reactormag.com
Jo Walton’s Reading List: April & May 2025
Books
Jo Walton Reads
Jo Walton’s Reading List: April & May 2025
Unhinged multiverse physics, romantic mysteries, and Homeric fanfic…
By Jo Walton
|
Published on June 16, 2025
Comment
0
Share New
Share
I spent the whole of April in Chicago, staying with Ada, and came home to Montreal in early May. In April I only really finished one book, and in May I read twenty-three, giving a total of twenty four over two months. If we pretend I’d read twelve in each month that would seem perfectly reasonable! However, moving swiftly on, you’ll be glad to know I read an interesting bunch of books, and they were very varied.
The Republic of Salt — Ariel Kaplan (2024)Sequel to The Pomegranate Gate, and I don’t know why I was expecting it to complete the story, but in fact it is a middle book of a trilogy. Not as good as the first book, because it has the flaw of middle books of “here’s some more” without either the thrill of introducing the world or the satisfaction of completing the arc. There was some great stuff here, and I enjoyed reading it, but don’t start here, and definitely don’t end here. The third book is not yet listed, which isn’t surprising, they’re very long and Kaplan is a very good and very thoughtful writer. We have two worlds which mirror each other, and events in one affect events in the other, but they are also clearly (to the reader) related to our world and the reconquest of Spain and the attending genocide and expulsion of the Jews. The books do not shy away from these reflected events. So the warning would be for real history, but it’s good to be braced for it.
Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio — Amara Lakhous (2006) Translated from Italian, and recommended to me by an Italian friend. This is a novel about immigrants in Rome. It’s very strange and sometimes funny, and it has some very good point of view switching where you see things very differently as the points of view change. Who is Amedeo? Did he kill the guy in the elevator? Everyone has a different story. It’s clever and well written, but I didn’t love this and found it easy to put down.
Posthomerica — Quintus Smyrnaeus (c. 250) Third century continuation of Homer’s Iliad, so essentially fanfic in mock Homeric verse, written hundreds of years after the original in language and style that were archaic when written. This is the story of what happens after the death of Achilles, with the wooden horse and the fall of Troy. Interesting, and interesting to see the details Quintus made up (or found in now lost poems) which have become part of our web of knowledge about the Matter of Troy. If you really love Homer, you will have moments when you think, well, this sure isn’t Homer. But it’s pretty good Homer fanfic really, with some wonderful moments. The way he treats the Amazons is interesting, seeing women hacking their way across the battlefield and being killed. Generally I’d say this is much less feminist and much less interested in non-Helen women than Homer. Interesting that this survived.
So You Want To Be a Wizard — Diane Duane (1983) Re-read. This has been updated at some point in between the last time I read my paperback and this new ebook, so that the kids have phones now, and I can’t quite tell what year it is but it definitely isn’t 1983 anymore. Maybe some other things had also changed, I can’t remember. This is a children’s book in which bullied bookworm Nita picks up a book called So You Want To Be a Wizard on the shelf among other books just like it that are nurse, and police officer, and accountant, and to her surprise and delight it turns out to be all real. This premise in itself would be enough to make me love the book forever, but it has a lot of other incidental delightful details, and a developing friendship between Nita and Kit, a local boy who also just found the book and is becoming a wizard. There are now many more sequels than there were when I first read this. Fun to read it again after all this time. Duane is having a sale of ebooks on her website to help with financial dire need, so a good time to pick it up.
Ayesha at Last — Uzma Jalaluddin (2018) Fabulous romance novel set in the Moslem community in Toronto, with POVs from both protagonists in the romance. It only had one off moment for me, where it is doing violence to a character to make it the bad proposal from Pride and Prejudice, but apart from that I thought it was great, extremely engaging characters in utterly plausible difficult situations. Also laugh out loud funny on occasion. I don’t think it’s like Jane Austen, but I do think if Jane Austen could have read it she’d have enjoyed it, which is quite a different thing. Terrific friend groups and family.
