Reading – Nastasya Parker

The Deal-Breaker

This Week’s Bit of String: An empowering walk to work

After a not-entirely-fun Bank Holiday weekend, I set off to work Tuesday morning with a mix of Mika, sea shanties, and Noah Kahan playing on my earbuds.

Exams start in less than a week, equating to hours of sitting next to my SEN student while she attempts to answer papers designed for only half the population to pass. In a month, my parents will move out of their home after 37 years, a huge task which I can’t help with from overseas, but in my house I’m clearing out my son’s things and some of my own. During the long weekend, I spent hours going through school notebooks, birthday cards, crafts, story drafts, sheet music, and a few tiny little outfits and stuffed toys. I feel wrung-out.

I’m also doing lots of agent research, and the book I started over the weekend, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, was not proving enjoyable. I’ve heard her name a lot, and literary agents mention her.

But this book is full of dense, page-long paragraphs cataloging every thought the characters have, and the minute actions of their daily routines. Also the characters are of the relatively privileged, but miserable ilk.

While I walked to work that morning, I thought: What if I just didn’t read the remaining 300 pages of Intermezzo?

And I knew it was the right choice because beyond relief, I felt liberated (which is hopefully how I will also feel, instead of mournful, when boxes of Bear’s old things go to the charity shops). I felt MIGHTY.

There’s a lot I can’t control. But I AM a loving mother who’s just recycled half her precious child’s finger paintings and 95% of their schoolwork. I frequently scythe through passages of my short stories and chapters of novels to make them more readable. I am capable of ruthlessness and this was an opportune, low-risk situation in which to wield it.

A Rare Relinquishment

I’ve only left one unfinished book in recent years, and that was Murikami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles. It had one of those male narrators who thinks everything is about sex and all girls want to sleep with him. Not a lot seemed to be happening, and I decided to use my time better.

*Is this the sort of display that will impress an agent?*

During my education, I read plenty of classics and plenty of books about unfortunate souls. From Hawthorne’s the Scarlet Letter and Bronte’s Jane Eyre, to James Joyce’s Dubliners and Kafka’s entire oeuvre, I put in the time and have relished the majority of those works.

But here I am, looking through agents’ requirements and all the preachy advice. At every step, writers are told to “Show, don’t tell” and to cut everything not indispensable to the plot. Where then does Ms. Rooney come off narrating (through her prematurely midlife-crisisy characters) every single thought in these interminable paragraphs with no differentiation for dialogue?

Nope, I was done. A couple weeks ago, I read a fun “romantic” genre novel to enjoy myself, and there are plenty of literary books I can enjoy too. If they, you know, have a plot heading somewhere at a decent pace.

Part of the Job

My target is to read 3 books this month, and I still can fit them in. After my fateful decision on my walk to work, and then the manic workday, I visited the town library and checked out an Anne Tyler novel. I’ve loved what I read of her before. She’s brilliant at “showing.” She’ll describe a character’s physical appearance in a pithy way that reveals their life philosophy as well. Yes, sometimes in her books she’ll walk you through each step of a protagonist’s actions as they execute a task, but she’ll do it in a revealing way. There’s a Raymond Carver-esque quality to it.

It’s also useful for me to read another Anne Tyler novel because I have been citing her family sagas as a comparison title to The Gospel of Eve. So, it’s research as well.

*The great bit of the long weekend: we celebrated our 22nd anniversary with an evening walk to a local garden centre to eat pasties, drink ciders, and listen to live music.*

There’s no doubt that reading is an important part of a writer’s work. It’s good for everyone to read a range of stories, but at more taxing stages in our lives/ creative endeavours, it’s best perhaps if reading doesn’t feel like a chore.

As fatigue accumulates and I feel often on the verge of tears, I’m working on fewer writing projects at a time to focus on querying, and I’m prioritising exercise and fresh air. I will take a week off from the clearing-out project too because there’s only so much ruthlessness I can stand.

Maybe if I’d picked up Rooney’s book at another time–perhaps when my child was still right here, running around me and telling me stuff–then I wouldn’t have minded it so much, and would have persevered. For now, Intermezzo has joined the ranks of the many books I’ll be donating to the charity shops.

What are your deal-breakers with a book? How far do you think we should push ourselves in our reading?

Labels: Friend or Foe?

This Week’s Bit of String: A heart-wrenching question

In a back corner of the school library, I’ve begun daily reading sessions with one of our Year 10 SEN boys. There are multiple clues in the book he’s reading that the narrator has autism. I asked him what he noticed about that, and he responded by asking what autism means.

*Paths are important, but sometimes it’s nice to stray from them…*

Then he asked, “Does that disability help them get good grades?”

He is very concerned with criteria of success. He considers career paths based on how much money they might provide. And he assesses circumstances by how they might affect one’s grades and prospects.

He worried, “Do I have a disability? Or am I just stupid?”

It’s heartbreaking to see students who, despite various strengths, feel so defined by their struggles that they long for the justification a diagnosis provides.

Judging a Book by Its Genre

Labels are useful because they give our brains an easy path to follow. We think, “Ah, something is this, therefore I know what to do with it.”

If a student has learning difficulties, we might provide literacy and numeracy support. If someone is neurodivergent, we’ll ensure they have spaces available to re-regulate when routine is disrupted.

