Some firsts of 2023 and plans for 2024

The new year is coming and it’s a traditional time to reflect on how the previous year has been and look forward to the next one. It’s been a busy year, so as highlights I’ve picked out a few things I did for the first time in 2023. I’d also like to share some news about what’s coming in 2024.

Firsts of 2023

In the summer of 2023, I recorded Pause for Thought for BBC Radio 2 for the first time – I did a set of four in June, and they liked me enough to invite me back for another four in November and December. (You can still listen on BBC Sounds.) This has been a great opportunity to learn some new skills, like writing scripts which keep to the topic, the time, and fit a faith-themed insight in somehow, as well as a chance to share Quaker perspectives more widely. It’s also a challenge, both to come up with the material, and because the recordings are made after my bedtime to go out early in the morning! 

In the autumn of 2023, I used Woodbrooke’s Quaker library in its new home for the first time. The move from the old Woodbrooke Centre to the University of Birmingham Cadbury Research Library is only one of lots of changes for Woodbrooke staff as the organisation moves away from the building and towards being a flexible, online and travelling Learning and Research team – you can read about other changes on Woodbrooke’s website. Most of the other changes in my work are in quantity not type, though. I always did travel around Britain to visit different Quaker meetings, and although I’ve done more in 2023, it doesn’t feel like a first. Similarly, running online courses is a lot of fun but it isn’t new any more. On the other hand, I knew there was a special collections library at the University of Birmingham, but I didn’t have a reason to use it until Woodbrooke’s collection moved there this year. It is different: calling up material from a catalogue rather than hunting on the shelves myself, and working in a dedicated reading room rather than borrowing books. It has advantages, though: I can email in advance and have something waiting for me, rather than searching and perhaps not finding, and the dedicated space pushes me to set aside dedicated time for research rather than trying to fit it in around other things. If you’d like to try this yourself, the Cadbury Research library is open to the public. 

Also this autumn, I self-published a book start to finish for the first time. I’d done some of this before when I published Between Boat & Shore – it had previously been with Manifold Press, which closed, and I put it out myself. However, there was still a lot I hadn’t done: for Carving a New Shape, I also produced a paperback version, tried to announce the new publication in all the right places, and did some experiments with marketing, including joining in with group sales by sapphic authors (like the I Heart Sapphfic end of year 99p sale which will run from December 23rd to 28th 2023) and starting a TikTok account just for my sapphic prehistoric novels. It was fun, but it also became clear that I have more to learn! (Especially from people like Jae who have much more experience.) I’ve got an idea for the next novel and hope to self-publish again in due course – but 2024 will be more about nonfiction, I think.

Another less than completely successful project was displaying Angela’s archery medals. Having never been a Sport person, this was an entirely new thing for me. I managed some of it okay – put up a small shelf for trophies – but I chose a rail which glued to the wall for the medals, thinking, perhaps foolishly, that they aren’t that heavy and something designed for towels would be good enough. However, Angela went on to have a very successful season (see her archery Instagram for details) and the rail fell down one night! A goal for early 2024, once our Christmas decorations have come down, is to get a new rail with a stronger attachment and make sure we’re ready to celebrate any successes next season.

2024 news

A big change for me in 2024 is that right from the beginning of January, my work with Woodbrooke will increase from three days a week to four and a half days a week. We’re rearranging who does what a bit and there are some exciting new projects in the works. If you want to know what I’m teaching in the next few months, have a look at my Woodbrooke profile page.

I’m also expecting to have two Quaker books come out in 2024 – I’ll have more details over the next few months, but here’s a little taster. One is a Pendle Hill Pamphlet based on a lecture I gave in 2023, which talks about radical welcome and whether Quaker communities are ready to include people who will change us. The other is another Quaker Quick, with the working title Speaking in Quaker Meeting for Worship. It draws on my work on afterwords and vocal ministry to explore the current understanding of this practice in unprogrammed worship and try to answer common questions (which are often about when and how it goes wrong!). 

