Fee

Argh.

I hated this story. Self-indulgent, self-pitying drivel about a man who is preparing to leave his hard working, patient, and frankly over-tolerant wife, the mother of his two children, because he wants to go out and have sex with younger, fitter, ‘more interesting' women.

Conversely, I enjoyed Kureishi's writing style, and there were a couple of sentences that stood out as really beautiful, though they were floating in a pile of shite so they were bound to stand out.

Part of me wonders if the point of this book was to hate it, in which case it's done its job very well and deserves five stars.

Not convinced.

Two stars, for the writing.

A charming collection of stories from Charlotte Gilman, most notably remembered as the author of high school favourite The Yellow Wallpaper, a searing depiction of the slide into mental disarray masked in a cloak of horror fiction.

This collection highlights just how anachronistic Gilman was, and firmly casts her as a pioneer of first wave feminism. Her frustration at the dismissiveness she had to deal with because of her sex is palpable throughout, and many of the questions posed in her stories are still very relevant today, some very close to the bone indeed.

I'd like to try out some of her novels or novellas in the future as I found that many of these stories were quite abruptly ended, or contained ideas that felt too big to be confined to such a small space. I suspect she'll bloom in the longer format.

3.5 stars.

“I'm trying to speak - to write - the truth. I'm trying to be clear. I'm not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.”

This is the second Octavia E. Butler book I've read, after Kindred, and it's a very different beast. Both novels fall in to the YA category but whilst I immediately handed Kindred over to my thirteen year old daughter when I'd finished it, I'd be hesitant to pass Parable of the Sower on. This dystopian nightmare is one of the most brutal and ruthless books I've ever read. The violence and the visceral hatred that seeps from the pages really got to me, perhaps because what in 1993, when the book was published, was a distant and unimaginable future is now looming and alarmingly possible. The only relief from the unending horrors was the insights into the creation of Earthseed, the brainchild of our protagonist; a new religion where God is change and the ultimate goal of the human race is to leave earth and live amongst the stars, because who in their right mind would want to remain on the planet in the state it's in? I enjoyed being witness to its development, especially seeing how it affected each of the characters.

This was a hard book to get through. I found Butler's blunt and clipped writing style difficult to gel with at first, and the bleakness of the story made me quite reticent to keep returning to it. I'm still not entirely sure I'm glad I pressed on with it, or indeed if I'll continue with the series. Maybe after a long break.

Scottish folklore is one of my favourite things so I was eager to read this book, but it was a bit of a let down to be honest. Despite the main character, Audrey, journeying to the Isle of Skye to ‘collect the word-of-mouth folk tales of the people and communities around her', there was scant mention of folklore in this book. Indeed for most of it, nobody wanted to talk to Audrey. The story was painfully predictable, the mysteries not terribly mysterious, and the ending rushed and overwrought, with all the loose ends tied up in a pretty bow.

If you want to read a better mystery set on an island and featuring Victorian feminism and independent women in the age of man, try The Lie Tree by Francis Hardinge, which this book seemed like a poor imitation of.

NB. This should be marketed as a YA book, not adult fiction.

I'm stuck in a weird kind of limbo with this book. I liked it a lot but I have no idea why. I hated every character in it. I seethed at their conduct. I despised the depiction of the art world. At one point I had to close the book to shout at my ceiling. But other than that I didn't want to put it down, and it's been on my mind often since I finished it.

This is an excruciatingly modern book, reflecting the age of the privileged and entitled back to us in painful clarity, and Ottessa Moshfegh captures it all with such ease.

4.5 reluctantly glowing stars.

Stephen King is often referred to as a master of his craft and On Writing only serves to reinforce that fact. His lifelong dedication to the art of writing is what radiates past all the anecdotes and advice that are so graciously imparted in this text; that and his deep love for his family, which really made me smile.

Whilst SK's humour often peeks through in his fiction, it took this autobiographical work for me to fully appreciate just how funny he is. I was absolutely howling at points, and moved to tears at others. A rollercoaster of a book, and exactly what a book that teaches you about writing should be like, IMHO, reinforcing the point that there is no magic formula to help you write a good book, and there's no secret idea bank that successful authors have access to and you don't. Good writing is a product of hard work, patience, and practice.

“When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why. I found that arrogant and infuriating, not to mention a pain in the neck. Sometimes I even wanted to hit them with a shovel to shut them up, like I did that time in elementary school. But I recalled how upset my sister had been when I'd casually mentioned this to her before and kept my mouth shut.”