Book publishers and, one assumes, readers alike appreciate genre labels because they give us an inkling what to expect. Is the read going to be gritty or cosy? Genres can help with that.

Labels can be limiting too, though. That happens for students with disabilities and in a more minor way, can happen with books. We tell ourselves we’d never dream of reading something from that genre.

*I loved this book. Don’t knock it unless you’ve tried it.*

Since I’m in a couple of critique groups, I send work to different writers every month or two. I read all sorts of pieces that come to me, and I comb through each with a view toward maximising potential, and provide detailed feedback. But every now and then, I receive a comment on my work saying, “I don’t usually read this genre, so I can’t comment.”

This happens to the opening of my novel retelling the Creation myth from Eve’s point of view. I think of it as Commercial Fiction, a sort of catch-all. Madeline Miller’s Circe was a massive hit after all, Disney has been re-filming the Percy Jackson series, Margaret Atwood and AS Byatt and Stephen Fry have all retold myths with great success.

But maybe some people dismiss it immediately as fantasy, or women’s fiction. I should work up my courage and ask the next person, “What genre do you think it is, exactly?”

“What Do I Have?”

Somewhat like my student anxiously asking, “What do I have?” while I showed him his EHCP to explain that he’s not, in fact, stupid, I do rather wish someone could just tell me what genre my book is instead of me trying to work it out. When querying agents, there’s no room for a mistake; they won’t give you a second chance.

But it is a bit rubbish, the genre system. Lots of books combine elements. Last week, I participated in the Women Writers Network discussion on women writers who blend genres, while this week, I’ve interviewed Lindz McLeod. She’s an incredibly hard-working writer covering speculative fiction, short stories tinged with horror, and also dabbling in retelling versions of Jane Austen. Truly, her imagination seems limitless and her appeal should be, too.

Stephen King has said that every book is a mystery. I agree with that. And even books without romance have relationships.

*Now I want to visit all the crumbling stately homes and eat all the cheesecakes.*

After my busy Easter break with the emotional roller coaster of traveling to the US and back, I returned to work. During the first couple weeks, I had a few writing commitments including the interview, while at my day job we gear up toward GCSE exams. I needed a fun and “easy” read so I picked a Milly Johnson book out of my TBR shelf. Her books are classed as Romantic Fiction so I hadn’t gone out of my way to read one before.

The Perfectly Imperfect Woman was the perfect read for me that week. A rollicking pace; clever, piquant descriptions; a well-rounded, super-relatable protagonist more on a journey to come to terms with a torturous past than to find romance. Oh, and there was cheesecake, and great big mysterious manor houses. There were multitudes contained within the genre label.

The idea of being “perfectly imperfect” is resonant to many of us, I suspect, and it’s the kind of attitude I want to foster in students. While understanding there will always be struggles, to work out the purposes worth struggling for, and the right support.

Do you have any theories or assumptions about genre fiction? What’s a book that impressed you from a genre you don’t usually read?

2025 Reading Round-Up

With minimal ado, here are my favourite books out of all I read this year. These are truly the 10 best of my best, because there were a few more which I rated with the full 5 stars.

What were your favourite reads this year? Have you read any of these books yet? I know I’m a bit late to the party on some, and I’d love to hear what you thought if you read some of these before.

The Women by Kristin Hannah

An epic tale of an Army nurse in the Vietnam War. She also has to cope with re-entering civilian life, particularly challenging with her upper-class family. They serve as a contrast to the strong, unconditional friendships she formed with other Army nurses. Truly an eye-opening read.

“Time and friendship had done exactly as promised: pain and grief had grown soft and malleable in her hands, almost pliable.”

The Lives of the Dead by Fiona McKay

I joined a book group specifically reading novellas-in-flash. It’s been exciting to explore, and I found this one particularly powerful. Each very short chapter is a mini-story, alternating between episodes in a new wife/ mum’s suffocating life, and stunningly retold fairy tales.

“It’s the kindness that does her in, that releases her long-held tears, that leaves her to walk back, red-eyed, along the line of women when she’s done; kindness, the essential vitamin missing from her supplements, the one she didn’t know she was lacking.”

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

I love ensemble pieces, where a quirky range of characters are thrown together. In this case, it’s at an apartment viewing which then goes wrong due to a desperate, bungled burglary. It’s funny and warm, the sort of thing to help survive a Scandinavian-level winter.

“Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken.”

Love lay down beside me and we wept by Helen Murray Taylor

I know Helen from the Women Writers Network, so I have been looking forward to her mental health memoir for years. She focuses on when she was sectioned in Glasgow following a breakdown. Helen reveals the contradictions we might hold in our minds at our lowest point and still she invites you in with humour.

“Trying to describe love was like trying to stroke Schrodinger’s cat.”

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane

I love Lehane’s books, especially his snappy dialogue. This novel is set in Boston just after WWI and deals with racism, poverty, immigration, labour rights, and even the tragedy of the Boston Molasses flood. It made me appreciate that the USA has come through incredibly tense times before, and we may yet make it.

“Time and again what was renounced as treasonous was merely a man standing before a crowd and demanding he be treated as a man.”

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Short and searingly beautiful, this Booker Prize winner is a wondrous read. It takes us through one day in the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station, describing the many juxtapositions of what they see below on their various orbiting paths, and lyrically weaves in the astronauts’ backgrounds and aspirations.

