Fantasy

A thought-provoking darkness: January 2024 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Nature Writing, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction

Caliente (Hot) by Luna Miguel

I learned of Luna Miguel by chance, in one of those late night internet searches which took me to an old blog of hers. I saw that she’d published plenty of poetry but also some non-fiction and became curious. When I was in La Librería de Mujeres (The Women’s Bookshop) – one of my favourite places in Madrid, they recommended this book to me, and so I bought it and read it in a couple of days.

Luna Miguel explores female desire in this book, which starts with her personal experience of going through a divorce after being with a partner (and also married) for many years and having a child in common. What follows is an exploration into self-pleasure, female masturbation and poliamory. It’s interesting to note here that Miguel brings in many other authors and examines their work and their life experiences to develop some of her points.

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Best Reads of 2023

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

This year I read more books than usual – making this my best reading year post-PhD. I’ve also realised more than ever that reading – especially in this age when we have so many things competing for our focus, such as email and social media – is like a sport. A muscle that you need to exercise regularly. After those times in the year when life became too much and I couldn’t read regularly – for example, July, when I was travelling a lot, doing job interviews and trying to plan another house move across England – reading became more difficult and during August I had to ease myself back into it. The good news is that after three or four days of reading regularly focus always comes back, and I find that the more I read the longer I can stay with a book in my hands without falling asleep. It’s actually kind of amazing to think that when I was a child I had much more natural endurance when it came to reading and I could spend hours and hours stuck to a book…

Also, libraries are wonderful, I still get a high every time I get to visit them and pick all the books I want to read and it’s for free! Nobody wants my money! It’s simple, accessible pure pleasure! Kindness! Let’s all please love libraries and care for them and never take them from granted.

So here we go with my best reads this last year.

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On Desolation: December 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

What a read.

I picked Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell when I was twelve or so in the public library (translated into Spanish). It caused a great impression in me, because it wasn’t like any other fantasy book that I had read before –  I’m looking forward to rereading it as an adult in its original language.

Piranesi, on the other hand, didn’t draw me in as much when I first saw it in a bookshop. I remember working at Waterstones when it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and we were selling heaps and heaps of them. And yet, when I read the blurb, it didn’t sound attractive to me at all – it seemed so vague.

I know, judging a book only by its the blurb. I should know better.

Sure, there are many potential issues and plot gaps in this book but I adored it and I read so fast. One of the most astonishing achievements of this book – which you could call a novella because of its length and the way the plot works – it’s how it manages to suggest such a complex world in very few pages.

Piranesi has something I have a passion for: strange vast and desolate landscapes. I can’t explain it, but I feel attracted to such places, which explains why Abandoned Places is one of my favourite books to look at and chill with a cup of tea.

In Piranesi, most of the plot is set in the House, a building of mammoth proportions composed of halls with impossible tall ceilings. There’s nothing in them but statues of all the things you can possibly imagine, including, for example, a woman carrying a beehive. (Because, why not.) To complete the picture, there is also a sea in the House so now and again, and depending on the tides, some of the halls get flooded. Because of this, there are fish, and sometimes seagulls, and even albatrosses. Apart from that, there are no other beings aside from Piranesi and the Other.

Can you imagine anything more beautiful?

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Experiencing the thin places: November 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Nature Writing, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

This was a reread – I came by this story back in 2014, when I was researching unreliable narrators – before that I watched the film adaptation when it came out in cinemas in 2007.

On this second read, I enjoyed the story even more. First of all, Barbara Covett, the narrator, is so interesting. She’s a twisted and opinionated sixty-something year old History teacher in a secondary school who becomes obsessed with her younger new colleague, Sheba Hart.

At first glance it may seem that the focus of this novel is the illicit relationship between Sheba, the new teacher, and one of her pupils, fifteen-year old Steven Connolly. But this is really the story of two women who will end up tied to each other, against all odds.

Hints at Barbara’s lesbianism were even more noticeable to me on this second read. She doesn’t make direct reference to it once but she reveals to be someone who’s maintained a series of obsessive friendship with women exclusively, many of them younger than she is, as it’s the case with Sheba. I believe, though, that Barbara’s intense friendships go beyond sexuality. She likes Sheba and she hates her too because she has all the things that Barbara wants: youth, beauty, social status (which, coincidentally, are many of the things women are socialised to crave from a very young age, specially the first two).

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Embracing winter: October 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Nature Writing

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

This is the first book I’ve read by Emma Donoghue but it certainly won’t be the last. I immediately connected with the main character in this story, Lib Wright, a young nurse with a tragic past who trained with Florence Nightingale herself. Her voice is strong and distinctive, with a superb attention to the detail, as you’d expect from a nurse, caring, yet strict.

The premise of the story also hooked me from the start: in rural Ireland, an eleven-year-old girl seems to be able to survive, month by month, without consuming any food, her only nourishment being ‘prayer’. Lib Wright is brought from England to investigate.

The mystery is an enticing one and keeps you reading. The most horrific part is not the reveal of how Anna (the Irish girl) is surviving or why she has decided to fast in the first place. The real horror, to me, was the fact that this story is actually based on an array of different cases of young women, such as Anna, who did similar things throughout their lives – always under the excuse of religion, of wanting to feel closer to God. It often ended with their deaths.

