2026 in Books: June

I have not read a huge number of books this month but, hey, it’s an improvement on May!

The Fairy GunMother - Daniel Pennac

This book has been on my shelf for a very long time. I acquired it as part of a Reading Spa at Mr B’s Emporium in Bath. Honestly, the Reading Spa is such a delightful concept — you go to the bookshop, they sit you down in a comfy chair and give you tea and cake, and then talk to you about books for an hour before recommending books you might like.

“—And Julie Corrençon had been drugged before she was depontated.
—Depontated?
—A word I’ve coined, Sir, with reference to the verb ‘defenestrate’.”

— The Fairy Gunmother

Unfortunately, it seems my tastes didn’t quite mesh with my Mr B’s-provided book advisor, and overall I didn’t love the books he prescribed for me. I was a little put off, and still haven’t quite finished all of them. The Fairy Gunmother is one such.

I was, therefore, not entirely surprised when I started on the book and didn’t like it all that much. I can’t quite define why: it’s got a lot of things in it that I would expect to like:

1. it’s a whodunnit

2. it is whimsical to the point of absurdity

3. it contains a lot of wordplay and snappy dialogue

I can totally see why it was recommended to me. But. But.

The opening page of the book drops you straight into the middle of the action with no explanation (again, a device I wholeheartedly approve of); the reader watches an assassination, told through the thought processes of the victim by an omniscient narrator. Re-reading it now, the language is quirky, the conceit is interesting, the details hilarious… at the time, I just found it bewildering and annoying.

We then follow the progress of the investigation into this murder (and various other crimes — are they linked? are they irrelevant?) — in a style which I am going to choose to describe as extremely colourful noir, zooming in on various different characters, and often straying into reams of elaborate detail.

As I write this, I’m wondering if I ought to read it again — I suspect the plotting may actually be much cleverer that it seemed. Maybe, now I have a secure idea of the destination, I could enjoy the journey more. And, as I said, I really ought to have loved it.

Broken Light - Joanne Harris

This genuinely was a re-read. It was last year’s (or the previous year’s? what is time anyway?) birthday gift from a friend with whom I have been swapping birthday books for (horrifyingly) approximately three decades. He’s a very reliable book-recommender. I had found myself remembering part of the plot, and — once I’d figured out which book I was thinking of* — decided to take it for another spin.

“Hormones are at the same time something that changes everything, and something of a joke, just as hormonal women are a joke; over-dramatic; untrustworthy.”

— Broken Light

This book sets out its stall very quickly. Within the first few pages the reader encounters the idea that we’re dealing with magic, male violence, and a woman struggling with both dreadful menopausal symptoms and an unsupportive, distant husband. All of these things are exactly what you’re going to get for the rest of the book.

The story unfurls through written documents. The attributions allow us to work out that these are all “from the past”, and that “something has happened”. Some of the documents are written by someone who barely appears in the story until much later. Even now, looking up my quote for the box over there, I’ve just noticed a tiny extra surprise — some of the “extracts” are from a book published by a company the owner spends the whole book denying is a vanity press. The fact that that character published that book after the “incident” is interesting all in its own right.

And that is just the sort of thing I enjoyed about this book. There is lots of detail, there, to pick up if you care. If you have time to notice, because it’s a real page-turner — even with the ongoing depressing themes of how men treat women, how men think about women, and how little agency the central character appears to have over her life.

Despite her weird magical powers.

Which are quite simple. But also hugely complex — I think this is what made me want to re-read this, the fact the narrative is so intensely layered with different messages, and different aspects of the human existence.

Broken Light is, also, rather delightfully arranged like a playlist, with a song associated to each section. I wish more writers would do that, I love it. Strong recommend on this one.

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*and if anyone can figure out that book about some sisters, which has a lot of references to the plant honesty, and where someone eventually drowns themselves after taking hemlock, I’d love to read that one again, too. The way my brain retains books does not facilitate easy Googling.

2026 in Books: May

Er, hello.

Well.

This is embarrassing.

You may remember that, in order to spur myself into reading more this year, I committed to blogging each month about the books that I’d read. Perhaps you’re ahead of me here. In May I finished reading… no books. This is a useful reminder to myself that I do have to deliberately make sure I find time for reading.