“He has an idea that if you could get far enough away from the earth you’d be able to understand it—to see it with your own eyes as an object, a small blue dot, a cosmic and mysterious thing. Not to understand its mystery, but to understand it is mysterious. To see it as a mathematical swarm. To see the solidity fall away from it.”

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

A great book about totalitarianism and war, with breathtaking depth of character. Both protagonists were so incredibly rich in background and passion for their interests, Marie-Laure with her Verne books and her understanding of how to get around without her sight, Werner and his machines and radios.

“She feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides…She hears the bones of dead whales stir the leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun.”

Home Bird by Fran Hill

*A reading verandah! Found on a* *walk in small town New Hampshire.*

If you’ve read Fran’s Substack–and you really should–you’ll know she excels at writing humour. But I love her detail selection even more. Her plots advance quickly through the specifics her narrator includes, bringing out the nuances of relationships and recreating the period of her novels.

“She knocked on my door, saying, ‘There’s Bakewell tart going spare,’ but I said, ‘It’s not the only one,’ and she left me alone.”

Still Life by Sarah Winman

A true feast of a book, celebrating art and travel and food but most of all friendship, the abiding kind that’s more like true love. After World War II, an unlikely band of Londoners, united only by happening to drink at the same pub, move to Florence and discover worlds both old and new.

“‘We’re embarking on a world of new language and new systems. A world of stares and misunderstandings and humiliations and we’ll feel every single one of them, boy. But we mustn’t let our inability to know what’s what diminish us. Because it’ll try. We have to remain curious and open.’”

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This book is about the creative process, relationships, grief, negotiating differences in ethnicity and sexuality… oh, and videogames. I loved it so much. The section about the NPC (non-playable character) is the most gorgeous and heartbreaking that I have ever read.

“Memory, you realised long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

Halfway to Ninety

This Week’s Bit of String: Making it to Europe

When Operation Desert Storm began in early 1991, my aunt, a nurse, renewed her passport. If necessary, she’d be sent to military hospitals in Germany to assist wounded soldiers.

I was ten years old, and jealous. Forget the desert, the storm, the war. Germany made me think of Alps and castles and history. I wanted in on the adventure.

I remember moaning at the kitchen table, “I’ll be an old maid by the time I ever reach Europe!”

In fact, I’ve lived almost half my life on this side of the Atlantic. I first visited the continent when I was 19, and I may have felt terminally single when I arrived, prematurely an old maid, but I returned to the USA [unwittingly] pregnant. Eventually, marriage anchored me here in the UK.

Life can certainly twist. I decorated for Christmas last week, hanging the stocking my mother embroidered for me, and the one she made for my husband. My Baby’s First Christmas 1980 ornaments from when I was 11 days old are on our Argos-ordered tree, and I bet my mom didn’t imagine they would travel this far.

I turn 45 this weekend, and while it would be nice to have a few more publications to my name, I’m quite content. I’ve had the wonderful excitement of being a parent, plus occasional travel, and my job certainly isn’t dull.

I like the sound of 45. It makes me think of a speed limit that’s high for a town centre or residential street, but just about too cautious for the highway. That suits me. I’ll be celebrating with an Italian meal in a Cotswold town, and maybe carol-singing at the local pub after. If it’s not pouring rain, I’ll have a long hike to a nearby town and write there for a couple hours the day before.

Paragraphs After Paragraphs

At work the other day, the bottom set Year 10s were working on narrative and descriptive writing. It’s for the 40-mark Language GCSE question, so the teacher insisted they write at least 5 paragraphs. That sounds impossible to them.

The scruffy little rugby player banished to the back corner learned that I write stories. He asked, “Were they long, what you wrote?”

Over the whole of my life I’ve probably written at least 5000 pages of story drafts by now. Counting my daily scribbles, it might be 10,000 (admittedly not all A4 sized).

We had this conversation as I encouraged young Mr. Rugby based on what he’d already written. He’d done three short paragraphs, and I’d never seen him so focused. It was hard work for him, but something must have gelled. In Maths and Science, he’s so distracted by other students’ antics that he barely does any work at all.

I’d been urging him to view concentration as a muscle that needs building. “It’s like how you do drills with your rugby team, right? Let’s see if you can go thirty seconds without looking away from your work. Then a minute.”

I’m not sure this has caught on yet. But every now and then, it’s worth testing my own focus “muscles” as well. I spend the majority of my time trying to cross multiple items off a to-do list at once. With the weather worsening and the holidays approaching, it’s extra busy in some ways but it also feels like an ideal time to slow down.

Adjusting Speed

I always re-watch the extended version of Lord of the Rings as the nights draw in. I can’t imagine watching the more concise version; I want to be immersed in the epic worldbuilding and character development. But I also have the decorations to put up, shopping to do, treats to bake, on top of the usual commitments, so for example last year, I was hanging ornaments on the tree while Return of the King was on, and I had to pause with angels dangling from my fingers to make sure I took in the wondrous lighting of the beacons.

*A cosy corner near the couch where I mostly do my writing* *(and reading)*

This year, somehow I managed to be still for long portions of the films. I wasn’t even scribbling or answering messages on my phone or using the Mahjongg app. I’d lit candles, my own mini-beacons, and I just curled up to watch the story unfold.