This will also be a year of changes for Angela, too, as she finishes her PhD with all the challenges that involves – paperwork, the submission process, the viva, and the uncertainty that goes with that. 

I plan to go on blogging sometimes in 2024, but if there are fewer posts, hopefully this helps explain why!

Diverse reading challenge: nearing the end of the year

Early in the year, I wrote about the diverse reading challenge I set for myself for 2023. Now, with just under two months to go before the end of the year, I’m starting to look at how I got on and thinking about what I might want to keep or change in setting myself another challenge for next year.

Overall, I’ve had a bit of a slow year for reading. I set my Goodreads goal at 150 books for the year – not as a challenge, but as a number which in previous years I’ve passed easily. This year it is proving a challenge, and although I might make it I’ve got some serious reading to do in November and December (three books a week). That’s okay, though – it wasn’t meant to be a challenge and I’ll just ignore it if I don’t reach it. I’ve done other things, some of which I didn’t know about at the beginning of the year, and some of which (like marking A-level exam papers, examining a PhD thesis, or doing archive research) involve large amounts of non-book reading. For the same reasons, the spreadsheet on which I’m tracking my diverse reading challenge has some gaps. Under the particular rules I set myself, I have to choose which category to file a book under, and I’d have filled more spaces if I let a single book count for more than one category. (For example, a lot of sapphic romances are written by authors who are themselves lesbian, bi, or otherwise sapphic, and would also count for my LGBTQIA+ authors category – but my personal rule for the year has been that six categories need six books and I don’t count them in more than one space.)

Image: some of the spreadsheet in which I have tracked my reading. Months are listed down the left-hand column, and categories across the top. Most boxes contain the author and title of a book, often with a note about how they fit that category. For details about these and all the books I read, I recommend looking at my Goodreads profile.

The categories in which I’ve been most consistently successful (so far – there are still two months in which I could fail to find books in these categories!) are authors of colour and authors working outside the UK/USA. When I designed this pair of categories, I was trying to think of ways to make my reading genuinely diverse: to hear from people whose experiences are different to mine. As a white reader, I benefit from hearing the voices of authors of colour, but I noticed that what I picked up when I browsed in a bookshop or a library here was often authors who were, despite our differences, also quite similar to me: it’s been really good to read books by, for example, a British Pakistani author who grew up in England in the 1990s… but also, we could have been at school together. To keep that but also add other kinds of diversity, I added the category about working outside the UK/USA, because I wanted to look beyond the mainstream of publishing and find other voices. 

It’s been interesting to see what I found in that category – often looking through lists of books I wanted to read anyway, or noticing what I was given which might count. Some places weren’t very far away: the Republic of Ireland and Germany aren’t far away from me geographically, and Australia and Canada have strong cultural connections to the UK and USA. Some of the things I enjoyed most in this category were also in translation, and I might use that as a category for next year’s challenge – the books I read in translation were especially helpful, I think, in approaching the goal of engaging with writing from a range of very different cultures. 

Although they had some gaps, other categories worked fairly well. LGBTQIA+ authors seem to end up on my reading list without much effort, partly because of overlaps of recommending and content interests. (I had a couple of months where I didn’t specifically list any books in this category; but looking around the rest of my spreadsheet, there are at least eight and probably more books which were included in other categories or other months and also have LGBTQIA+ authors – it’s more about my uneven reading patterns than a lack of material.) Having checked that this is the case, I might let this go as a category next year in favour of something more specific, like looking at sapphic romances – which is as much about knowing the market in which I’m selling my own novels as anything else. 

My two academic categories, one about Quaker history specifically and the other for my academic fields more generally, were also helpful – not because they made me find more material (I have plenty!) but because they helped me pace my reading in these areas. Spreading it out, and aiming to read one book a month, rather than saving it all up for a rushed burst when a project is due or waiting for some (potentially imaginary) time in the future when I’ll be able to do academic reading ‘properly’ is a more balanced way to approach this. I might change the specific category to reflect the work I’m hoping to do next year, or make these categories more flexible in some way, but I think I’d want to keep something similar.

