A few months ago, I sent out a newsletter rounding up everything I’d read so far this year. Then I almost immediately fell off the reading wagon and clocked up a pitiful number of pages over the summer.
Why is that? When I’m reading a lot it’s all I want to do - insatiable, can’t get enough, find it extremely inconvenient that I’m expected to do anything else, god forbid anybody try and engage in conversation mid-paragraph. Yet reading is a lot like, say, doing my physio exercises and eating more vegetables than chocolate buttons and not starting the day by doom scrolling through social media. That is, it’s a simple thing that tangibly improves my life but that I find it very easy to slip out of the habit of.
Luckily, September brought with it a fair few hours on public transport, some evenings alone in hotel rooms and a solid amount of sunbathing. And in all of those circumstances, what are you going to do but get a book out?
So here’s September, in books1:
First up was the Clock Dance by Anne Tyler. I used this book as a prop in an Instagram reel I made back in June (lol) and then didn’t finish it until September 3rd. Maybe this is why I read so little in July and August? I felt like I was enjoying it and like I did want to know what was going to happen next, yet I never had any strong inclination to actually get it out of my bag and find out. I read it in dribs and drabs, never building up much momentum. The premise is basically that Willa Drake flies across the country to care for her son’s ex-girlfriend’s child and dog after a mysterious shooting. It should have all been a bit more exciting than it was, maybe? Not a glowing review, I realise, but the highlight for me was Airplane the dog.
(This is probably a good time to say that, for the most part, if I don’t like a book I just won’t tell you about it. I hate the thought of ruining an author’s day with a bad review. But maybe the point where that rule goes out the window is when they’ve sold millions of copies and got a Pulitzer Prize and, surely, don’t care what I think anymore? I hope that if that’s ever me I’ll be somewhere sunny enjoying my riches, not dwelling on a mediocre review in a small fry newsletter.)
Another book I carried around for a while (because it got stuck in the Clock Dance bottleneck) was The House of Deep Water. I bought it in an amazing second hand bookshop in North Carolina that sold coffees and beer and almost all of the books on the display tables had little notes in with bookseller recommendations. I always like reading about somewhere while I’m actually there, so I picked up this book about three woman in small town America - then finished it while in the Italian Alps. But I still really enjoyed it. The characters were flawed in a way that felt very real and it was funny alongside being quite heartbreaking.
Continuing the theme of largely uncheerful books, next up was Soldier Sailor. Claire Kilroy’s novel about motherhood was beautifully written, intense, at times a little confusing - and almost completely put me off having a baby. Or, more specifically, put me off having a baby with the narrator’s husband. The most unlikeable character in any of the books I talk about here.
Okay, onto the lighter stuff. I read A Court of Thorn and Roses exclusively because of all the hype. I always think I don’t like fantasy but some of my best ever reading memories involve Narnia and Hogwarts so maybe that’s not true, and I thought it might be fun to try something different. Took a while to get into it but I’ll probably read the next one in the series. The main purpose this book served was striking up conversation with strangers. Four people approached me to discuss it during one afternoon in Manchester. Four! It was like taking a puppy out.
The gem of the crop, without a doubt, was The Rachel Incident. I love author Caroline O’Donoghue’s podcast Sentimental Garbage (especially her Sex and the City mini-series with Dolly Alderton, ‘Sentimental in the City’) but something put me off reading this. I’d had a run of disappointing experiences with highly raved about books written by the loose category of ‘people I follow on the internet’ and which I just… didn’t love. I’m not proud to admit I’d condemned this book to that same category? But I will happily admit that I was extremely wrong. Caroline’s an amazing writer and this book was brilliant. Really fun to read, but poignant too, and so many great references to pop culture around 2009/2010. 16-year-old me was thrilled to see The Pigeon Detectives mentioned.
I read The Rachel Incident in one day, lying on a beach in Albania. By stark contrast, I finished the last book of the month from under a blanket on my parents’ sofa, recovering from the after effects of a pretty grim bout of food poisoning. But if there’s anything that’ll cheer you up when you’re feeling poorly, then surely it’s a new Richard Osman? We Solve Murders is the first book in his new series and it contained a lot of the things I (we? the entire world?) loved about The Thursday Murder Club. It’s written in exactly the same style and I think I read that he sees the two series as existing in the same world (although there’s no character crossover). So much so that I sort of forgot I was reading a different series, and kept expecting to go back to Coopers Chase and hear what Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron thought about the case. Not necessarily a criticism - it was still funny and comforting and can’t-put-it-down.
That’s all for now. If you receive another of these for October it means I’ve stayed on the reading wagon, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed for that. As always, super open to any book recommendations in the comments.
There are some affiliate links in this post. This just means that if you buy a copy of a book I make a small amount of money, but it doesn’t cost you anything extra.