It felt luxurious. I did the same, briefly, when I put Frozen on the following weekend. What a treat to train undivided attention on the opening scenes: the view through the ice, the sunrise and aurora colours. I miss the wintry terrain of home sometimes, and I marvel at how this Disney animation captured the slightly porous, ridged contour of the ice chunks.

I’m also treating myself to sink into a reread of Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, which I read just a year ago. But I craved the sumptuous layers of stories and magic, and wanted to see what I can pick up from a second read.

I still have big plans of course, for Christmas and for the next year. Hikes and excursions… In 2026 we’ll be taking a little trip to France for a Jazz Festival, and I’ll visit my family. Even when I feel a bit worn out, there’s some part of me aching to keep exploring, to keep making the most of each day. I’m just reminding that intrepid young part of me that slowing down and enjoying a moment is pretty worthwhile, too.

How might you take things a bit slowly over the holiday?

Carried Along

This Week’s Bit of String: A wide range of accounts

Only one exam left. I’m happy for our students that they won’t have to sit through them anymore, but disappointed that it’s the only accepted measure for how they’ve done in secondary school.

My role in exams this year, in addition to reading and scribing for a 16-year-old with special needs, is also to act as language modifier for him. This is a rarely-granted access arrangement, for those with hearing and/ or processing disabilities, as well as reading difficulties.

It means I can assist with clarifying a question, but of course it’s quite restricted. I can’t define or ‘modify’ any subject-specific terminology, and it’s best to leave the engine of the question, command words, untouched (explain, analyse, evaluate, the whole Bloom’s Taxonomy lot). I can help with “carrier language,” the words that form the framework of the question.

Here’s an example. In the first History paper, one of the questions was: “Give an account of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

The student asked me what “account” meant. “Like Instagram or Facebook?”

I rephrased it as “Tell the story of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

This gave him a clearer idea. While the concession of having a language modifier is rare, I wonder how many students unshakably associate the word account with social media, just as an example. For students who are neurodiverse, a word they’re unsure about can be very hard to see past.

Staying Flexible

Adults have this issue as well. There’s a new writer to the writing feedback group I’m in, and both times I’ve sent her my writing, she comments negatively because she’s made an assumption early on and then the story doesn’t comply with it. In a short story where the protagonist was looking after her grandmother, the reader decided that Nan was the name of one of the protagonist’s children, criticised me for mentioning a “grandmother” because that was adding too many characters, and continued to complain that the character didn’t interact with Nan in a manner suitable for a young child.

Revising our assumptions as we go along is a vital skill. Certainly, it’s more innate to some than others. I try to reserve judgment as I’m reading, and when something doesn’t make sense I go back and work out what I may have misinterpreted. I don’t often read book blurbs anymore because they sometimes distort the significance of plot aspects and lead you to expect something different.

This comes from when I read Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You. The back of the book talked about how the heroine “knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home,” and said “knowing what’s coming keeps her sane.” For perhaps my own personal reasons, I concluded the protagonist was neurodivergent, maybe on the autism spectrum. I was baffled and a bit annoyed when she wasn’t.

My frustration was my own fault and based on my assumptions, so I decided not to read book blurbs anymore. I want to get swept up when I read, not anchored down by my potentially outmoded notions. When we read fiction or poetry, all language is carrier language. It’s all taking us somewhere.

Letting Characters Carry

During the last couple of weeks, I started writing my new novel. It feels as if, in a way, most of the language in the first draft is carrier language. That’s what I’m reminding myself anyway. It’s clunky because mainly, I’m seeing how the characters develop the plot. When I go back and edit, I can polish the voice and streamline the form. Many revisions from now it will travel, it will fly, rather than get shoved along.

*I love these roots at an old canal mill site, but for now I can’t get too attached.*

I’ve done a lot of planning and character research, and I feel I’ve honed my craft in terms of focusing the story structure and understanding the direction, kicking off with inciting incidents and such. But I won’t get super attached to anything just yet. I scribbled many notes on my characters’ backgrounds, considering their needs versus their wants, so I feel I know about them, but I can’t presume I know them deeply. I must remain open to what they do, because they could alter my planned plot.

A few pages in, I’m trying to stop thinking about how to rewrite with improved style. It doesn’t matter yet. My characters are more important. This absolves me for now from having to write beautifully or cleverly, which is great since I’m tired and not ready for that yet.

Stories carried by characters engage me more than stories dragged through certain plot points, and I think that’s true for many readers. However, we don’t want the plot to trudge as characters wield the burden of their thoughts too heavily. Later, I’ll correct the balance.

How do you stay flexible? What carries you when you start a project?

A Flaw-Finding Mission

This Week’s Bit of String: A 30-year-old reading list

Last week when I couldn’t sleep, I invented a new game: Trying to remember which books we studied each year of high school, back in the mid-1990s. This joins other such spectacular entertainment forms as How Many Second Grade Classmates Can I Remember? and Recall the Layout of All the Holiday Cottages I Used to Clean for a Living.

One of my British secondary school system gripes is the paltry amount of books read for English. Two whole years studying nothing but Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, A Christmas Carol, and 15 war poems is such a drag.

On the other hand, we read quite a few books in our slightly deprived rural American high school. In 9th grade alone, we read Romeo and Juliet, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, and I think some form of The Odyssey. We also read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which I didn’t like much, and Cormier’s The Chocolate War, which I detested. It seemed clear he’d written it, with masturbation references and stupid boy behaviour, to impress his teenage son. Not my demographic.