I’m also aware of the categories I haven’t included. I haven’t had a category for poetry, for example, and have hardly read any this year – that’s time and whim as well as the challenge, but there’s probably some connection.

So here are some categories I might set myself as challenges for next year:

* in translation
* author of colour
* sapphic romance
* new poetry (published since 2000)
* academic

What’s the best thing you’ve read this year? Did you set yourself any challenges, or do you think you’ll set any for next year? What other categories might work as interesting challenges?

Fiction recommendations

I thought I’d highlight a few things I’ve been reading recently. Here are a handful of excellent novels I’ve read so far this year – nonfiction may or may not follow in another post!

Firekeeper’s Daughter, Angeline Boulley

A young woman tries to understand her community and her family, and gets involved in an undercover police operation as part of that process. This is a great story with some really interesting and nuanced reflections on what it means to be part of a community, or more than one community, and what options you have when tragedy seems to be endemic. I found the violence genuinely upsetting – an important feature of this sort of writing, even if I can’t really call it ‘enjoyable’ – and also appreciated the way in which teenaged characters are able to share with the reader their growing insights into the structures, often unjust structures, which shape their world.

Set in Stone, Stela Brinzeanu

A different set of questions about how far you would go to challenge society and build your own life. Where the main character in Firekeeper’s Daughter moves towards her community to try and understand it, the characters here end up moving away from their communities, but not before a good deal of struggle with the assumptions people make. I enjoyed the way the two main characters come to rely on each other, and – although I don’t want to give away spoilers – the ending.

Acts of Love and War, Maggie Brooks 

Lucy goes out to Spain during the Civil War, intending both to help the Quaker relief efforts there and to bring home two young men she grew up with. The effort to persuade them not to see non-partisan views of the situation or to change their minds is mostly futile, but their letters provide a lot of the contextual information about the war; if anything, Lucy changes her perspective as she sees more of the situation. She discovers the satisfactions as well as the challenges of supporting refugees and orphans, and becomes much less dependent on her relationships with men. For fans of historical fiction, this is closely based on academic research, and accurate as well as engaging.

The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng

This story is both beautiful and heartbreaking. It explores how a traumatic experience (being in a prisoner of war camp) changed the whole shape of a woman’s life, including directing her to a particular career and to a fascination with gardens. Having been imprisoned by Japanese soldiers, but wanting to learn to create Japanese gardens, Yun Ling has a deeply complex relationship with Japanese culture, and hence with the Japanese gardener with whom she studies. I don’t have very much patience left for fiction which explores the legacy of the Second World War, especially if it’s clumsy, so believe me when I say that this is the very opposite: beautifully and thoughtfully shaped, like the gardens it describes, with a real focus on the effects on the victims of war. 

Ember of a New World, Ishtar Watson 

Ember has only just come of age when she is suddenly given a mission to travel as far through her world – Mesolithic or just pre-Neolithic Europe – as she can. She sets off alone to explore, and along the way introduces the reader to different hunting and farming methods, cultures and languages, and dangers (some natural, but mostly human). Ishtar includes non-fiction sections at the beginning of each chapter so that you can see how each section is based on research, which adds depth, and although this isn’t a romance story, there’s also a charming plot line in which Ember begins to fall in love. 

Have you read any of these? What have you been reading?

Exciting news: launch, sale, and podcast

I’ve got three exciting pieces of news today. 

Launch day!

Today is the official launch day for Carving a New Shape. It’s a sweet love story about a young woman who goes on her first trading voyage and ends up with more than she bargained for! It’s also about making a space for yourself and your loved ones even when you don’t fit in, and about learning about relationships and communication when your assumptions are put to the test. You can order it in paperback or ebook from any Amazon store.

Queer Your Bookshelf sale

If you’re looking for a bargain, you might want to look at today’s Queer Your Bookshelf sale. More than 260 books, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and other queer characters are all 99p (or $0.99 or equivalent) on September 4th only. It includes my previous novel, Between Boat & Shore, and you can find all the books listed on the website. 