This is such an odd wee book. A quick read, ultimately because not a lot happens and there's not much of a character arc to speak of, but Murata's writing is compelling and Keiko's story is endearing and relatable, despite her bizarre personality quirks. Her constant enforced cheerfulness and unabashed bluntness reminded me an awful lot of May Kasahara from Murikami's The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. An interesting look at the role of the individual in the machinery of society, and society's expectations, and often insistence, of conformity.

I've had The Sea, The Sea on my radar for a looong time, years and years, mainly because the title stuck in my head and wouldn't budge. Somehow I ended up with a lot of preconceptions about this book but other than really beautiful descriptions of water, none of them were accurate. I think I was expecting something vaguely dreamy and ethereal, but The Sea, The Sea is grounded firmly in reality.

Murdoch does character studies wonderfully. She records almost every detail of the minutiae of life until it feels like we're following along in real time, but whilst in unskilled hands this would be a huge slog, Murdoch turns the mundane ins and outs of everyday living into something fascinating.

These are the notes I jotted down as I was reading:

egotist
misogynist
fantasist
bully
unreliable
weirdly focused on food
rose coloured glasses of first love
Hartley clearly has mental issues
justification of others' actions in his favour
obsessive
writing a memoir/autobiography
self declared Prospero
self absorbed
manipulative
ignorant of his own motivations

Despite all that, Murdoch managed to make me empathise with and feel sorry for this character by the end of the book. Her writing is addictive and I did not want to stop reading, though I found myself often questioning exactly why that was. I am head over heels, and really looking forward to reading more.

In this feminist coming of age story our protagonist, Esperanza, leads us through the physical and emotional developments of puberty and all its accompanying discontent while she tries to carve out her place in the world. Her voice is wonderfully forthright; the exhaustive musings of a teenager before she learns the need to censor herself.

The story is told in a series of short vignettes, and for such a tiny little novel it manages to pack an awful lot in to its few pages. Cisneros's beautiful writing borders on poetry and is both enchanting and brutal. My heart ached for Esperanza as she searched for her identity whilst having to deal with poverty, racism, sexism, and sexual abuse. I can't imagine that many authors would manage to successfully evoke such strong feelings and address such big issues in a book of this length.

I'm sorry to see that it's still banned in several places. This is an important story for adults and teens alike, and should be free to be read by all.

I've long had an interest in the ongoing conversation regarding the reintroduction of wolves into the wild in Britain, particularly in Scotland, and to see these often frustratingly circular discussions come to fruition in The Wolf Border was magical.

Hall's writing is effortlessly evocative; reminiscent of Matt Bell's in its demands that you read slowly and carefully. There is so much packed into this book, far beyond the confines of wildlife conservation. Hall's examination of the human condition in parallel with the lives of the new wolf pack is deftly presented in her wonderful prose, and her vision of a world in which the campaign for Scottish independence was successful cut very close to the bone.

My first Sarah Hall but definitely not my last.

This book is a perfect example of what happens when you give more weight to prose than plot. I had high hopes, especially considering the numerous plaudits crammed in all over the covers, but ultimately it was a bit of a let down.

Orkney is the story of an ageing college professor who marries one of his young students, and follows how their new life together unfolds as they honeymoon on the ever changing Orkney coast. Amy Sackville writes beautifully, and if this book was a short story it might have been an interesting read. As it stands it's far too long, particularly because the first half of the book is mainly repetitive descriptions of how attractive the professor finds his new wife, which very quickly became tedious. Had this book been written by a man, I would have given up on it. As it was, I pressed on and whilst the second half of the book is definitely better than the first - in that things actually happen in it to progress the small semblance of story we're given - I was still left wanting. The whole thing feels unfinished, and though I can see what Sackville was trying to establish with the mind numbing repetitions, it falls far short of the mark.

2.5 stars, all garnered from the beautiful descriptions of the island landscape.

I LOVED this book. Good grief. I am such a sucker for an unreliable narrator.

Pale Fire is an unfinished Poem by the recently deceased John Shade, and is presented here with an introduction, commentary, and exhaustive index by his friend, Charles Kinbote.

Or is it? Who knows.

I was aware that this book was held in very high regard but I had no idea how funny it would be! The pompous and witty Kinbote keeps us entertained throughout with his unbelievably far reaching footnotes and his direct appeals to the reader to do his research for him because he just doesn't have the time or the resources. I particularly enjoyed his bizarrely detailed discourse on committing suicide ‘successfully'.