*“Everyday Use” is about historic quilts–whether to display them, or use them. These quilts are part of the annual show at Billings Farm, Vermont.*

In 10th grade, we read Macbeth, Lord of the Flies (sound familiar?), Old Man and the Sea, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I was not a fan of the latter. We also read a volume of memoir essays and short stories, the first things I loved reading in high school. My favourite was an Alice Walker story, “Everyday Use.”

If we hadn’t been required to read such a broad selection, I might not have connected with any of it. I’m glad I didn’t lose interest, because the curriculum had terrific offerings in our junior and senior years.

I don’t remember what I was reading for fun during the first two years of high school, or if I bothered. I had plenty of homework, and my own made-up story-world I constantly nursed. Maybe that was why I resented certain assigned books. I preferred my own stories, woven around my experiences.

So at 3 in the morning a few days ago, I realised: my adolescent self was a narcissistic reader.

Inconvenient Truths

I see it in a couple of my students. Simon Armitage’s war poem “Remains” is great for spotting narcissistic readers. It’s written clearly in the vernacular, sometimes using collective pronouns which almost make you feel complicit. Most of the chatty girls and fidgeting, shouting-out boys stop and fall under the spell.

But one boy from our Trio of Fortitude has to always be the victimliest victim who ever victimmed, so he slouches through the succinct tale of war, PTSD, and substance abuse. This boy can’t pick up a pen because he has a cut on his finger, or his stomach hurts. He is cross that no one has helped him during class with his homework yet, and he might get a detention because obviously he’s not going to do it in his own time.

Now, as a teen I generally behaved myself in class and did the work, mostly on time. Ish. But I wonder if I had it in for Maya Angelou because at the age of 14 I, too, fancied myself the victimliest victim.

For at least a couple years of my adolescence (I think I got better), I was limited in my ability or desire to truly support other people. I became painfully aware of this years ago. I hadn’t realised that maybe this self-centeredness affected my reading. I just kept assuming the books weren’t very good.

Ready or Not

I’m a big advocate of reading for fun. So I won’t begrudge adolescent me for being self-involved 3 decades ago. If we’re honest with ourselves, we all have phases even as adults when we don’t have the strength to read certain things. It’s useful to remember that’s not the books’ fault.

Against the backdrop of negative news in my native country, I like to read books of plucky individuals banding together. I probably won’t attempt rereading Maya Angelou’s memoir of tribulation at the moment, but I do know now that I actually like some of her poems quite a lot.

*These caged birds were painted on a Glasgow wall, 2019.*

While there are always plenty of reading options to suit any mood and even, I daresay, any impending apocalypse, what to write can be a conundrum. I had this issue during the pandemic as well. When the world is suffering severe pangs, and we don’t know what it will give birth to, how do I bring forth a new big project? If I plot and start a novel referencing the current situation, that’s going to change by the day. If I start penning a contemporary novel without referencing current circumstances, is that callous? Does anyone even want to read more about the present chaos, after exhausting ourselves with the news?

Considering all this, I’m setting my next project in a place I love, and I’ve decided to set it during the first Trump election and administration, 2016-2017. We still had the “Not My President” fig leaf that he’d lost the popular vote, and we thought some people just didn’t realise how greedy and racist and misogynistic and authoritarian he was. This parallels the journey of my characters, as they wrestle with learning that maybe they’re not as kind and upright as they have tried to present themselves.

Which brings me back to my discovery about myself. Recognising our own flaws opens us to appreciating more outside ourselves, and I feel as if starting with my characters’ flaws makes me a little less protective of them, a little more open to the courses their journey can take. They say we should never judge a book by its cover. We shouldn’t judge by our adolescent opinions, either.

Have you encountered any books you ended up really changing your mind about?

2024 Reading Round-Up

I had some ups and downs in my reading year. My first Didn’t-Finish in a few years (because there wasn’t enough STORY, dammit!) and a couple stretches of 2-4 weeks with no time whatsoever to read. But I always balance those out with a voracious spell after. It feels so good when reading time opens up again, like diving into a cool lake after overheating. Here are my favourites among all I read. I’d love to hear what you think!

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Direct and unobfuscating, McCullers introduces us to various misfits about town, starting with the iconic opening line about the “two mutes, [who were] always together.” The story represents the voiceless in many ways, and emphasises the need to be heard.

“The words which are surely the root of all human grief… ‘I have done those things which I ought not to have done, and left undone those things which I ought to have done. So this cannot truly be the end.’”

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

*Wintry Moomins at Octavia’s Bookshop, Cirencester*

Working at a school, I’m somewhat bombarded with young people’s moods and stories, so I don’t go for too many books written in teen voice. I’m so glad I read this one, though. Lauren, the young narrator of this novel, is incredibly driven, and practical even while being compassionate. I wrote about her more in an earlier blog post because she became a favourite character of mine, and Butler’s take on empathy is an exciting one.

“Show me a more pervasive power than change.”

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

A glimpse into someone forgotten by history, this resonated with me partly because of my Eve novel. It delves deeply into the Duchess of Ferrara’s story, whom Browning alluded to in his poem ‘My Last Duchess.’ We see the plight of women in Renaissance Italy, and also explore a love of art that sets someone apart from the crowd.