A promo graphic for Queer Your Bookshelf, showing a stack of multicoloured books on the left, and text reading: Queer Your Bookshelf. Hundreds of LGBTQ+ books just $0.99c each. 4 Sept only.

Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast interview

Heather Rose Jones, who reviewed Between Boat & Shore when it first came out, interviewed me about both novels for the Lesbian Historic Motif podcast. We talked about how and why I set my stories in the Neolithic, the connection between the books and Quakerism, and how these novels fit into the wider field of lesbian historical fiction. Her website includes the audio and lots of links to the books we talked about.

Writing an autistic character

I’ve hesitated over whether to talk about this in public. In particular, I spent a lot of time trying to work out what the rules are for this conversation. Am I hurting someone or taking space away from someone else if I discuss this in public? Self-diagnosis is valid but is my tentative self-diagnosis valid? What if I’m wrong? It’s good to be authentic, but will this be yet another case where people don’t believe me about my experience? In the end I’ve decide that because I want to talk about it in relation to my novel, I will – my blog, my rules – and readers can decide for themselves whether this perspective affects their view of the book.

In my new novel, Carving a New Shape, one of the characters is autistic. Perhaps I should say at least one of the characters, because readers might find signs of different presentations of autism in other places – but I knew when I was writing Bokka that I was crafting a character with a profile of autistic traits. She doesn’t have that language to describe her experience, and even today she might well not be diagnosed (a 2002 found that 80% of autistic women are undiagnosed at 18). She does struggle with communication and friendships, have distinctive sensory needs, and approach forming a relationship differently to other people.

When I create a character, I always draw on myself. Not every character reflects all of me, of course, but the larger the role a character has the more of my own experience they are likely to include, and when I was writing Bokka I was aware that I was choosing aspects of my experience which fit an autistic profile. Am I autistic? I don’t know for sure, and probably never will – formal diagnosis is and will probably stay out of reach – but I do have some of Bokka’s traits. It’s often difficult for me to recognise and express my emotions, for example, especially in what other people consider a timely way. (I get better with practice, but when something completely new happens it can be hours or even days before I know how I feel about it – and even longer if I don’t have some time alone.) I can get a very fixed idea of how things will be, and find it difficult when reality doesn’t match up – and, like Bokka, I do better when I’m in charge of my own circumstances rather than trying to fit in with other people’s expectations. That’s partly about being able to follow where my attention wants to go – as Bokka’s often goes to her stone carving project. Her experiences with her peer group, especially of being excluded and bullied, are also modelled on my experiences, especially at school, with some poetic license in the form of exaggerations for effect (but not that much exaggeration). 

After I wrote my first full draft, I found I wasn’t sure whether Bokka was ‘really’ autistic or not. In some ways, that also mirrors my experience and the place I’m in at the moment – going back and forth about whether I count as autistic, whether I’m too good at X to be really autistic, whether it’s only that I’m too anxious or a terrible person or if I just tried a bit harder… In the end, a friend read a polished draft and as well as making some suggestions, commented – without prompting or knowing what I’d intended – that the depiction of autism was welcome. So if readers can tell, it’s really in the book, whatever is or isn’t happening in my life! 

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Carving a New Shape will be published on 4th September 2023 and you can read it on kindle or in paperback.

I have found this report from the Autistic Girls Network, Autism, Girls, and Keeping It All Inside, useful in understanding more about internal and external presentations of autism. I’ve also learned a lot from people around me – for a little taster of that you can watch my wife’s TED talk about her experience of being autistic.

Five reasons to read Carving a New Shape

Why should you read my new novel, Carving a New Shape? Here are five possible reasons.

1. Lesbian and bisexual representation. One of the main reasons I started writing novels featuring women who fall in love with women is that those are the stories I wanted to read. I wanted to read novels where women took all the roles – loving and loved, desired and desiring, dashing and dramatic and scared and excited and maverick and everything else. That doesn’t mean that aren’t men and nonbinary people in the story (there definitely are) but that we see women front and centre, and centering other women in their lives.

The cover of Carving a New Shape, which shows a pebble beach and blue sky.