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Defying form and conventions: September 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Crime Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction

The Gathering by Anne Enright

I’m always intrigued by books that whin the Booker prize. To be honest, I wasn’t really aware of the Booker and its significance in the literary world until I started working in a bookshop. There, the day of the launch of the long-list would always be a big event, and we would display all the chosen books in a special table. There would be people who came to buy them all read them and draw their own conclusions about which book deserved to win the final prize and why. Things would get even more interesting with the announcement of the shortlist and, finally, the winner (which was always controversial, some customers would come saying how the winning book was actually not that good and such and such other book should have won instead…) Which really tells you a lot about prizes and how subjectivity plays an essential part when judging their value.

I had no idea what The Gathering was about when I started reading, and it’s also my first piece by this particular author – who I’d heard from before. The first thing that became evident was the quality of the writing: superb. I was immediately drawn into the story by its unreliable narrator, a woman trying to make sense of a memory she has from childhood (or that she think she has, things are not completely clear in that regard). She’s convinced that, if she manages to remember it all, she’ll finally understand why her older brother Liam died by suicide.

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Families, relationships and societies: August 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors

I picked this book in my library because I had been seeing it everywhere for a while – a bit like it happened with Normal People back in the day – I wanted to know what all the fuzz was about.

After reading the blurb, I was mainly interested in two things. First, New York as the setting. I’m a city person (I was born in Madrid, after all) and New York is one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever been in. Second, this book focuses on the relationship between a woman and a man twenty years his senior. I am interested in relationships with a big age gap. I was born to one of those and I’ve been in one for almost a decade.

The first chapter was interesting – very sharp writing, good dialogue. It’s narrated from the perspectives of both Cleo and Frank (actually it took me a bit to get used to the switch of perspectives in the same chapter, but this happens all along the novel, so it wasn’t a problem in the end). Their encounter, on New Year’s Eve is quirky but sweet, and these two different characters are introduced by the way they dress and speak to each other.

Almost immediately we jump into a wedding scene. Cleo is twenty-four and Frank is forty-four. She’s a British painter who has moved to New York and is struggling to make a living on her art after finishing her university studies (I mean, yeah, as a fellow artist I sympathise, it’s a hard world out there). Frank is a successful marketing executive with his own company who’s starting to make big money. Ah, also, he’s an alcoholic.

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A month of travels and rain: July 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction

July was a very busy month – I was travelling most of it, first to Iceland (thanks for letting me stay with you Beth!) and then to Belgium and the Netherlands. This was also a very stressful month for many other reasons so I didn’t have much time to read at all. Whenever I get very stressed I go to the mind-numbing pleasure of crocheting instead. Here I’m including the two books that kept me company during that time (even though I technically finished them both in early August).

Gideon the Ninth by Tasmyn Muir

The moment I learned that this book was a bout lesbian necromancers in space I had to read it. This is a good example of how you can make any idea work if you are a skilful writer. I’ll be definitely using it as an example to encourage my students to think out of the box when they write horror and SFF – they don’t need to write carbon copies of well-known books like The Lord of the Rings or It by Stephen King, there’s so much potential within these genres to let our imagination run wild and write about whatever takes your fancy.

Because this book works. Oh, yes it does. It’s a dark, necromantic, nerdy Hunger Games of sorts with a narrator I adored from the first page (because she’s so wonderfully extra, so confident, such an optimistic) and many other characters that you won’t forget.

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Enlightment: April 2023 Reading Log

Book Review, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction

Small things like these by Claire Keegan

This is a novella, so a quick read, yet it left a big impression on me and I’m still thinking about it. Set in Ireland in 1985 it follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small town where everyone knows each other. The day before Christmas he goes to the nearby convent to make a delivery and finds something in the coal bunker that shouldn’t be there. Hence, he’s faced with a dangerous moral decision – to speak up against the nuns, who are very powerful members of the community or keep living his life as quietly as he’s used to.

This dilemma is a powerful one – to tell the truth and stand up for others often requires a sacrifice that not many of us are willing to make. Being good and decent can also mean paying a high price. It’s easy to empathise with Bill from the very beginning because he’s a hard-working man with the best intentions. He has an interesting upbringing many would have frowned upon back in that time – his mother had him when she was sixteen years old and while working as a maid for Mrs Wilson the richest woman in town; he doesn’t know who his father is. Against all odds, Mrs Wilson lets mother and baby stay in her household and acts as a sort of kind relative towards them both. As an adult, Bill has a job, a wife, and five daughters. All of these are important details that will foreshadow the protagonist’s final decision.

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A month of magic and dispair: March 2023 Reading log

Book Review, Books, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Speculative Fiction
Photo credits: Neil Rolph

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

“What is it like to be you? I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person.”

Elizabeth Strout

When I used to work in a bookshop, Elizabeth Strout was an author that many of my University friends came for. They’d get every book Strout published, telling me how much they adored her writing. I remember shelving those same books. The covers didn’t seem particularly attractive. When I read the blurbs I wasn’t especially inspired either. Once we got a review copy of Olive, Again and instead of reading it I gave it to one of these friends, who was very, very happy.

Fast forward to March 2023 – I saw Lucy by the Sea in the library. I picked the book just to try and see but very much doubted it was going to be my thing. Where to start? Strout is one of those authors that manage to imbue a certain hypnotic quality to their writing that traps you, no matter how interested you really are in the characters or the plot. She’s similar to Haruki Murakami and Sally Rooney in that regard. Especially to Sally Rooney, even though she writes about a demographic that’s in their sixties and seventies, rather than late twenties and thirties (I suspect Rooney’s characters may grow with her as she keeps writing them, though?)

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