running around her, in a room that doubles as a bedroom, study, and kitchen. She is too engrossed in her books. Nor can she hear her mother's continual nags and calls for assistance. Until, one day, the unexpected happens. Her aunty, the one with the frightening eyes and gravelling voice, has come to the house asking for the strangest thing: the girl's hand in marriage for her son. 'We have decided that your daughter, Sara, would make an adequate wife for our third son, Fouad, and we expect you, as a family, to accept this offer.

....Years from now, all she will remember of that day is her screaming

A Family Matter (Reading my own books)

A woman living in a small town in SE England in the 1980s meets another woman and she wants to leave her husband. In the 2020s, a man and his daughter deal with his recent cancer diagnosis. She doesn't see her mother, was told that she ran away and never asked for contact.

Of course, the stories are connected. I admired the apparently simple writing style.

They are both the kind of people who would scoff at the very idea of meditation. In fact, Maggie is known to have gone on fairly long rants about what she considers the pernicious cult of mindfulness. But here they are, together, deep in the peaceful satisfaction of working on a long-overdue task.

'It's amazing, isn't it?' Maggie says. 'Unbelievable. How much you accumulate.

'It is, Heron agrees, 'unbelievable', as he feeds ten-year-old bank statements into the shredder. This, in fact, is the luck other people see in them. The luck of having someone who will listen to you saying all the dull things, obvious and true, which nonetheless seem important enough to say out loud. How much paperwork there is in living a life. How amazing it is to see it, to hold it in your hands.

They laugh at the pile of Which? magazines, at the instruction manual for a toaster that was three toasters ago. Expired chequebooks from accounts which don't exist any more. From banks which don't exist any more.

This is unashamedly a fictional story pointing out a factual miscarriage of justice: how in the very recent past women were denied access to their children due to the state's belief that they would somehow damage them by being lesbians.
There is a "happy" ending in the sense that Maggie and her mum reunite, but it really isn't. I admired the way the author avoided turning the ex-husband into a villain rather than someone who didn't know how to avoid being swept up by what he was told was the thing to do. An afterword explains how the story is rooted in real legal cases.

The Sea Cloak sounds very good and also hard to read. The excerpt was heartbreaking. I'll look for a copy.

Both The Sea Cloak and A Family Matter sound like good reads, Charlotte. Maybe after Christmas I will look into them. I hope you have a very enjoyable Christmas and look for work in the New Year. Enjoy your time off.

>60 RidgewayGirl: I bought two books by Palestinian writers from a small publisher. I still have the other to read.

>61 vancouverdeb: I enjoyed them both, but have been mixing them with some lighter stuff, an NF about examining the shore of the Thames for buried historical objects (Mudlarking). I'm also plodding my way through a book that has been on my shelves for years The Glass Palace.

I just finished Blue Aubergine. A short book, but confirmation (not that any were needed) that I am not a fan of experimental literature!
Set in Egypt and first published in English in 2011. At the heart of it is a girl in a conflicted family, dealing with different messages: from her dad, from her mum, from her grandmother, and from "society" about how she should behave and be. However, the book jumps around between different voices, and beyond understanding that the main character had unsuccessful relationships, hindered by cultural expectations from the family and more widely, there wasn't much here for me.

His words were provocative but I didn't disagree. I did not dare tell him that the secularists and the communists are all out to get at Islam with this intellectual assault on the minds of young people, and that Islam has come to be a stranger in the world, as it was in the beginning, and that the establishment of the Islamic State is an obligation of the Faith, and that the warriors of God must revive the sacred jihad, for careful and precise organization and unswerving adherence and unceasing work are the only way. All those ideas were hanging on banners around the university for him to see and could be heard everywhere on the tapes and cassettes the Islamic bookstalls were playing.

Really sad to read about the death of Caroline over on the 75ers. She will be missed. I am going to add some Virginia Woolf to my reading plans for 2026 in her memory.
https://www.librarything.com/topic/374918

Hi Charlotte, I also read about Caroline's death. I did not know her well, but the outpouring of posts shows how loved she was by so many LTers.

I finally visited your thread again. You have read so many interesting books! I particularly took BBs for Bloody Mary - A Graphic Biography, The Bookseller's Tale, Persian Girls and The Sea Cloak.

I hope you enjoy your time off the job search over Christmas and that you have left the winter bug behind you! And all the best for 2026 of course!

>63 charl08: Oh that is sad news. I only saw her on your thread and a couple of others, but she always seemed so interesting and well read.

I read the news of Caroline's death. So sad and, as I understand, she'd just retired too.

I hope your Christmas was a merry one and good luck with your job search.

I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas, Charlotte.

>64 MissBrangwen: Hope you enjoy those recs if you get a chance to pick them up. I am feeling much better, and hoping for a healthy (or at least, free from flu) 2026 as I've had my vaccine.