2. Happily ever after. If you prefer not to know the ending of a story, maybe you should skip this point – but perhaps romance genre books aren’t for you in the first place. One of the aims of the genre is to be uplifting and supporting; the interest is in how the ending is reached, rather than what the ending will be. The couple will get together. In this case, that also means that no women will be refrigerated. 

3. Explore ancient Orkney and prehistoric society. I once read in a writing manual that an ‘exotic setting’ was key to a romance novel, and although I don’t think that was good advice on the whole, there is a pleasure in exploring a very different setting. In Carving a New Shape we visit two very different villages – both actually based on the archaeology of Skara Brae and Barnhouse, places where prehistoric houses have survived because they were built with Orkney’s distinctive flagstone. 

4. Characters building a new lifestyle for themselves. In my previous novel, Between Boat & Shore, one of the main themes is finding your place in a community. In particular, Trebbi’s development takes her right to the centre of her community as she accepts and starts to grow into a leadership role. In Carving a New Shape, Laki and Bokka also need to find their place, but for them it isn’t about coming into the centre of the community. Instead, it’s about creating a role which didn’t exist before, dreaming up and then making real a new option. (And we get a little update about Trebbi and Aleuks, for readers of the previous book who are interested in that.)

5. It’s fun! This isn’t a book which exists to make a serious point. (I write nonfiction for that.) It’s there to entertain, and if it’s a bit silly in places and nothing more than a quick, light read, it’s done what it was meant to do. So if you’re looking for something to read for fun, something which is a little different in setting but nothing too serious, try Carving a New Shape. 

Carving a New Shape can be bought on Amazon as a paperback or ebook (and it’s also in Kindle Unlimited). If you review books and would like a free advance copy, or if you’d like to buy a signed paperback, comment or message me.

Why Tell Stories? Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots and some of his mistakes

Over the end of April and beginning of May I read Christopher Booker’s huge analysis of stories and why we tell them, The Seven Basic Plots. I remember seeing it on bookshop tables when it was new, and being intrigued but also daunted. It came out during my undergraduate degree, when I’d ‘given up’ studying English literature in favour of philosophy and theology and keeping creative writing strictly as a hobby, and I chose not to read it then. Having finally decided that I did actually want to read it and borrowed a library copy, I was determined, but there are many ways in which it didn’t live up to the promise it gave or what I’d imagined for it.

The seven basic plots are covered in the first half, maybe even the first third of the book, and there’s an argument that he should have stopped writing there (or I should have stopped reading) – I knew before I started that I didn’t agree with him about some political questions and by the time I was two-thirds of the way through I was clear that I don’t agree with him about gender roles, war, or history. He uses Jungian ideas about the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, mapping genders onto human virtues like courage and care, and matching those to characters in stories. He’s incredibly ready to judge stories which don’t fit his seven plots, without considering that they could be evidence for, err, there being more than seven plots. (He does concede that creation and detective stories don’t fit his structure anyway.) He’s much more interested in men’s writing than women’s, and isn’t impressed when female characters in stories have ‘masculine’ roles. I should probably be glad, considering what I guess he would have said about it, that the romance genre is never mentioned.

I kept reading partly because it’s good sometimes to engage fully with someone you disagree with. At least now I can give details about how and why! I also kept reading because even though I disagreed with his conclusions, it was an interesting prompt to think about some questions which are key for an author. Why do we tell stories? More specifically, why do I want to tell these stories? Booker died in 2019 and I’m sure he wouldn’t have had any time for modern ideas of ‘representation’, although seeing the diversity of real people represented in fiction is important to me.

