A sparse month of reading, that’s what this was. A cold, non-reading month, full of watching BBC’s Season 3 of the Traitors, wearing extra layers, sledding in the Lake District, and tobogganing in Austria.
I picked up The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and was really sinking into the prose and the story when there was suddenly a scene that I found to be very disturbing. I’ve been reading nearly all my life, saving those few years when I was impossibly lazy and also under the age of four.
What I’m trying to say is this: I know what I like to read and I’m sorry, I can’t read children being hurt. And so, I had to put the book down. And have a little cry too.
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden is a hard book, if you really examine it. Blunden uses the natural world around him to contrast against the horrors of his experiences in World War I. He employs metaphorical descriptions, intertextual references, and other fiction techniques to try to explain what happened to him.
It’s haunting. And important. If we don’t learn our history – how will we avoid repeating it?
I also read Break the Beast: a Retelling Beowulf by Allison Tebo, which had some beautifully written moments. It is firmly planted in the Christian fiction genre which, depending on your tastes, can be a good or a bad thing. Beowulf is very Christ-esque and Grendel is very Calvin-wretched-sinner. As someone who used to read this genre, and also dabbled in writing Christian fiction, this was familiar territory.
I don’t read this genre very much anymore as it sometimes veers to too sermon than story, so this book wasn’t quite for me.
The next book I selected from my kindle line-up was Beyond the Aching Door by Victoria Mier. I finished this while curled up in a sunlit bedroom, sipping a cup of cooling tea.
Does it have some melodrama? Yes. Does some of it feel slightly Cassandra Clare? Yes. Did I enjoy it? Also – yes.
It’s an urban fantasy, with a prickly, older heroine (as in – she’s not 18 years old. Hurrah!) and a slow-burn romance with an overarching mystery of: what happened to the heroine’s missing dad?
–
While I write this, there’s four piles of books on my desk. It’s been a slow reading start to the year but I want to relearn the habit of reaching for a book instead of my phone; I hate how addictive the damn things can be! There’s lots of interesting books ahead of me and I look forward to devouring them.
happy reading!
of words & books 