Things I have done this month include: read short stories online, read magazine articles, read news articles, begun - but not finished - a book. I have not forgotten how to consume words with my eyeballs.

In lieu of any book reviews, I can tell you what a lovely time I had at the most recent Liminal Tales event in London. I read my story The Organist and the Old Man - but once that was all over and done with, I sneaked into the audience to listen to a very strong set of stories from the other four authors.

Stuart Hardy is a Liminal Tales regular, and he always delivers exceptional horror stories. The Intruder was a quiet, insidious sort of story - made all the creepier by Stuart’s typical low-key delivery. The story’s available in an anthology if that sounds like your thing.

Paul M. Bradley read My Private War, which is exactly the sort of story I find incredibly hard to read out loud: one which is almost entirely dialogue, relying only on “voice” to let the reader figure out what’s going on. Fortunately, Paul is a real, proper actor who can easily carry two characters at once - and has the timing to deliver the story’s twists.

James Morgan Belcher (my linking is all over the joint here, depending on what seems to be people’s most prominent online presence…) has often been at Liminal Tales as a punter, but this was the first time I’ve head one of his stories. Bad Mime Makeup was a wonderfully weird fever-dream of a story, with some really gorgeous bits of description in it.

The final story, though, was my favourite: Emma Burnett’s story 25 Peppercorns. Read by actor Freya Bowen, the tale cleverly uses the food and recipes a family shares to talk about intergenerational trauma. The link will take you to a freely-available version of the story in Mythaxis Magazine, and I highly recommend clicking on it and settling down for a great read.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and pick up a book, so my next blog post isn’t quite so awkward…

2026 in Books: April

On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts - Thomas de Quincey

I’m going to put my cards on the table straight away: this is a re-read, and this book is much, much stranger than I remember.

“...against Locke’s philosophy, in particular, I think it an unanswerable objection (if we needed any), that although he carried his throat about with him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it.”

— On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts contains three essays. The first is presented as the transcript of a speech given to “The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder”. It includes a brief history of murder (beginning with Cain), and a dissection of some “recent” (at time of writing, in the early nineteenth century) murders. The cases are weighed and measured for aesthetic merits and virtues; the murderers’ choices are critiqued, praised, or mocked. The essay also includes a special section on the murder of philosophers (with reference to their respective philosophies) - in fact, I’ve seen the whole thing described as “a prolonged satire of Kant's aesthetic theory”, and I worry that some of the finer points might have whizzed right over my head.

The second essay is a defence of the first, with lengthy detours into the reaction of The Society as a whole (and one member in particular) to the Ratcliffe Highway murders. The third is a straight-up true crime account (though not, according to Wikipedia, an especially accurate one) of those same murders.

It is somewhat worrying to note that when I bought this book (in a long-gone second-hand bookshop in Hastings) and read it for the first time, I couldn’t easily look up the Ratcliffe Highway murders, because Wikipedia had not yet been invented.

I remember this book as being very funny - and parts of it are. The author, however, does have that maddening tendency of nineteenth-century writers to assume that his readers can all follow his erudition effortlessly, and he sprinkles Latin, Greek and French quotations liberally without translation. I looked some of them up, then lost patience. In general, the writing style veers around between turgid and outright silly, passing all stations in between, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as I remember doing the previous time.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune - Nghi Vo

I am pretty sure that this was a gift, and I’m embarrassed to note that I have forgotten from whom.

“Her hair was cropped close to her head like a nun’s, but she’d cut strange patterns into it like sheared velvet, and her eyes were as narrow as her smile was wide.”

— The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Being a novella, it’s a quick read - but is absolutely delightful.

The story gives almost no background before we are suddenly in right there, with a cleric who is collecting stories of a dead empress from one of the empress’ servants. In each chapter, we hear a little of what the cleric is up to in the here-and-now, then we slide into yet another of Rabbit’s tales of the former empress.

Without that background, the reader is left to put together the pieces of the story themselves - and it’s impressive that the whole thing still feels satisfying, and I never felt “lost” in the loose, disjointed narrative.

