July 2026 reading round-up

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Nyhavn Copenhagen
(CC BY SA 4.0/kallerna)

We have spent most of the last two weeks in Denmark, which is pretty cool. And has kind of eclipsed whatever else it was I got up to in the first half of this month. I think there was a heatwave? I will post properly about the holiday when I have sorted through my hundreds (thousands?) of photos.

One thing of note: right at the start of the month, Tim spotted one of those niche local lectures in a room above a pub that was right up my street. “Sylvia Plath, witchcraft and radical poetry” presented by Dr Dorka Tamas, based on her own research. She introduced the different types of witch in literature, history and society, and explained how all those show up in Plath’s work. She showed us the cultural and social influences that we know Plath was responding to. This includes the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, Shakespeare, historical witch trials in Salem and Scotland, Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt, moral panics about gender roles at work and at home after the world wars, the Kinsey report Sexual Behavior in the Human Female…to name just a few. Tamas had some really interesting insights to share, including that Plath had more explicit references to witches in many early drafts of her poems, which were softened or made ambiguous in the final versions. I will absolutely be reading more Plath again soon – and making sure I buy a copy of Ariel that restores Plath’s own choice of the order of the poems.

Before holiday, Tim and I looked up some Danish writers to immerse ourselves in. Aside from Hans Christian Andersen, surprisingly few have been translated into English. And I couldn’t quite bring myself to read Kierkegaard to prepare for a summer holiday. Does anyone have any recommendations? While we’re in the Danish mindset?

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Book review: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Wild Dark Shore book coverSometimes a bookseller presses a book into your hands that you had never heard of and it is the most absolutely perfect read for you. Booksellers like that are a precious, precious thing.

During Independent Bookshop Week in June, the Very Small Bookshop in Bristol had a cool way to share book recommendations. Leah, who runs the shop, created six lucky dips under topics including “somewhat bizarre” and “gaaaaaaay”. You picked out a slip of paper with a title and author, and if you liked the sound of it enough to buy the book you got 15% off. I love a book recommendation from someone whose taste I trust/share – and the selection of books in Leah’s shop already vouched for that. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy was my pick from “soft or profound or lovely”. I certainly wouldn’t call it soft, but it’s very profound indeed.

This novel focuses on the Salt family – father Dominic and his three children – who live on an extremely remote sub-Antarctic island called Shearwater. Dominic is the island’s caretaker, a role that he chose after his wife died nine years ago. They live in an old lighthouse, no longer functional for that purpose but bringing with it more than a century of lonely histories. The extreme, harsh environment seems an appropriate setting for grief – perhaps one so extreme it can drive people mad.

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Book review: Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

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Big Swiss book coverI’m a fan of the Weirdos Book Club podcast with Sara Pascoe and Cariad Lloyd, though I don’t always agree with their take on books. For instance, both hosts loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh, which I found…meh. So when they heartily recommended Big Swiss by Jen Beagin I couldn’t be sure I would like it. But it’s a comedy about a relationship that starts at a dog park, so I at least knew dogs would feature heavily. And it would hopefully be a light read. I’d say it achieves those things. And I did like it, though I wouldn’t go so far as love.

Big Swiss is sort of a love story, but it’s more about sex than romance. It’s certainly not sweet or romantic. It satirises life in the rich New York town of Hudson. And it’s very funny.

Greta lives in a falling-apart old farmhouse with her friend Sabine, her dog Piñon and a few thousand bees. She works from home transcribing audio of the local sex therapist’s sessions. It’s all supposedly anonymised but in their small community she often recognises the voices of patients. Lately she has become obsessed with the sessions of a new patient she nicknames Big Swiss, a woman who she knows is tall and Swiss.

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June 2026 reading round-up

Not-beer, sick dog, martini experiment

June was an…odd month. We thought the dog needed surgery, so we cancelled plans, got all ready to hunker down for her long, slow recovery. And then after scans and specialists, it turns out she doesn’t need surgery. Which is of course a massive relief and I am hugely grateful. But also it took my brain a bit of time to adapt to “oh, we do get to have a fun summer after all”.

The crazy heatwave coincided with the above, so we were more than happy to stay indoors with closed blinds, a fan and plenty of chilled water. It is a little scary to experience 39 degree heat as early as June though.

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Book review: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

The Old Drift book coverI forget where I saw the recommendation to read The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. I suspect it was a listicle about African sci-fi. And indeed this book won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020. But I feel like calling it sci-fi is a bit misleading. This is an epic saga, incorporating some sci-fi elements in the last 20 years of its 125-year tale. With a touch of magical realism in the earlier part of the story. It’s also brilliant.

