Welcome to our annual winter reading poll! Tell us about a great book to curl up with on a frosty winter night, and what fragrance we should wear while reading it. (Or, do what I do and record here everything you have read since the last reading poll. And if you want more recommendations, scrolling through the literature tag will bring up all the older reading polls.)
My recent reading:
I finished Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, which I started in the summer of 2020 and then set aside for a very long time.
Kevin urged me to read Hermione Lee’s biography Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. So I did, and it inspired me to re-read Fitzgerald’s work, and to pick up the few I had never read. So over the past few months I’ve gone through The Bookshop, Offshore, Human Voices, At Freddie’s, Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels and The Golden Child (they are all relatively short), plus her short story collection Means of Escape. I had read many of these books when they first appeared in the US, but reading them all at once made me agree with authors like Julian Barnes and AS Byatt, who thought she was one of the finest British authors of modern times. She was just brilliant. The Beginning of Spring in particular is like a perfectly polished jewel,* and that is the one I will assign a fragrance: The Different Company De Bachmakov might as well have been made for it. Next on my list is to re-read what was probably her best loved book, The Blue Flower, and then I will try to find a copy of The Knox Brothers.
Otherwise in fiction, I started Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree and read about half before it was due back to the library. I read about a third of James Purdy’s collected short stories, then that had to be returned as well. I also started Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms and gave up about halfway through (I was reading too many books at once to follow the shifting time frames). After that, I read her Half Life of Valery K and enjoyed it greatly.
On the mystery front, I read the last of the books in the Hercule Poirot series, and I also finished Elly Griffiths Bleeding Heart Yard.
On the non-fiction front, I re-read (really, skimmed through) Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil before our quick trip to Savannah back in November. I also read Ron Chernow’s Grant (I had to renew it 4 times to get through it), Anthony Doerr’s Four Seasons in Rome, EB White’s Here is New York (a long essay reprinted in book form). I started Upper Bohemia: A Memoir by Hayden Herrera but I did not get very far (I seem to have given up on lots of books this quarter?) and I’m currently reading A Childhood: a Biography of a Place by Harry Crews, which has been languishing on my reading list for years and years.
Note: with apologies to those of you who are quite done with Yayoi Kusama, thank you very much, top image shows an interior page from her 2012 illustrated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which you can find on Amazon for $37.
*The Beginning of Spring deserved a Booker, and she was shortlisted but she lost that year (1988) to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda, which was also a wonderful book although I have not read it since it came out. Fitzgerald did win a Booker in 1979 for Offshore. She was also shortlisted for The Bookshop and The Gate of Angels, and was a Booker prize judge in 1991 and 1999. She died in 2000, at 83.