The culture is not precisely defined, but seems to borrow elements from various real-world Asian cultures, with a hefty dose of fantasy and magic mixed in. The writing is beautiful, and very direct, with very vivid descriptions conjured up from tiny phrases.

This novella feels like a small, polished jewel - and will definitely bear a re-read.

The Fourth Bear - Jasper Fforde

“Take a step closer and my associate hiding over there will tranq your fuzzy butt and we can talk it over at the station. Me with a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive, and you with a splitting headache and a numb arse. Your choice.”

— The Fourth Bear

I have been extremely busy during April, both in my day-job and in my real life. Towards the end of the month I had got to the point of wanting something very undemanding to read.

In steps Jasper Fforde.

I’ve read (and enjoyed) some of his Thursday Next books, but this is from the Nursery Crime series, in which DCI Jack Spratt investigates crimes involving Persons of Dubious Reality. It is, however, set loosely in the same world as Thursday Next - which has the added bonus that most of the magic- and mayhem-riddled action takes place in Reading. I worked in Reading for more than a decade, and while murderous nursery rhyme characters are already quite funny, they’re much funnier when they’re rampaging through, say, the Oracle shopping centre.

There is, in general, something quite endearing about Jasper Fforde novels. They’re deeply silly, and they know it. The characters occasionally address the reader directly, the plot cheerfully filches devices from all over the place (and takes them to extremes), and poor old Jack Spratt constantly has to battle government bureaucracy, circumvent department funding problems, and keep his case from straying too far into noir pastiche.

I think it would easily be possible to have too much of this sort of thing, but a little bit when required is just the ticket.

2026 in Books: February

Well, having started strong with 4 proper-length novels in January, February has been a little busy, so I’ve read rather less.

In my defence, I finished a book on Sunday, so if February was a proper-length month I’d have squeezed in another. Ah well, at least I’ve got a headstart on March!

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary was a Christmas present from one of my most reliable book-choosing friends. She usually skews more towards fantasy (at least in her presents to me), so I was mildly surprised to find myself unwrapping what was patently going to be reasonably hard sci-fi. And set in space. I often don’t get on well with books set in space. But, like I said, she’s very reliable.

“I have four rough circles, each a couple of inches across. Yes, inches. When I’m stressed out, I revert to imperial units. It’s hard to be an American, okay?”

— Project Hail Mary

And everyone liked The Martian, right?

It was, of course, fine. The books cracks along at a tremendous pace, manages not to have vast tracts of turgid prose about the insides of spaceships, and is broadly speaking very silly.

Dr Grace - our unlikely space hero, suffering from amnesia and inexplicably solo on a large spaceship - has a very lightweight, chatty narration style that is incredibly easy to read.

We do, over the course of his adventures, get moderately vast tracts of space logistics, some of which I found a little difficult to follow - but I think that’s on me. I usually can’t keep up if anyone describes a layout more complicated than a small potting shed.

The story does use the same device over and over again: Dr Grace has a problem! Dr Grace can jury-rig himself a solution using a thing that is already on the ship, some alien tech and a lot of maths! He is basically a one-man A-Team In Space.

But… while I wouldn’t like to stand bail for all the solutions being completely plausible, they are plausible enough. They feel like a bunch of little puzzles with very satisfying conclusions. Anyway, the cover-blurb says Tim Peake liked the book, which seems good enough to me.

Despite my space-based misgivings, this book was massive fun.

Once Upon A Tome - Oliver Darkshire

This book - also a Christmas present - is subtitled “The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller”. I suppose technically it is non-fiction, but it is another very quick, easy and entertaining read.

“Unlike other disciplines, book cataloguing is less an art, not really a science, and more of a completely unstandardized, decentralized carnival fire.”

— Once Upon A Tome

In a series of very short chapters (which are the absolute devil for making readers think “ok, just one more, then I’ll…”) the author recounts the deeply peculiar - and probably mostly true - life of an apprentice at a shop which claims to be the oldest bookshop in the world. (At least he says it did at the time, its website now claims, slightly more circumspectly, that it is “the longest-established rare book dealer in Europe”.)