This has been in my bookcase for years and I just never got around to it. Having now (finally) read it, I'm sure it was bought as a post-HoL recommendation because there is definitely an air of the House about it. I was also very much reminded of A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Poor Things by Alasdair Gray throughout.

I will be absolutely amazed if this book isn't in my top five at the end of the year.

Five stars. No, six! Ten!

Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it started.

First Stephen King of the year! <3

Despite all the awful things that happen in Doctor Sleep, it was strangely comforting to return to the old familiar characters after such a long time. I love The Shining so I was nervous to see where SK had taken Danny and Wendy Torrance, and as much as I had wished for redemption and a good life for Danny, I wasn't surprised to discover that SK had, rightly, remained true to Jack Torrance's legacy - Danny, like his father, is an alcoholic trying to escape his past. The story of Dan's redemption is at the heart of this book, and its climax on the Roof of the World moved me to tears.

Doctor Sleep has snuck in right behind Insomnia in my list of favourite SK works. Not terribly surprising, I suppose, when you consider how similar the pacing and the themes of the two books are. I'm really enjoying the way that his writing has evolved into this wonderful mix of quiet horror wrapped up in almost literary fiction. It's a far cry from his earlier books and eminently readable.

4.5 stars.

PS. Loved the wee Silence of the Lambs reference!

I can't imagine there's much left to say about Frankenstein that hasn't already been said elsewhere, so I won't go on too much.

When I first read Frankenstein as a teenager I thought the language was quite stilted, and though I appreciated the story at the heart of the book I found the text difficult to concentrate on. In contrast, on this read through, I was blown away by how beautifully written this book is and I wanted Shelley's prose to go on forever. Such is the difference between adult and teen, I guess.

Despite being two hundred years old and having been done to death in countless retellings, the sad story of Frankenstein and his monster still comes across as somehow modern and fresh. It does not suffer from the tedium that accompanies so many books of the early eighteen hundreds, and remains a relevant cautionary tale for this day and age.

This book is a true classic that has resoundingly withstood the test of time, and I loved every minute of it.

From the first page it's apparent that The Deathly Hallows is a very different beast from the previous books in the series. The epigraphs, particularly the sinister and apocalyptic quote from Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers, immediately establish a darker tone which only gets more pronounced as the story develops.

Unfortunately this book confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt something I had previously touched upon: as an alumna of Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches, the real magic in the HP series, for me at least, lies in Hogwarts and the day to day running of the school. When you take the characters out of that setting, the story loses a lot of its sparkle. Whilst I enjoyed a lot of the first half of the book - the laying to rest of Moody's eye and the appearance of the silver doe in particular were beautifully written - I didn't feel like I really settled in to it until we returned to Hogwarts, and we all know what happened after that.

I can't help but admire the courage it must have taken for JKR to kill off so many of her well loved characters. A couple of the deaths knocked the wind right out of me, and I mourned the loss of Hedwig through the whole book. I was a bit disappointed at how quickly Snape was dispatched with but finally having his backstory revealed in the pensieve made up for it. I was surprised to find myself feeling sorry for the Malfoy family towards the end, and to be honest I was managing to hold it together in the final pages of the book until we encountered Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy running through the crowd, not even attempting to fight, screaming for their son. I hope that, like Severus, they're given a second chance.

All things considered I've really enjoyed reading the HP books, and it's been a good way to ease into the reading year. Unfortunately none of them quite scraped five stars but a couple came very close, and I have no doubt that if i'd first read them as a child I would hold an entirely different opinion.

4.5 stars.

The penultimate installment in the HP series, and the first of JK “I didn't read The Lord of the Rings until after I'd finished writing these books, honest” Rowling's books that I can genuinely say I enjoyed from start to finish. It made me laugh out loud (Roonil Wazlib cracked me up) and shed a tear (Hagrid carrying Dumbledore's body at the funeral was heartbreaking), and for the first time since starting this series I felt truly invested in the characters.

I particularly enjoyed the return to the focus on school work in this book, and found myself sharing Harry, Ron, and Hermione's nerves when the owls bearing their exam results turned up. I don't think I'll ever tire of reading about the various concoctions muddled together in potions class - if I was a Hogwarts pupil it would definitely be my favourite subject, and I'd love to get my hands on a copy of that annotated textbook! Despite Draco playing a bigger part in this book, he remains quite a flimsy character and it would be good to see him fully rounded out before the end of the series. I appreciated JKR's clever use of the pensieve as a vehicle to give us access to Voldemort's history while allowing us to spend a little more time with Dumbledore before his unfortunate demise, though I wouldn't be surprised to find that we haven't seen the last of the old man.