For Booker, the purpose of stories is to provide a psychological road map in which the lead character goes through various stages of development in order to become a whole, well-rounded person. (By the way, he claims he couldn’t find alternatives to the words ‘hero’ and ‘heroine’, but ‘lead character’, ‘main character’, and ‘protagonist’ all seem useful to me.) If we sit very lightly to the gendered Jungian stuff he adds to that, it’s similar to what Gwen Hayes calls “the journey from hole-hearted to whole-hearted” (in her book Romancing the Beat). The emotional journey of a story is often to explore how someone can move from incomplete (whether that’s immature, lonely, or in some other form) to complete (mature, loved, or in traditional fairy tales, often monarch). Tragedy is a key exception, although I think Booker doesn’t give enough credit to stories where the final ‘complete’ stage is a happy ending but is also shown to be incomplete in some ways – he tends to assume this is a failure on the part of the author, while I would tend to see it as a deliberate choice to echo life’s real complexities and reject plot devices like miracle healings and overengineered coincidences which can move an otherwise realistic story into the realm of the implausible. 

In terms of his seven basic plots, I think my novels Between Boat & Shore and Carving a New Shape (forthcoming) both have two main characters – pretty standard for romance genre books – and each of them has a ‘Rags to Riches’ story, specifically one in which they move from unloved or disconnected to being loved and fully connected. This looks slightly different for each one, and they tend to start with at least some connections but not the ones they really want. Trebbi, for example, has a strong connection to her friend Dru, but her community are struggling after the murder of their leader and her character arc includes growing into a leadership role as well as falling in love with Aleuks. I think it does make sense in some ways to see these narratives as metaphors for psychological integration or becoming a whole self. I’d differ from Booker on the details, but that core part of his argument does fit for some kinds of art and stories. 

He misses out, however, a whole other set of motivations for reading and telling stories which are to do with empathy and imagination. At the very beginning he reports that lots of people told him that stories were about ‘escape’, and he rejects that as too simple, which is fair in some ways. But he never returns to this theme. I think more recent research on the effects of reading fiction, which show that it increases empathy and improves social cognition might hold some of the answers. In Booker’s model, when we imagine a character we are creating a reflection of our own inner world. In the research, it seems that when we engage with a fictional character we are developing our theory of mind – that is, working to understand other people’s minds, rather than our own. That gives fiction a powerful educational role. We are escaping our limitations and able to visit places we can never go in reality – sometimes the ancient past or outer space or a private palace, but above all other people’s perspectives.

And perhaps he also misses out the fact that it’s fun. Booker has a whole analysis of a plot structure he calls ‘comedy’ which, it turns out, doesn’t even have to be funny. For all the plot structures, though, and for all stories, enjoyment is a element of the appeal. Sometimes it’s enough that a story makes us laugh, or surprises us, even if it doesn’t draw us in to a traditional plot – a Monty Python sketch still turns on a very short story even if it finishes with a surprise visit from Flying Fox of the Yard rather than a true punchline. Reading or hearing a story can be a pleasure in itself even if it doesn’t follow the full arc of a traditional plot – things which we consume in episodes, whether that’s a book chapter at a time or a TV show, can be enjoyable as they are even if they leave us wanting to know what happens next. 

A year of surprise books

For my first wedding anniversary, my friend Marion who has known me since secondary school gave me a year of blind dates with books – twelve books wrapped in brown paper and labelled by month, so that each month I got a surprise book. It’s now almost my second wedding anniversary, the books have run out, and I thought I’d write a bit about this experience. I see some Pinterest/TikTok/etc posts about the idea from the giver’s point of view – choosing books, wrapping them up, and so on – but not so much about what it’s like for a recipient. 

The first thing I want to note is that how well this works for the recipient is going to vary a lot depending on their reading habits in general. I read ten to fifteen books in an average month, and already belong to a circulating library system (a group of us vote on books, which are then circulated so each member of the group has each book for a month), so adding one extra book to my reading for the month wasn’t a big stretch and I did keep up with them. If I only had time to read one book a month, this present might have lasted me a very long time! That said, there was still one book I didn’t read cover to cover.

