Books Jo Walton Reads Jo Walton’s Reading List: February 2026 Thoughts on Gene Wolfe, Sharon Shinn, and finally getting the appeal of cosy fantasy! By Jo Walton | Published on March 11, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share February was a pretty much perfect month spent entirely in Florence. I had friends visiting some of the time, and some of the time I was here by myself. I finished the first draft of the novel I was writing. I saw some art, and went for a lot of walks through the beautiful city, and ate lots of great food. I read eleven books, and here they are. Soldier of Arete — Gene Wolfe (1989) Sequel to Soldier in the Mist and really a direct continuation—brilliantly written, very strange. After a head injury Latro can’t remember anything beyond today, and lives in a strange continuous present in which everyone and everything is new every day, but he’s recording what he can on a scroll, which is the book, including his encounters with gods of various kinds. This book has Amazons, the fall of kings, Sparta, a nymph, and an Olympic chariot race. It’s fantasy, I suppose, and I certainly wouldn’t know what else to call it, but it isn’t much like any other fantasy. What a peculiar thing to do. I’m still not sure if it’s for anything, or if it’s just the experience. Brilliant but weird. Read the first book first… or possibly it doesn’t matter, but read it first anyway. Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca — Ferdinand Mount (2020) Re-read, book club. What a strangely interesting book this is, an investigative memoir of the author’s uncle’s wife, who lied about her name, her age, her parentage, and her class background. It’s like a textbook example of truth being stranger than fiction. It led to a good book club discussion too. You don’t usually get a biography of someone who isn’t famous, who didn’t do anything notable, who knew a lot of people and lived a life through part of history, the way people do. So that’s interesting, even without the reinvention of herself and the way the lies hurt other people. Also very interesting memoir detail of Mount as a child and his reaction to his aunt and her family. Growing Light — Marta Randall (2003) A murder mystery set in a very specific moment; I’d say 1987? There’s a tech company and very primitive computers, and the things that the computers can do are interesting. Like you couldn’t trace the provenance of a particular antique knife now, but these are very primitive computers and they’re printing everything out all the time. I didn’t enjoy this much. I didn’t find the humor funny, and I didn’t care much about the mystery, and what I like best from Randall is her worldbuilding, so this book set in a moment of the real world was disappointing. The thing that kept me reading was the characters. But I like her SF and F much better. The Courage For Truth: Letters to Writers — Thomas Merton (1983) A collection of letters from a Trappist monk and poet, from the mid-twentieth century. I’ve decided I don’t like the kind of letter collection that gives you all the letters to x, and then all the letters to y, I much prefer to do time chronologically. However, this does the first, and also made the odd decision to arrange the book by how well known the writers he’s writing to are, so that it starts with Waugh and Pasternak and then goes on to the (actually much more interesting) South American poets he was corresponding with. It’s interesting that Merton was a twentieth-century Trappist and stuck in a monastery and under discipline and censorship, as he lived through the Cuban missile crisis, the anti-war movement, and the advent of the Sixties. When you read a letter collection you really come to know the writer, and sometimes that’s good, but in this case unfortunately I didn’t very much like him. I didn’t like the way he kept repeating to everyone that he thought of himself as a Latin American poet and not an American one, despite being an American and writing in English—weird guy, really. Not recommended. Shifter and Shadow — Sharon Shinn (2025) Sharon Shinn is a vastly underrated writer, and I’m not sure why. She’s just great, her books are well-thought-through and engrossing. She thinks about the implications of her worldbuilding and the effect it has on all sorts of different people. This book is about a shapeshifter magically curing a plague by turning the victims into dogs and giving the dogs medicine that cures the disease but is poisonous to humans. People are understandably reluctant to be turned into dogs, especially people who, for religious reasons, don’t like magic users. So this is a fantasy about vaccine reluctance, while also being rooted entirely and completely in the fictional world. And also it’s a sweet love story, that works very well. This short novel was written later but was the chronologically next in the Twelve Houses series, so I read it next. This world is so interesting, and the magic is cool, and I really like the characters. You should definitely start at the beginning though. The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural — Agatha Christie (2019) An odd collection of Christie stories, some of them very classic ghost stories, and some of them stories where the supposedly supernatural thing is a set-up to allay suspicion. All the latter were great, though the ones where there actually was a genre element were very mixed—some of them effective and creepy, others predictable and rote. Christie is wonderful at characters, and many of these stories were immediately gripping even when the supernatural element wasn’t really working. A person could do a lot worse than analyse the very beginnings of Christie to see how what she does to make them so gripping. Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning — Fiona Sampson (2023) After finishing the Browning letters last month I wasn’t ready to let them go, so I bought and rapidly read this biography. It’s an adequate biography, one that thinks hard about a lot of things like the presentation of EBB as a woman and a poet both in her lifetime and since, and about the inherited money made from plantations worked with enslaved people in Jamaica. But I felt she didn’t quite see the person I knew from the letters, even though she’d clearly read the letters. This is the third unsatisfactory biography of EBB I have read, so maybe it’s something wrong with me rather than them. Fascinatingly there don’t seem to be any recent biographies of Robert Browning (though one of the ones I have covers them both) but there are numerous early twentieth-century ones. Talk to Me — Jules Wake (2014) Romance novel. Wake’s first book, and you can tell. It’s much clunkier than her later works. The plot relies on a character who tells lies to hero and heroine and keeps them apart, and, additionally, an obsessed psychopath. Both of these things! That being said, it’s still an enjoyable read, with the seeds of what will make Wake a much better writer later already visible. If there were times when I thought “oh good grief” there were also times when I laughed aloud, and the pacing was very good. The Enchanted April — Elizabeth von Arnim (1922) Re-read, book club. The ur-novel of the romance novels where the characters go to Italy and everything is all right. Two unhappy women in a club in London on a rainy day in February see an ad in the paper for renting a castle in Italy for the month of April, which they do. There are beautiful descriptions of the castle and the gardens, and the power of better places to make people better. In book club we talked about whether it actually was meant to be read as “enchanted” in terms of magic, or whether we were supposed to believe Italy just did that. The characters are all excellently drawn, the book is funny and acerbic as well as sweet, and it is by far the sweetest of all von Arnim’s work. Legends & Lattes — Travis Baldree (2023) OK, now I get it. This is a good book about a retired orc warrior setting up a coffee shop. It’s also silly in the way you’d expect from that, but it’s sweet and fun and has good characters. The difference between this and the boring imitations I’ve read (and the ones I’ve read part of and given up on because I was bored) is that this has heart—Baldree clearly loves what he’s writing about, and loves the details of turning a livery stable into a cafe and having a gnome-designed coffee machine delivered, and because he loves it and cares about it (and is a good writer) he made me not mind the essential silliness and improbability—and honestly, given that this is essentially a D&D universe and that’s a requirement of the premise, the worldbuilding is just fine. Also, the plot is actually quite clever. So, cosy fantasy! This book existed, and people loved it, and I understand why, and now there’s an entire genre of people doing this. I’m not the target audience here, I found this readable and mildly enjoyable, and I would read the sequel on a wet Sunday when I had a cold. But I understand people liking it, and even voting it a Hugo, I understand some of the things that were perplexing about the other cosy fantasies I tried to read, and now I can stop trying to figure it out and read things I like. The Invention of the Restaurant — Rebecca L. Spang (2000) Terrific book about the invention of the restaurant, the myths of the invention of the restaurant, and the French Revolution. But Spang is one of those people who writes about the French Revolution in context, so that she starts beforehand in the ancien régime and goes on through the revolution and past Napoleon to the restoration and the July Monarchy and follows the changing vision and reality of the restaurant through it all. Very few people do this, it’s one of the places where periodization is a real problem, so I very much appreciate it. This is a book about Paris, and about restaurants, and about politics. There was a point in the French Revolution where everything became political, even food, and then there was a reaction where nothing was political, not even government. This is a very readable and thought-provoking book, enhanced with relevant political cartoons, and I think most of you would enjoy it. [end-mark] The post Jo Walton’s Reading List: February 2026 appeared first on Reactor.