Hopefully, what with ridding the wizarding world of the greatest evil ever to threaten it, there won't be much time left for teenage romance in the final book. I suspect I would have enjoyed those bits a lot more if I'd first read the books as a teenager, but reading them for the first time as an adult makes it all a bit voyeuristic. Despite that, I did think JKR handled them very tactfully, and I thought this, from when Harry and Ginny first kiss, was lovely:

After several long moments — or it might have been half an hour — or possibly several sunlit days — they broke apart.

Unlike its predecessor, the protracted length of the Order of the Phoenix is justifiable and it was nice to be able to settle down into the now comfortable cadence of JKR's writing for the duration. She's really found her footing in this book and the clarity of her vision for where the characters are heading is firmly established.

This is the first book in which it feels like she knows how all of this ends, and we just have to trust her and enjoy the ride. A pervasive sense of foreboding creeps in throughout the writing, and it becomes apparent that we are being ushered towards something big, beyond the confines of The Order of The Phoenix. I'm eager to find out what it is, and also to discover if there's a five star read in this series. Some tighter editing to get rid of the frustratingly silly errors that are still cropping up in the text would definitely push the next book towards that.

Having established a winning setup with The Prisoner of Azkaban - slow start, long and baffling middle, big batch of clarifying reveals at the end - it seems that JKR decided to go down the ‘if it ain't broke don't fix it' route With The Goblet of Fire and stretched the same format out to fill an extra two hundred pages, when really she could just have cut out the bits with the blast ended skrewts or Hermione's quest for the emancipation of the house elves and written a shorter, tighter story. Im giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that these points must evolve into something significant in later books because they were unnecessary here.

It's interesting to note that The Goblet of Fire, like the previous books in the series, came out a year after its predecessor. The remaining three books have two or three years between releases. With this book being significantly bigger than the first three, I do wonder if JKR rushed it and if that's what's responsible for its many niggling mistakes. Her inability to punctuate Sirius's name properly throughout was incredibly irritating, not to mention her continued insistence on using ellipses where they're completely redundant, for the third book running. She's also come to rely on a select few favourite phrases so much that their repetition now jolts me entirely out of my reading (Hagrid's ‘beetle black eyes', or ‘bottle brush tail' in reference to Crookshanks being the worst offenders).

On the plus side the Weasleys remain absolutely adorable, and I think Mr and Mrs Weasley might be my favourite characters of the whole series. I could have wept when Mrs Weasley and Bill turned up in place of Harry's family for the final task in the tournament. I enjoyed the introduction of Mad Eye Moody and his roaming, magic eye, and I hope we'll see him again after his convalescence. I'm looking forward to finding out what that glint in Dumbledore's eye meant, and also if Fred and George do invest all that gold in a joke shop. I suspect not though.

3.5 stars.

After a bit of wavering about in the first two books, in The Prisoner of Azkaban we are presented with a novel that feels fully developed. In retrospect, The Philosopher's Stone and The Chamber of Secrets seem like practice runs for JKR in which she hones her craft, builds and furnishes her wizarding universe, and cements the quirks and traits of her characters' personalities. With all that out of the way, our patience is rewarded with a gripping, clever story that doesn't rely on a clumsy Dumbledore related deus ex machina to bring it to a conclusion. Huzzah!

My eldest tells me that this is her least favourite of the books, and I suspect the reasons for that lie in the difference between reading it as an adult and reading it as a child. This is undoubtedly my favourite of the series so far but I can imagine a youngster could find it quite boring without the relentless, quickly paced twists and turns found in the previous books. This is a tale to be slowly unraveled, and although it doesn't have the charm of The Chamber of Secrets there is a lot to love about this book. Fred and George's relentless pranking of poor, overly-earnest Percy had me laughing out loud as I read, and I sincerely hope we get to see more of gentle Professor Lupin. The Marauder's Map was a stroke of genius, and the reveal of the origin of the names and their accompanying backstory gave me the warm fuzzies.