At the beginning – a clear plastic box with twelve parcels in it, each wrapped in brown paper and labelled with a month. On the top I have left the instructions which were taped to the wrapping paper. They start, “What do you get a bookworm that seems to have everything? Get her 12 ‘Blind Dates with a Book’

Another is that as the recipient, there are some choices to make about how to interact. For example, I chose to unwrap the books on the first day of each month, but I didn’t necessarily read the book immediately – it came as a surprise to some extent, but I would unwrap it and put it on my to-be-read shelf with others rather than unwrapping and going straight into it. That decision lessened the blind-date effect to some extent – when I sat down to read, I knew what the book was, and sometimes had left it sitting there for two or three weeks – but increased the chances that I would actually read it, by matching the genre etc. to the time and place of reading. (For example, I could choose not to read a thriller at bedtime.) I think that’s a lot about personality and reading style. My method worked well for me, but it may not be exactly how the present was intended to work.

In some but not all of the books, Marion had included a note about why she chose it, whether she’d read it or not, etc. If you’re wrapping something up, I’d say this is well worth the effort, because it dramatically increased my feeling of connection to the books and desire to read them. Some of the ones which didn’t have notes and which were outside my usual genres made me wonder why I was reading them, and a note might have helped! 

The final pile of twelve unwrapped books, stacked on my shelves (not in order).

In the end, I read eleven of the twelve books in full. The other one is a volume of poetry, which I dipped into and appreciated, but didn’t feel like reading cover to cover. It was good to be encouraged to try things I wouldn’t usually pick up – including at least one famous author everyone likes but I normally avoid. I made a special shelf tag for them on Goodreads, so I can easily go back and see the whole collection (although at the moment I also have them in a physical pile, that will probably be broken up next time I need to sell/donate/pass on books to make more shelf space). If you’re thinking of doing something similar, as long as your intended recipient is a regular reader, I say go for it. If you’re less confident about choosing, a similar gift where the recipient has more choice is the Persephone Books subscription – someone else sent that as a wedding gift the previous year, and I thoroughly enjoyed that too!

Free book: I Heart SapphFic Favorite Scenes from Favorite Authors Anthology

Download this free anthology and sample the scenes that make these authors the proudest. What a fantastic way to find your next sapphic read!

With almost two hundred extracts from a wide range of sapphic genres, this anthology will help you explore the whole world of sapphic stories. It includes several historical romances – my prehistoric book, Between Boat & Shore, is one of them – and fantasy, sci-fi, and all sorts of other genres as well. You can download it in several different ebook formats here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/ck3pqiiavx

Reading in February

I’m not sure I intend this blog to focus on my reading – but I do intend to write a post every month, and at the moment writing about what I’ve been reading seems both moderately interesting and reasonably safe, in that a lot of other things affecting my life at the moment aren’t really mine to talk about. (One of them, the announcement about the Woodbrooke Centre, was made public after I wrote the first draft of this post. I also managed to finish writing it just in time for World Book Day.)

Last month I wrote about my challenge for the year, and in February I did manage to read books in all six categories. For a change, though, I’m going to write about them by genre rather than in those categories specifically.

I read several fantasy books this month. It reminded me that at one time I was mainly a fantasy reader, with a little bit of sci-fi thrown in, and although I now read very widely I still enjoy a good fantasy story. Four in this genre were:

1. Aiden Thomas The Sunbearer Trials, which has teenage characters in a deadly competition – but many of them also have superpowers in a Mexican-inspired fantasy world setting. I wasn’t a Hunger Games fan and the competition element didn’t really appeal to me, but I enjoyed the character development and world building. 
2.  Samantha Shannon The Priory of the Orange Tree, which has a blurb on the back describing it as a feminist Lord of the Rings. I was doubtful but actually that’s not a terrible description – it does have a focus on women, including women who fall in love with each other, who ride dragons and wield magic swords and generally do the adventure part of a swords and sorcery story as well as the washing up.
3.  Ann Leckie The Raven Tower, a delightfully weird book, the plot of which I can hardly describe without giving away spoilers. I will say that if you’re looking for books which explore animism through a fantasy lens, and you’ve already read Pratchett’s Small Gods, this might be of interest.
4.  Ahmed Saadawi Frankenstein in Baghdad (trans. Jonathan Wright), which could also be filed under horror or satire – but with a strong magical realism element which also qualifies it, in my opinion, for this category. A compelling reflection on the gruesome results of war and the ethical imperatives it creates, especially those which trap people in a cycle of violence. 