This is the story of three families in what is now Zambia. In 1904, on the banks of the Zambezi river, near Victoria Falls, a feverish British man, an Italian hotelier and a local African busboy become connected by what seems like a small incident. Percy Clarke is an archetypal colonist – a bored Englishman looking for adventure. He’s racist, often drunk and generally unpleasant. His is a disturbing mind to be inside.

Thankfully it is just a few pages before the narrative swiftly moves on to “The Grandmothers”. Serpell lays out the stories of three women connected to that moment in the prologue.

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Book review: Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

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Interstellar Megachef book coverI try to buy ebooks direct from publishers when I can. There are a few small publishers that are really good for this, such as Rebellion. When I go to their site for a particular book I almost always wind up buying a couple of random other books that just sound fun. Such as Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan – I mean, that’s quite the title, right?

A queer SF tale about an intergalactic cooking show, this sounded like it would be completely silly fluff. Which I was very much in the mood for when I bought it and when I decided to read it. But this is actually much better and less fluffy than I expected. Though it does have its sillier moments, and comedic ones too, this is largely a story about prejudice, migration, xenophobia and bullying.

Saras has run away from Earth, arriving on Primus with nothing but a small bag of belongings, her little robot Kili and a dream of winning the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show, Interstellar MegaChef. As one of Earth’s most celebrated chefs she thinks she stands a good chance, but she is in for a rude awakening to reality.

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May 2026 reading round-up

Well, life just keeps on getting more complicated and frustrating, but also the sun is shining and we survived the first heatwave of the year.

Highlights of the month include seeing Robin Ince live as part of Bristol’s Skeptics in the Pub/Theatre lecture series run by Bristol Skeptics Society. Ince is a comedian, science communicator and all-around lovely human being and his live show is brilliant. Go see him if you can. And either way, read his books. There are quite a lot of them.

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Book review: Passing by Nella Larsen

Passing book coverI probably hold on to more of the books I read than I will ever realistically reread, but there are some I know I will come back to. Like Passing by Nella Larsen, which I recently read for the second time in 14 months. It was chosen by my book club (with my encouragement) and I’m pleased to find I loved it second time around (as did all but one of the book club).

In this 1929 novella, two Black women reconnect years after having been children together. Irene and Clare bump into each other in a whites-only restaurant in Chicago. They’re both passing, but for Irene it’s a brief convenience to drink a cool drink on a dusty summer’s day. Clare is living her whole life passing for white – including being married to a racist white man who has no idea she’s Black.

Irene is married to a Black man who is a doctor and fund raises for civil rights. They’re prominent members of society in Harlem. She doesn’t approve of Clare’s life choices – even more so when Clare starts coming to socialise in Harlem when her husband is away.

“Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things, for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other such silly rot…Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her.”

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Book review: Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue book cover

Like many people I discovered David Mitchell through his bestselling novel Cloud Atlas. I went back and read his first two books and declared myself a big fan. I bought his next few books as hardbacks on release and loved them. But then after 2014 I for some reason didn’t pick up his next two novels – until now.

Looking back at my notes from the talk Mitchell gave in Bristol in 2014, he said he was writing “a book largely set in 1960s London and New York, due for publication in 2016”. Well that surely has to be Utopia Avenue, which was finally published in 2020. And which I finally read last month.

This is a novel about a fictional band called Utopia Avenue in 1960s London (mostly). They’re a cross-genre hybrid formed by a visionary manager, Levon Frankland, bringing together musicians he’s individually impressed by. Which at first seems like a plan so misguidedly hopeful it can’t possibly work. As these five strangers gradually become a team, life throws curveballs that could end the dream before it’s begun.

Each chapter centres around the writing of a particular song, told from the perspective of the song’s writer. All the band members and their manager get a turn – though two of the band do the majority of the writing and therefore get more chapters. It’s an interesting way to tell the story, though I did occasionally want more from the perspectives that were largely missing.

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April 2026 reading round-up

My reading last month was boosted by the Easter long weekend, sunny evenings in the garden and a short holiday in Bannau Brycheiniog (the Brecon Beacons).

We had fantastic luck with the weather considering it was a holiday in the UK in April. It was gorgeously sunny and warm while still early enough in the year that the UV was only high for brief periods each day. Which meant I could be outside for hours at a time without triggering a lupus flare. Cue 3-4 hour walks in peaceful countryside with picnics or pub lunches. Then getting back to our holiday cottage mid-afternoon to sit in the garden with books, wine and snacks.

On holiday we stumbled across Hy Brasail, a strange house that looks like a hybrid of ordinary Victorian house and an Italian villa. Which is basically exactly what it is. There is some mystery surrounding it, but what seems agreed on is that it was owned by a local lawyer, Mr James, in 1912. He made some quirky additions to the building after he went on holiday to Italy. He may have fallen in love with a contessa and promised to build her a house reminiscent of her Tuscan childhood. She may even have lived there with him. Though more likely she broke his heart and never came to Wales.

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