The Nightmare Before Kissmas — Sara Raasch (2024) Part of my continued quest to understand what romantasy is. This one works as a romance, unlike the others I’ve read, and appears to be set in a universe that is fanfic for a movie I haven’t seen. The worldbuilding was OK if you don’t think too much about it, and the tone reminded me of Alexis Hall’s Boyfriend Material. It had good family and friends, something I always like in a romance, and I believed in the attraction. But whenever I did have to think too much about the worldbuilding, meaning every time it impacted the plot, which was quite a lot, then I was rolling my eyes because it didn’t make any sense. There aren’t enough people to sustain a paparazzi industry, if nothing else. I like fantasy. I like romance. Why don’t I like this? I ought to. It should be a fun cinnamon bun, but instead I am chewing through cardboard. Is it that what I like about romance is the way it does the real world? Beats me. Will keep trying until I either like it or figure it out. I am going to consider all the romance and mainstream I read after this point in this context.
Letters to Camondo — Edward de Waal (2021) A rich French Jewish family who assembled a perfect house and gave it to the state as a museum, which it still is, and then died in the Holocaust. Camondo himself died in 1935 and I felt this huge sense of relief when I got to his death, that he died without knowing. His family were not so lucky. It’s a very strange book, written in the form of letters to Camondo, examining the objects and photographs and the history, with a precise and fascinating focus, and the weight of what is coming and what it means hanging over every page, every object, every fact of Camondo’s life and his family’s life and their relationship with France and what it means to French. We can’t unknow history, we can’t be surprised by it, and a book like this uses the tragic form of knowing the end to ask questions about how we live and what it means to love art, and your family, and your country. Really powerful.
Drop Dead — Lily Chu (2025) Now this is what I want from a romance novel. This is set in Toronto, and concerns two rival journalists (who are obviously made for each other if only they could realise it) investigating a long ago mystery in a house—which resonated oddly with Letters to Camondo because this was Canada, now, and fiction, which meant the mystery could be resolved and everything could be all right, which it was, in an extremely satisfying way. Chu is a really good writer, with an eye for the sort of real world detail I like. There’s a wonderful old lady writer, a little like Atwood or Monro, there’s politics, there’s growth of friendship and then a relationship, there’s people finding the confidence to be themselves, and it’s all grounded. This was a delight to read. Hmm. Yes, I think I could take this exact book and rewrite it so its set in another world with a bunch of fun worldbuilding and I’d still like it. I’d have to change what the macguffin was and what it connected to, and obviously the history, but that’s pretty much all. Anyway, excellent and fun novel, Chu keeps getting better, read it.
The Man in the Brown Suit — Agatha Christie (1924) I guess technically a re-read but I had no memory of it. This is not a good book, but my goodness it’s readable even so. I think it may have the absolute least motivation for people falling in love of anything I have ever read. And the heroine is very silly. And the view of the world and politics and colonialism is even sillier, because pernicious. But things move fast, there are shenanigans on a liner going to Africa, and even if it makes no sense when you stop and think about it, it’s still a lot of fun to read. I think setting it in another world would cause it to become topheavy with worldbuilding, because Christie doesn’t do any, and slowing this down would be bad.
Letters and Treaties — St Dionysius of Alexandria (2nd century AD, ebook 2010) An interestingly odd set of letters as the bishop lives through a persecution, tries to deal with the people who caved rather than be martyred but would not like to come back, and wrangles tricky points of theology. Sometimes I like reading things like this, fragments of a life so long ago with very different concerns.
The Subtle Art of Folding Space — John Chu (2026) John Chu’s first novel, out next year! This is a story about a family, and rewriting the underlying physics of the universe. But rewriting the universe, or fixing the “skunkworks” that generate one of the multiple nested universes, is everyday work for these people, and even tracking down the people who have been hacking quantum physics to tilt the universe for their benefit is an assignment given to some cousins. There’s a lot here that’s similar to Chu’s short work conceptually, but of course a novel gives more room for development. There’s an odd tilt between the actual science fictional ideas and the family dynamic for which they are a sort of metaphor, because this isn’t magic realism and the skunkworks and magic dimensional library are real within the world of the story, but the weight of the book keeps leaning into the metaphorical level.
The Other Family — Joanna Trollope (2010) Re-read. A man dies, leaving his wife and daughters in London, and also the divorced first wife and son he left behind in Newcastle. The book spends time with all of them as they deal with complex grief and complex moving on with their lives. This is a perfect example of the mainstream book that has no plot in our terms, a man dies, a piano gets shipped, some people move house, a girl goes to university. But somehow it’s unputdownable anyway. It’s also a perfect example of how to do ratchet-pov, also known as separated povs, where the characters are not in the same place and the story leaves one set of characters to follow the others, without frustrating the reader who didn’t want the jump. This is smooth and seamless here. It couldn’t be cosy fantasy because it’s about death, but it could be set in another world and still work, but it would make it a kind of book we really do not have.