“She is absorbed in her work; she is her work; it gives her more satisfaction than anything else she has ever known; it intuits the need, the vacancy within her, and fills it.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

I feel as if I’m the last to read this, but in case anyone else has yet to discover this novel: It’s excellent. There was tragedy in it and unfairness that I didn’t expect. I should have though, as the book is about an exceptionally intelligent woman trying to pursue a scientific career in the mid-20th century. Ultimately, the opposition she faces makes her later alliances and triumphs that much more thrilling.

“Their odd, tell-all friendship was the kind that only arises when a wronged person meets someone who’s been similarly wronged and discovers that while it may be the only thing they share, it is more than enough.”

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

It’s got an exciting scifi premise: the world is in danger, so a delegation must be sent to space in search of a fix. Once there, the lone surviving voyager meets someone from another planet, as different as can be. They develop communication with each other, and the results are breathtaking. I’m eager to see the film once it’s out.

“Sometimes, the stuff we all hate ends up being the only way to do things.”

*An artsy trip to the real Oxford, this past summer*

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Another book about art… This became a bit of a theme for me, and I really enjoyed it especially as I attended a couple of art exhibits at the time. Art unlocks emotion, and feeds creativity for our own art of writing. This book is a David Copperfield-style journey through a boy’s misfortunes, uncanny encounters, and striking characters, propelled all the while by a deep, tragedy-induced connection to a single painting.

“Immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved.”

Midlife Without a Map by Liz Champion

This book made me laugh the most this year. In addition to being funny, Liz (who also has a brilliant Substack) is incredibly relatable. I love how she doesn’t hold back disclosing her highs and lows. She’ll get swept up in something but be completely honest if it doesn’t work out, and that’s rare and refreshing both online and in literature.

“But now I’m halfway up the mountain, facing hairpin bends and vertical drops with a driver who missed his Formula One calling, I’m wondering if I was ever fit and fearless. Maybe a book by the pool would have been adventurous enough.”

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

A hilarious and heartfelt coming of age story, but also a great look at art and how we respond to it. The main character, Johanna, wants to save her family from poverty, so she becomes a music critic as a teen–a scathing one. Could passionate fandom make her as much money as trashing every band she sees?

“‘I feel like I can see the operating system of the world–and it is unrequited love. That is why everyone’s doing everything. Every book, opera house, moon shot and manifesto is here because someone, somewhere, lit up silently when someone else came into the room, and then quietly burned when they weren’t noticed.’”

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Language and revolution entwine in this speculative novel. In an alternative Oxford, colonial powers rule through silver. Once silver bars are engraved with pairs of translated words, magic imbues them, resulting from the disparity in meaning. The plot follows young trainees in this art of translation, and as readers we join them in their enchantment, and their horror as they recognise the injustice at the heart of the system.

“That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

This novel is about books, about books of lots of stories, and the stories are alive but they must be protected…It’s a stunning work to read, as all the little pieces fit together, reminding us that no story really stands alone. I found it incredibly lovely to sink into the universe of this book.

“We are all stardust and stories.”

My Life in Libraries

This Week’s Bit of String: 14 million books

We finished a half-term weekend in London with the realisation of a dream for me, walking up from Lambeth to Camden so I could visit the British Library. I browsed their Treasures collection, a variety of artefacts displayed to the public with no admission price.

There’s one of the original Magna Carta sheepskin documents, a Gutenberg Bible, and a couple of the earliest Greek translations. Each of Shakespeare’s folios, a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’ve curated manuscripts of writers ranging from George Eliot to Oscar Wilde to Andrea Levy to Siegfried Sassoon, and musical notations from Mozart and from the Beatles, plus gorgeous ancient texts from every religion. Fantastic examples of moveable type in Asia (a century or two before Europe managed it), and 2000-year-old homework of an Egyptian student.

The library also has a philatelic collection, vertical tabs so you can pull a sheet out with examples of money or stamps from all around the world. There are the reading rooms, which I’m sure I can find an excuse to utilise one day, and on every, open storey, there are seats all along the walls and overlooks. Each one was occupied by someone studying or working, mainly young people.

There’s a central, multi-storey cube just beyond the foyer. It’s massive, and full of the old, vellum and leather-bound volumes that were King George III’s collection. We’re talking at least 5 floors of this, 4 walls facing out, each many metres long. I wonder if a librarian there knows every book in that collection and where they’re located. I wonder if I could fill my brain with something like that instead of obsessing over how the election will go.

Library History

Yup, I’m still stressed about the state of the world! However, I’m on half-term break so at least I’m not stressing about work and the state of our students. I am carrying on in the vein of last week’s post, by writing about something quite happy. Books!

As I looked at the enormous hoard of books the ‘mad’ King George had amassed, I was intrigued by his motivations. Did he enjoy actually reading the books? Were they merely a status symbol? I felt, for once, a bit smug about my native country because I remembered hearing that Benjamin Franklin started one of the first American libraries and I thought, How perfect that a Revolutionary would counter the tyrant King’s greed by sharing books.

Only, wouldn’t you know it, Franklin’s library wasn’t free. It was a subscription library in Philadelphia, so you had to pay dues to check out books. On the other hand, Britain established its first free public library in Manchester in 1653, thanks to a bequest from a textile merchant, Humphrey Chetham. He even requested that librarians overseeing the collection “require nothing of any man that cometh into the library.”

Isn’t that a lovely thought? Welcome to the library. Nothing’s required of you here.