With my ratings steadily creeping up, I have high hopes for the next few books. Four stars.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. After reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone I was expecting more of the same middle grade level writing, but, even in the space of one book, JKR's style has noticeably matured, no doubt a necessity to deal with the darker themes presented here. Aside from her constant overuse of ellipses, I found her writing much more nuanced, her foreshadowing deftly dealt with rather than ham-fisted as in the first book, and many of her turns of phrase were positively charming - Hagrid trying to raise werewolf cubs under his bed, Moaning Myrtle blushing silver, and particularly this:

October arrived, spreading a damp chill over the grounds and into the castle. Madam Pomfrey, the matron, was kept busy by a sudden spate of colds among the staff and students. Her Pepperup Potion worked instantly, though it left the drinker smoking at the ears for several hours afterwards. Ginny Weasley, who had been looking peaky, was bullied into taking some by Percy. The steam pouring from under her vivid hair gave the impression that her whole head was on fire.

Poor Things is a book that grows with you, like all the best books do. The first time I read it I was twenty-one, and I found it intriguing, but difficult and a little baffling. Over the years I've come to love it dearly, discovering something new each time I pick it up, and just when I thought I couldn't love it any more, here we are.

Despite Alasdair Gray's iconic status in Scotland, reading this book reminds me that he's still massively underappreciated. Poor Things is nothing short of a masterpiece, exploring an array of far-reaching themes including feminism, the morality of medicine and the ethics of science, class distinctions and social inequality, colonialism, memory, and identity, both personal and national. It's a narrative within a narrative within a narrative, with not one but two unreliable narrators, giving Nabokov a run for his money, and at the heart of it all lies an exquisite Frankenstein-esque pastiche of the Victorian Gothic that is endearing and terrifying and everything in between. On top of all that, as if that wasn't enough, it's a love letter to Alasdair's beloved Glasgow.

If you haven't already, I urge you to pick it up - then gimme a ding when you're done so we can chat about it!

Embarking on my first read through of the entire Harry Potter series this year, mainly so I can understand what my youngest is talking about and to be able to answer quiz questions about wizards.

This is the only HP book I'd read before, back in 1999, and I wasn't enamoured enough with it then to get swept up in the hype. Not much has changed with this read through. At its heart this is a good story, with all the prerequisites for a well crafted novel: a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, neatly packaged chapters with appropriately spaced cliffhangers, and JKR should be commended for how strictly she's managed to adhere to the good old Hero's Journey trope. However, conversely, the writing is overly simplistic, the pacing too measured, the reveals and resolutions often predictable, and the deus ex machina in the final chapter so heavy handed it cracked me up.

At the end of the day this is a children's book so I'm cutting it some slack and giving it three stars, but if I come across another scene that's directly lifted from LOTR I'll come back and take a star off, I swear.

This is not for you.

I bought my first copy of House of Leaves in 2005, twenty-five and heavily pregnant with my second child and entirely unaware of what I was getting myself into, with regards to the book at least. I spent my last trimester poring over it, pouring myself into it, scribbling notes in the margins, sourcing works referenced in the footnotes, reading those, coming back to HoL, reading that footnote with new eyes, writing out my theories, plotting connections, drawing labyrinths, dreaming of Johnny and sunken ships and sweeping hands and Sarawak.

HoL changed my life. It changed me. It changed how I think, how I write, the media I consume, my art. I've never read anything like it, before or since, and for a long time I struggled to read any other fiction because nothing lived up to it. ‘I only read non-fiction,' I declared to my now husband when we met in 2011. He thought it was a bit weird but he went with it, thankfully. From 2005 to 2015 I read HoL at least once a year, usually twice, sometimes more, my pencilled marginalia smearing beneath my fingers as I expanded and clarified my often prolix - your word - notes. In 2015, lured by the pull of BookTube, I decided it was time to make a conscious effort to get back to reading fiction. I put HoL down and didn't pick it back up again for a long time. I'd quit smoking the year before, a twenty a day habit. Quitting HoL was a hundred times more difficult.

Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error. 1
–p107

I dabbled, of course. It haunted me. Rarely a day goes by went by that I didn't think about it, some small part of it. I picked it up here and there, read a few pages at random, maybe looked up a line that was nagging at me, checked a footnote or two. When my eldest showed an interest in reading it, we puzzled through the first few chapters together. But I didn't commit to doing a proper read-through again until last month when I turned forty three. Call it a birthday present.

Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a compelling work of post-modern, ergodic lit, narrated by four characters who exhibit varying degrees of reliability. The text is almost a character in its own right, expanding and contracting as the story progresses, shifting and dancing through the pages, demanding that you rearrange your body to accommodate it. It's about a film by photojournalist Will Navidson, which documents his family's experience of living in a house that's bigger on the inside than on the outside, and what happens when he decides to explore it. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is a complex academic study of the aforementioned film by an elderly blind man, littered with footnotes and peppered with references to other works that may or may not exist. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is the story of Johnny Truant and how his life progresses after his discovery of the aforementioned academic study, told entirely in the footnotes of the main text of the book. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is the epistolary story of Johnny's mother, who was committed to a mental institution after she tried to strangle Johnny when he was a child. Except it isn't.

House of Leaves is none of these things and all of them at once. It's an endless, impossible labyrinth of a book, and if you don't keep your wits about you it will trap you inside its ashen walls.

The idea of a house built expressly so that people will become lost in it may be stranger than the idea of a man with the head of a bull, and yet the two ideas may reinforce one another.
–Jorge Luis Borges

Returning to HoL after seven years with fresh eyes and a better brain was a joy. It was almost a clean slate. There were parts of the text I had completely forgotten about, and it was like reading them for the first time. Sections that had made no sense to me in the past were suddenly clear. I could follow references that I hadn't understood before. I was making connections between disparate parts of the narrative that I'd previously had no idea existed. But the thing about HoL is that it can be tricksy, and the older I get, the more simplicity I crave.

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.'”
–p34

All the puzzles and riddles, the winding, convoluted narrative paths, the whorls and loops of footnotes that ensnare you when you least expect it, the cross-referencing, the looking up quotes, the knowledge you're forced to assimilate in order to move through it all, all of that is a distraction from what lies at the heart of this book: not a Minotaur, but a beating heart. House of Leaves is a story about love, obfuscated by detail, and it's beautiful.

Maze treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted and fragmented, suffer confusion, whereas maze viewers who see the pattern whole, from above or in a diagram, are dazzled by its complex artistry. 2
–p113

I once read an interview with Mark Danielewski in Flak magazine. “I don't consider myself a horror writer,” he says. “(Though) I think anyone that deals with big questions could be defined as a horror writer. If you're Melville, if you're Hawthorne, if you're Emily Dickinson. If you're Nietzsche. And I name those names not to put myself in their company — I'm just saying that you can pick a diverse range of writers who, if they really approach the deeper questions are ultimately going to unveil something that's terrifying.

“I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book but when I finished it, I realised that it was a love story.' And she's absolutely right.” he explains.

I never understood that until now. Perhaps I wasn't meant to.

Why did god create a dual universe? So he might say, “Be not like me. I am alone.”And it might be heard.
–p45

So this is it. I'm writing this because after seventeen years, and for the first time, I feel like I've finished the book. Will I ever read it again? I expect so, but the near constant nagging urge to just pick it up has left me, and I'm sure that if I were to hear The Song of Quesada and Molino today, I'd be able to sing along.

I've done it. I've finally found my way out of the labyrinth.

Known sum call is air am. I'm free.


[1] Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering. –Virgil, The Aeneid
[2] From The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, by Penelope Reed Doob

“I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called ‘bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”

When I arrived on the Goodreads page for The Secret Life of Bees, I was amused to find that I'd marked it as ‘want to read' eleven years previously. It was worth the wait. This was a well paced, easy read, touching on themes of racism, motherhood, the power of female community, and the divine feminine.

As a beekeeper I was always going to be somewhat biased towards this book so it will come as no surprise that I absolutely loved it, particularly the way that facts about bees and beekeeping folklore mingled with the storytelling throughout. Sue Kidd's writing is dreamy, almost fairy tale esque, and does a fantastic job of evoking the heat and tension of the American south in the sixties.

Another five star read. What a month!

I had to laugh when I typed the title of this book into Goodreads to write my review, only to discover my previous review from 2008 - a measly two stars! I distinctly remember reading this at twenty eight, enchanted by Goldberg's fusion of Zen Buddhism and writing reference but frustrated that it wasn't the clearly laid out roadmap to writing success that I had been looking for; annoyed at the earnestness of it, and scoffing at Goldberg's suggestion that learning to be a good writer is not a linear process. Oh how things change. Straight into my top five for the year.

The 30th anniversary edition is wonderful, with additional content from Goldberg after each chapter discussing her thoughts at the time of writing the original manuscript and how her practice has or hasn't changed in the years since. And of course, the core message of the book remains the same: we learn writing by doing it. That simple. So write.