Other reading was more scattered. I am almost at the end of a year of blind dates with books – for my wedding anniversary in April last year, my friend Marion gave me twelve books wrapped in plain paper and labelled one per month. I still have one to open for March. February’s book was Eagle Day by Robert Muchamore; set in the second world war and I think aimed at teenage boys, it was an interesting read for me. It skirts the edge of exploring moral complexity but generally comes down on the side of a simple British = good German = bad narrative which sometimes frustrates me. It provides footnotes to explain technical terms, like what a U-Boat is, which would be taken for granted in a book aimed at an older audience. The central characters are all aged eleven to fifteen, and the notice on the back, “Not suitable for younger readers” seems to be as much about making it okay for teenagers to read as actually warning off under-tens!

I read three other novels this month. One was also set during the second world war, although J. E. Leak’s In the Shadow of the Past is very different to Eagle Day – although they both feature spies, In the Shadow of the Past is a historical romance with adventure elements, rather than an adventure story, and the main characters are two women who are attracted to each other and must decide how to act on that or not. I enjoyed the angst as the multiple layers of overlapping difficulty developed in the plot, and there’s a twist at the end which promises more fun to come in the next book in the series.

Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed also features a woman who loves woman, although she also has a fairly long relationship with a man and refuses to label her sexuality. The focus on the story is on intergenerational developments, especially parent-child relationships, with all the complexities created by international movement, changing approaches to religion, multiple languages, and different attitudes to sexuality. For me the exploration of Islam in America and the main character’s changing relationship to the queer community were especially interesting.

The final novel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, was a more challenging read, with several different time periods interwoven and some emotionally difficult content as Kenyan characters are treated brutally – or just weirdly – by the British. There is also a good deal of moral complexity, addressing similar issues to Frankenstein in Baghdad about ethically sound responses in a time of war, although by a very different and much more realist route which does not allow the reader any ironic distance. 

Besides these, I read five nonfiction books. My review of Finding Right Relations: Quakers, Native Americans, and Settler Colonialism will appear in the summer issue of Quaker Studies, so I won’t go into detail here – but if you are interested in any of three items listed in the subtitle it’s probably worth a read, and if you’re interested in two or more I would definitely recommend it as an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about those interactions. On a different but also brief note, William King Baker’s early twentieth century dramatisation of the lives of George and Margaret Fox doesn’t really need discussing – it was interesting to read as an example of how people have tried to make history accessible, but it doesn’t succeed in that aim for modern audiences. Similarly, Neolithic Houses in North-West Europe and Beyond was a useful read as part of my ongoing research on Neolithic lives in Britain, but it’s both academic and probably somewhat dated (a lot of excavation has happened since it was published in 1996) so I won’t be recommending it as such.

Seldon Smith’s Pendle Hill Pamphlet An Atheist’s Guide to Quaker Process, however, is well worth discussing and already sparked some interesting conversations on Facebook. Smith’s articulation of a nontheist approach to Quaker decision making will not appeal to everyone – for example, the theism it does not have is noticeably Christian in some ways, and some of the details of the discipline are not shared by all Yearly Meetings – but is a useful attempt at answering a very frequently asked question about nontheist participation in Quaker communities. Smith himself is a nontheist and gives a clear account of his understanding, based on extensive experience of Quaker decision-making, which is a very valuable perspective to hear. I consider this a considerable step forward on what I had before, which was some philosophically coherent guesses about possible answers based on things nontheist Quakers had said in other contexts, and hope that it will prompt further work on explaining Quaker processes in multiple different ways.

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is a lively and accessible exploration of the point at which all time management approaches will fail – the fact that we have limited time alive and cannot possibly do everything. It was good to see written down some things I’ve long felt, including that it’s okay to choose some areas of life to be bad at (he suggests lawn care as an example; I long ago selected mental arithmetic), and that it’s better to focus on experiencing the moment than cramming in every activity possible.

What have you been reading recently, Friends? Do you use Goodreads or another site to help you keep track?