Libraries I’ve Known

Libraries are so much more than book lenders. They often serve as community centres. Our little library in Lyme, New Hampshire was across from the school, and would welcome us for an autumn celebration every year, serving us donuts and cider as we listened to stories like The Enormous Crocodile, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or The Funny Little Woman who followed her lost dumpling into the underworld to get it back.

*Another phenomenal library I ticked off my bucket list previously: Trinity Library in Dublin*

By the time we moved away when I was 8 years old, I had a boyfriend and we’d kiss hidden by bookshelves from the rest of our class. I also had my favourite little chapter books from the library. One was about a puritan settlement in early America, including a dispute over a pewter spoon resulting in public punishment. Another had a young heroine, Elizabeth, uncover and foil a plot to blow up President Lincoln’s inaugural train. I don’t know the books’ titles, their authors, how old they were, or how I chose them. Perhaps I just bumbled into meeting them, as I did with my then-boyfriend.

The great thing about libraries is they allow you to be reckless. You can choose whatever you want—for free. If you don’t like it, just put it back, no charge. When I was first settling in the UK, I was so lonely I went to the fiction shelves in our orange-carpeted library and worked my way alphabetically, grabbing almost anything. One book had, as its climax, a heroine confronted by two marriage proposals from great guys and the stress of this caused her to fall into a deep sleep for days and wake up with clarity. Why couldn’t that happen to me? I thought.

The library in my parents’ town, where my mom worked when I was a teen, has a theatre hall/ voting place upstairs and a mysterious cabinet of porcelain dolls at the back. While waiting for Mom to finish shifts, I entertained myself reading through weekly news magazines in the 1990s and learned quite a lot about world events. I also spent many of my high school lunch periods in the school library. Compared to the lunchroom with my peers, I truly felt less was required of me there.

What libraries have comprised your history, and what do they mean to you?

Learning Abroad

This Week’s Bit of String: On the way to somewhere else

I’d never have got into this whole immigrant fix, splitting myself between two countries, if I hadn’t done a term abroad while in college. My major was English/ Education in New Hampshire, where contributing to class discussion was key.

In the UK, on the other hand, professors seemed flummoxed when people turned up. They didn’t even expect us to read the assigned literature: “If you didn’t do the reading for this week, I hope you do at some point in your life. It’s a great book…”

*Twin American spires: church steeple and rocket*

I had read each book, as it happened, and was unimpressed having it summarised in a murmur for 3 hours. Screw it, I decided. I’ll do the reading while on the train to somewhere more interesting.

And off I went, to friends in Glasgow, Bangor, Wolverhampton, and especially London. I read, and listened to new-to-me British music (Texas, Robbie Williams, Steps), survived on Kingsmill rolls and Edam cheese and Smirnoff Ice, and fell for three different guys in quick succession, the final one being my now-husband.

I also wrote a wacky but fantastic story about a girl whose heart, in the form of a cookie, is eaten for breakfast. I got an A for that class, after only attending 1.3 lessons. I did the reading!

What I Wrote This Summer

*New England idyll: Billings Farm Museum, Vermont*

It’s always interesting to see other writers post about their vacations in the summer. Some catch up on reading, and many are busy with their children during the holidays anyway. For me, I spend 4 weeks out of the 6-week break going to see my family in New England. There are definite vacation aspects to this—the lakes and rivers, the mountains, the ice cream.

It’s also very busy as I condense a year’s worth of interactions into 1/12 of the time. Half my family are too busy to keep in touch when I’m not there, so I run around trying to help people out and make memories. They are all I have, and they are precarious without me recording them. When not Doing Things, I’m scribbling about them.

This leaves little reading time. I have writing commitments—promised critiques, etc, and also students I check in with even in the summer, so I squeeze those in. What I do find, though, is that the travel, the hiking and driving and swimming and reflecting, open me up to learning a lot of random things. Without the more rigid structure of work and long-term writing projects, my brain relaxes just enough to sponge up new information.

What I Learned This Summer

There were my discoveries while hiking, which I researched later:
The rather formidable Argiope aurantia (ok, yellow garden spider) keeping watch from her web in the lake bridge. It’s also known as a zigzag spider because of that uniquely thick central line. The purpose of this unique pattern is still unknown to us.

The Warren Rocket: My family got together in Warren, NH, near the White Mountains. While other towns have Civil War cannons on their greens or in front of their schools, Warren (population peaked in 1860 at 1100-something) has a great big Redstone missile rocket. (Pictured at the top.) It was funded and transported by a local veteran hoping to encourage interest in space travel.

Signs around the rocket tell visitors about SS Officer Wernher von Braun, who supervised concentration camp workers to manufacture missiles that killed 1400 Londoners. After the war, Americans smuggled von Braun out of Germany to design even deadlier rockets over here, but also realise his childhood dream of sending rockets to space. I wonder what the childhood dreams of his captive labourers were, or those civilians killed in airstrikes.

*You can see why the Morse Museum caught my eye…*

The Morse Museum: Another early morning Warren hike discovery, a building with granite plaques advertising Curios of India and China, and African Game Trophies. Now-vacant, it was dedicated in 1928 to house the collections of Ira H Morse, a local shoe store mogul and game hunter. There’s a colourful bio online of IH and others, written by affectionate family members. They include his adventures but also quirks like how he would “ream out” uncooperative salt shakers, at home or in public.