If you are the sort of person who likes hanging around in second-hand bookshops, and sincerely wish to believe that all booksellers are mad as hatters, shuffling about in a sort of genteel chaos of incunabula and stuffed owls, trying to avoid both demanding customers and cursed volumes, then you should read this book.

If you know that sort of person, and never quite know what to give them as a present, give them this book.

I assume that lawyers have been involved and none of the stories are actively libellous, but there is a pleasing vibe of scurrilous gossip throughout. Grab a drink, find a comfy chair, and prepare to be entertained.

You Don’t Have To Have a Dream - Tim Minchin

“Which is your job (just by the way):
To put into the world valuable ideas.”

— Tim Minchin

This is yet another very quick read - as a book it’s on the slim side, but more relevantly it’s big print, and big illustrations. The content is the transcripts of three speeches Minchin has given, each one on the occasion of receiving an honorary degree. One of which is a long-form poem.

Some of it is advice on being an artist. Some of it is suggestions of how to live better. Some of it is a bit angry, and some of it is funny, and all of it is very easy to understand and expressed with a lot of heart.

It feels like it would be pretty decent life advice for a child, though it depends how comfortable you are with your child reading the word fuck occasionally.

You Say Clickbait Like It's a Bad Thing

I’ve been thinking recently about titles. Specifically, the titles that writers give short stories.

I’m embarrassed to admit that for a long time I didn’t give that much thought to titles for the stories I write. Sometimes a title springs fully-formed into mind before a story is even written - but equally often a half-written story ends up saved in a file named after a character (or an object!) in the story, and eventually that accidentally becomes the title. I mean, titles aren’t that important, right? It’s the story that counts.

Now, if you are - say - Neil Gaiman, with a vast and enthusiastic following who will leap on a new story with delight regardless of title, you can probably get away with calling your latest work any old bollocks (or, of course, Any Old Bollocks). Spoilers: I am not Neil Gaiman. My enthusiastic following is largely limited to my parents and a couple of friends. (Also, arguably, even Neil Gaiman didn’t get where he is today by publishing stories with crap titles.)

If you publish a novel then you’ve got a title, a nice illustrated jacket, and probably a cover blurb to lure people in. If you’re very lucky, bookshops will pile your novel temptingly on tables, include it in multi-buy offers or (bless every last shop that does this) post up little handwritten notes from the staff explaining why it is awesome. A short story is much more likely to appear on a website, where casual browsers have nothing but a list of titles to choose from. So the title had better get its paw in the air and yell “pick me!”

My story Granny’s Cooking was turned down a number of times before I began to wonder whether, perhaps, its title was a bit boring. It eventually appeared in print as Cook Me A Storm. Would the magazine have taken it, regardless? I’ll likely never know, but I like to think the title-change gave it a hand up.

The most intriguing title I’ve seen recently was in an an issue of Cossmass Infinities. Browsing down the contents page, I immediately clicked on Murder or a Duck by Beth Goder. What situation could possibly result in that particular choice? I wanted to know. Then I became suspicious.

Calling your story Murder or a Duck makes an implicit promise: there is going to be some sort of dilemma, dichotomy or question of identity revolving around murder (or a duck). Your fiction had better make good on that promise. Coming up with an intriguing title is easy; coming up with an intriguing title which suits the actual story and does not leave the reader feeling cheated is quite another.

(Murder or a Duck, by the way, was delightfully silly and delivered handsomely on the promise. I recommend it.)

Intrigue isn’t the only option. I’m also strangely fond of titles which tell you (in a sense) exactly what you’re getting - for example Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island or The Tale of the Three Beautiful Raptor Sisters, and the Prince Who Was Made of Meat. And of titles that appear to ramble on long after they ought to have stopped, like Once More Unto the Breach (But Don’t Worry, the Inflatable Swords Are Latex-Free). And titles that include fun pop culture references, like Open House on Haunted Hill…

It’s fair to say that titles are capricious beasts, and that there’s no smart formula for coming up with them. They are, however, something that I’m going to give a lot more thought to in the future.

Next time you see me advertising a story on Twitter, let me know if I got it right!