The Last Witness — K.J. Parker (2017) Re-read, a novella I already had in a collection but bought when wanting more Parker and thinking it was a novel. Very good story about an unpleasant Parker hero who can remove memories and then remembers them as if they were his own, complex Parker plot follows. This would actually be a quite good place to start, as it has intense readability, interesting moral complexity, minimal love, and is otherwise quite typical of what he does. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it again, after a brief moment of kicking myself for buying it twice.
A Taste of Italian Sunshine — Leonie Mack (2023) Romance novel set in Italy, in which a wine buyer is very implausibly forced to spend an extended period on Italy buying prosecco and falling in love with a tractor-driving neighbour with a mysterious past. This was fluffy and light and really a just fine example of what it was. Could it be set in a fantasy world? Absolutely. Would that make it boring to me? Maybe it would, huh, it would definitely make it a worse book because less grounded. This exercise is definitely helping me triangulate.
Old English Poems — Cosette Faust Newton (1924) A nice complete collection of old English alliterative poems in translation, including Caedmon and The Dream of the Rood and a whole bunch of stuff. Free on Gutenberg and very good. I was bemused at the poem arguing that the existence of the phoenix proved resurrection, because you don’t often see a phoenix, but hey. If you want a free edition of these poems, here it is.
Young Mrs Savage — D.E. Stevenson (1948) I love Stevenson. This is a delightful novel of a widow with four children right after WWII when there is still rationing and times are hard, who goes on holiday with her twin brother and meets an old friend. All the details of children on trains and the beach and the children acting on the stories the mother has told of her own childhood as a twin, are just delightful. This has the interesting attribute of feeling like an old fashioned children’s book written for adults. It would make an interesting pairing with Streatfield’s Saplings, though it is not as good as that. Would it work set in another world? Don’t be silly, it needs this exact time and moment to work at all. I suppose Delany made Babel-17 work in the immediate aftermath of a SF war as complex and consequential as WWII, but a story of a mom and kids going on holiday on a planet that won but still has rationing would be… different. Unlike anything. Why don’t we have books like that? We have fantasy huge wars, but not this, and we could.
Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent — Judi Dench (2023) A series of conversations with Dame Judi Dench about the Shakespeare plays she has acted in and the parts she has played in them during her long career. This is part meditation on Shakespeare and part theatrical memoir, and it was great fun and very readable. Whoever recommended this, thank you, you were right, this was exactly my cup of tea.
Dear Reader — Cathy Rentzenbrink (2020) This book, on the other hand, should have been my cup of tea but was not. The concept is a long time reader and bookseller talking about and recommending books that had been powerful for her at different stages of life, so part memoir, part talking about books. The problem is that I think Rentzenbrink was trying too hard. So much of a book like this depends on rapport with the writer, and I constantly felt she was trying to force that rapport without ever achieving it. There’s an odd confessional nature to memoir, and Judi Dench effortlessly achieves it, you feel even when she’s actively keeping something back that she’s being effortlessly honest and herself, while with Rentzenbrink I feel she’s being cagey while stagily trying to perform openness. Also, I was less in sympathy with her book recs than you’d expect from a book that starts “Last night I dreamed I went to Narnia again.”
A Girl’s Best Friend — Jules Wake (2018) There’s a whole genre of romance novels of the form “heroine goes to live in the country” and this is one of those, with the added bonus of a dog. I’ve enjoyed a lot of Wake’s work, and I enjoyed this, the beats fell in the right places, it was funny, and the pacing of the couple getting together worked well. I also liked the dog. The evil ex is a bit of a caricature, but that’s fine in a book like this. Both hero and heroine are snarled on their exes, and the depiction of them separately unsnarling because they realise they like each other worked for me. The representation of being blocked and then being able to work again (the heroine is an artist and illustrator) is very good. This one would utterly work as cosy fantasy, with a dragon instead of the dog, and the hero could be a vet for more exotic animals, and the evil exes could have evil magic. Would it be better or worse? Hard to say. You have to remember here that my least favourite Jennifer Crusies are ones where she adds fantasy elements to the plot, and thinking about this book feels like it would make it like that.
Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca — Ferdinand Mount (2020) This was so great and you should read it. It’s a memoir about Mount’s aunt, beginning with his childhood recollections and going on to discover she wasn’t in any way who she said she was, and all of it, her bigamy, her lies, her self fashioning, is absolutely fascinating. Mount’s search through papers and public information is itself a great story, and very revealing about the England of many social classes in the twentieth century. I’ve never read anything like this, and I loved it. I have added all Mount’s backlist to my reading list, recommendations of specific others welcome.
Mystic and Rider — Sharon Shinn (2005) Again, catching up on Shinn series I missed at the time. This is the first volume of the Twelve Houses series, and it’s great. Shinn has been writing really good low stakes fantasy and nobody was paying attention. Or maybe it was just me who wasn’t paying attention and it is my gain now as there the books are for me to enjoy without waiting. A small group of travellers in a fantasy world go out to find out what’s up in the southern region, which is becoming intolerant of magic users in a horribly racist way. But it’s all small scale, thus far anyway, and most of the book is this group of interesting people riding and camping and staying in inns and having conversations and taming a wild animal that is terrorizing a village and which they then have to deal with. Logistics, a dash of romance, an interesting world, and the low level start of a threat—this feels like it might be starting essentially before the beginning of where you’d expect a fantasy to start. Also, lots of women who are different from each other and different ages. Men, too. This is a book with different archetypes of perfectly valid masculinity. I’ll be reading the next one soon, please avoid series spoilers in comments. I was about to say I didn’t like it quite as much as the first one of the elemental series because I loved the elemental blessings, but actually the treatment of religion as neglected and coming back here is also really nifty and unusual. If you have also foolishly neglected Shinn, you’ll enjoy this one.
Storm House — Kathleen Thompson Norris (1928) Norris is a writer I can not predict, but I have figured out the rules of her universe, which makes reading her less puzzling. It remains bizarre to read books published as genre romance, and which I originally read in a desire to understand the US in the period (romance novels are very good for this) in which romantic love (both eros and agape) is generally bad, friendship essentially doesn’t exist, familial love is problematised, and money is unquestionably the root of all evil. Now you’d think that would make the characters unsympathetic, but not a bit of it. Also, what kind of love does she like, having issues with all the Platonic kinds. Well, caritas, essentially, kind ongoing caring without passion or obsession, which I guess might be philia except that it’s really rare in Norris to see friendship portrayed. This book is odd. The relationships in it are odd, and treated weirdly. The details are really neat. It’s almost a gothic, but it isn’t that either. It couldn’t be anything but what it is, Norris is almost her own genre.
What Does It Feel Like? — Sophie Kinsella (2024) Not really a novel. Poor Sophie Kinsella had a brain tumour last year and has lightly fictionalised the experience of a writer of the kind of books she writes with the kind of success she has had, having a brain tumour and going through recovery. I hope she recovers even more and writes more books, and I bought and read this book to support her in this process, but if you want to read a Kinsella book read Love Your Life.
Letter From America 1946-2004 — Alistair Cooke (2007) Alistair Cooke did a half hour radio show on BBC Radio 4 every week for 58 years, with the title Letter From America in which he talked about the news, or current events, or the weather, or whatever he wanted, in a way to explain America to a British listener. I listened to it myself, and I always liked the gentle way he explained things and the way he was wryly funny. It was odd reading this book now, and seeing everything in the eternal present of journalism, often wrong, always without the context the future brings. Sometimes I found it comforting to think our journalism will look like this, like Eisenhower, like Watergate, like Reagan. Occasionally I winced at things that had changed, but sometimes I smiled at it. Cooke lived and wrote his little pieces across a lot of time. It’s not all politics, there are reflections on Charlie Chaplin and the New England fall, but it’s the bygone politics that stood out to me and the urgency with which they were this week’s news, and now are not.
[end-mark]
The post Jo Walton’s Reading List: April & May 2025 appeared first on Reactor.
News Feed (Home)
Popular Posts 
Events 
Blog 
Market 
Forum 
Go LIVE!
Headline News
VidWatch
Game Zone
Top PodCasts