Speaking of museums, there are a couple in the area which I like to visit.
Billings Farm, a late 19th century agricultural reenactment site. It’s great for learning about cows and dairy, edible plants and farm life (see above). When we visited this year, they were making pasta in the farmhouse kitchen. I hadn’t realised how long pasta has been a staple in the US (it’s much more recent in the UK), but in fact Thomas Jefferson sampled and loved it in Europe, and by the time of the Civil War macaroni was very popular.

The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College: I always stand in awe before the incredible, ancient Assyrian tablets before moving on to the current exhibits. This summer, a diverse selection of art including Musasama’s elaborate arrangement of textiles and natural objects across the floor, part of the Maple Tree Series, made me aware of the maple tree abolitionist movement. Did you know that in the 1790s, free people of colour, white settlers, and native Americans advocated substituting maple syrup for cane sugar, to starve the economy propping up enslavers?

My family creates a good learning environment, with our eclectic interests. Dinner discussions might be about what’s the oldest continuously-used language in the world (Hebrew, Tamil, Sanskrit… Lithuanian and Icelandic appear in the top 10, too). My dad found an 1884 encyclopaedia in our AirBnB and read passages out loud to us. There was no entry for childbirth, but lots of details on “Brawling in Church” and the various statutes against it.

Even though I didn’t do much writing work over the summer, the feeling of my mind loosening to hold more is not an unwriterly sensation. New stories could develop from here!

Do travel and family time inspire your writing?

Making It Up

This Week’s Bit of String: Near-misses and resistant materials

“Miss, did you ever almost cause the death of a small child?” a year 10 boy asks casually as we sit on the high stools around a Design Technology table. Three boys with various tools and MDF fragments, me with my laptop and notebooks.

This is Resistant Materials. I know very little about CAD, woodwork or metalwork, but I’m supporting a student doing the GCSE. When I told my husband I’d be helping with Resistant Materials, he quipped, “Is that the course, or the students?”

Fair question. But I’ve clearly won some trust. The boy who’s asked this surprising question explains to me that he was once on a ferris wheel with a friend, and her shoe fell off and almost hit a toddler on the ground. Hence, he feels he was beside someone who almost accidentally caused the death of a small child.

Story ideas pivot on crucial moments like the one he mentioned. A slight change in breeze, an incremental rise or fall in the Big Wheel, and the shoe might have hit. I noted the exchange with the Year 10 boy and preliminary thoughts about the alternate scenarios in my daily scribbles, ready for half-term when I have a few free hours to sit, and wrestle out my first new story of the year. I’ll have my latest novel edits all typed up by then.

Exploring Options

Around the time the Resistant Materials boy mentioned his anecdote, I was reading through a literary magazine called Story. It’s based in the US, and I discovered it because I was looking for submission possibilities and Googled “short story magazine.” Sometimes we forget to keep things simple; we look through comprehensive listings of publications and deadlines and fret over word counts… This was more a case of “ask and you shall receive.”

There were some great stories in this issue. My favourite was about a group of boys and their scout leader who got trapped in a cave for several days. The dynamic among the boys before, during, and after was fascinatingly written. It made me realise–and again this sounds SO obvious but it’s another thing that I lose sight of now and then–we get to make stuff up.

I’m pretty sure the writer hadn’t been stuck in a cave or been close to someone who was. But they did a great job making up the scenario and tracking its impacts. I’m going to do that too, I thought. Make something up.

I tend to be a bit timid with my ideas, whether it’s from actual fear or more likely, lack of mental energy. Starting from scratch is EFFORT, to borrow the ultimate disparaging statement from my students. That’s why it can be useful to begin with a memory, with a favourite setting or even person, or with a retelling, a twist on something old.

What About the Future?

Lately, I’ve indulged in inventing future scenarios. If my imagination is slightly inhibited regarding stories, I severely limit it when considering how real life could turn out. I’ve done this from a young age, to avoid disappointment. I specifically remember preparing for my 8th birthday, to be celebrated at Chuck E Cheese’s, something I’d wanted for years. Rides! Games! Pizza! I’d wanted it, but wouldn’t allow myself to picture it, because that would risk building expectations.

If we’re tuned into the world, and we have an ounce of empathy, it can’t escape our notice that we’re clinging to some privilege. Whatever tough times we’ve had, billions in the world are substantially worse off. My husband and I remark to each other sometimes about the Event, an imaginary but tacitly half-expected reversal of world fortunes.

“This would be a strategic location in the Event,” he says when we take in hilltop views on a hike.

“For the Event,” I say when I add to the ranks of canned goods in the cupboard.

But it’s also possible that amazing things will happen in the future. You know, on occasion. Struggling to sleep with exam stress on behalf of my students recently, I started imagining what, for example, our 30th or 40th anniversary might look like, having just celebrated our 20th.

Maybe we will be surrounded by family next time, instead of on our own. There could be a new generation of children on the scene, and though another decade could see further health complications for my parents, I imagined my own kiddo helping to ensure they’re looked after, and this brought comfort.

We can’t get attached to any single projection of the future. But envisioning positives—perhaps especially in the form of small, everyday details—is a new bravery for me. Part of appreciating what I have means letting go of my expectation of disappointment. And if events look to go in a different direction, then I’ll just make up new hopes.

How do you keep sight of the freedom to make things up?