>65 Jackie_K: She will be missed, I'm sure. Her posts about the art exhibitions and cinema she visited, were often a reminder to me to get out and about and visit galleries.

>66 Familyhistorian: Yes, that was my thought too, that she didn't get long to enjoy the fruits of her hard work. Thank you for the festive wishes, and the same to you.

>67 vancouverdeb: Thanks Deborah.

Well, I'm nudging towards the end of the year. Still haven't decided on a theme for 2026's thread. I'm leaving it late, I realise!

Some short summaries of my recent reads.

Hollow Grave (new to me)
Not sure why I picked this up from the library, a police procedural crime series set in Wiltshire. A young woman's disappearance is reinvestigated when her bag, complete with ID and money, is found abandoned some twenty years later. She has never been in touch again, and her family are convinced something happened to her. The police called off the case back then when a young woman reported to a London station, but can the cold case team find any useful evidence tonprove what happened twenty years later?

Mudlarking
I've wanted to read this for ages. The author has spent years on the shores of the Thames river, looking for historical objects. Accompanied by beautiful photos, she discusses the objects she's found, the different histories of the areas she's explored, and how she became a mudlarker. Although set around the Thames, this is a story that bears witness to the thousands of years of London's global links.

Ships also filled up with London ballast: riverbed gravel, dredged up by big-boned, muscular men known as ballast-getters, who tied pieces of sail around their feet and legs to prevent the gravel from falling into their shoes as they worked. In this way London's flint, bricks, rubble and even broken pottery were spread across the world and mixed into foreshores and beaches thousands of miles away. Flint from the riverbed of the Thames has been found in New Zealand, Australia and Canada, where it was used by indi-genous people to make tools and arrowheads. Broken English pottery has been found scattered over beaches in Bermuda, and it is quite possible that the silver Edward VI shilling, dated 1551-3, which was found by a metal detectorist on a beach on Vancouver Island in 2014, arrived in ballast dredged up from the Thames and not, as has been speculated, from a secret voyage made by Francis Drake.

>70 charl08: This one has been on my WL for some time, it sounds fascinating!

>71 MissBrangwen: I really enjoyed it! Well written, full of historical detail but also a kind of series of mysteries as she describes trying to work out what certain finds actually *were*. I think I will remember her description of walking on hundreds of clay (?) pipes abandoned in the mud the next time I am by the river.

Murder Book: a graphic memoir (GN)
I asked for this as a Xmas present and couldn't resist picking it up to read. The author explores her own enthusiasm for true crime, how it developed and wider ideas about the "phenomenon" of true crime books, TV and film. I don't know a lot about true crime, so most of what she discussed was new to me. The book is black and white and quite "scruffy" in style, which worked for me. I've added some true crime to my wishlist, including Ann Rule who Campbell sees as particularly influential.

I loved the humour:

>73 charl08: That is funny.

Mudlarking sounds good.

Will your home in 2026 be in the category challenge again? I don't want to lose you!

>74 BLBera: Yes, I'll be in the category challenge: I just can't decide on a theme...

The Glass Palace (Reading my own books)

This is a book I'm fairly confident that I've bought from a charity shop several times and returned unread when I tried to cut back my boxes of books...

I finally read it, and it is a sweeping story (as promised) about families migrating between India, Burma and what is known today as Singapore and Malaysia. It's been a while since I read such an ambitious historical novel. What's interesting about reading this one now is how different (and the same) Burmese politics is now.

The newspapers were full of strident denunciations of imperialism. It was because of the imperialists that Burma had to be shut off from the world; the country had to be defended against neo-colonialism and foreign aggression.

These tirades sickened Dinu. One day he said to his wife: 'Look at the way in which these thugs use the past to justify the present. And they themselves are much worse than the colonialists; at least in the old days, you could read and write.'

Daw Thin Thin Aye smiled and shook her head in reproof. She said: 'To use the past to justify the present is bad enough - but it's just as bad to use the present to justify the past. And you can be sure that there are plenty of people to do that too: it's just that we don't have to put up with them.'

>70 charl08: she posts short videos on facebook (and no doubt elsewhere) too which are always interesting.

>77 Jackie_K: Thanks for this Jackie: just found her on instagram.

I also own The Glass Palace from a second hand shop. One day I hope to get to it. Sounds interesting. Happy New Year, Charlotte.

>79 vancouverdeb: And to you Deborah.

I am hoping to finish book #298 this evening. Yesterday was taken up with a rather depressing amount of cleaning and a much nicer meal out with family. Bit gutted that I'm not making 300 this year (despite also thinking that counting the number of books read is not really the point).

Happy New Year, Charlotte. 298 is a respectable number. :) See you next year.

>80 charl08: 298 is more than respectable! Congrats!

>81 BLBera: >82 purpleiris: Thanks! Just squeaked another GN (Spent) under the wire, so 299 in 2025.

>83 charl08: That is amazing, 299 book read in 2025, Charlotte. Happy New Year!