Is there anything more beautiful than a pile of books you want to read? My main Christmas (and birthday) present from Mr Litlove was a course in Writing Lives with the Faber Academy, which takes place in February. This isn’t just about memoir, but about biography and fiction based on real people, too. I’m very excited about it and in preparation for it, have been making little piles of books around the house the way squirrels hide nuts. There’s an official reading list that accompanies the course and inevitably, my own unofficial one.
This is my main pile and it mostly consists of books about writers, which is my favorite area of inquiry – I love all that stuff about creativity and the way our lives as readers become entwined with the books we love and admire. I’ve already read the Benjamin Taylor which was a straight biography about Willa Cather. I think it’s Michele Roberts on Colette that I’ll go to next. In case it’s unclear, the titles from top to bottom are: Free Woman by Lara Feigel (about Doris Lessing), Once Upon a Time in the East by Xinolu Guo (memoir), My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Gunn, The Road to Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead, Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson (a reread of the best book on journaling I’ve ever come across), Arthur Ransome and Capt. Flint’s Trunk by Christina Hardyment, Chasing Bright Medusas by Benjamin Taylor, Colette; My Literary Mother, by Michele Roberts, Algerian White by Assia Djebar (about several Algerian intellectuals that Djebar knew), and The Lives of Elsa Triolet by Lachlan Mackinnon.
This is book pile number 2, which consists of books with more experimental or complex premises:
The books in this pile are, from top to bottom: Landscape of a Good Woman by Carolyn Steedman (incorporates cultural theory into her account of her mother’s life), True Pleasures by Lucinda Holdforth (author spends time in Paris chasing down the traces of a huge range of women authors), True Story by Michael Finkel (a disgraced journalist discovers that a multiple murderer has assumed his identity), Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas (more Parisian literary hi-jinks), The Unfinished Harald Hughes by Richard Ayoda (a fictionalised biography) and Kafka’s Last Trial by Benjamin Balint (a nonfiction account of the international legal battle that erupted between Israel and Germany as both countries fought to claim ownership of Kafka’s work).
I also have a virtual pile, which is the largest of them all. Can’t take a photo but highlights include: Thunderclap by Laura Cumming, This House of Grief by Helen Garner, The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, But Beautiful by Geoff Dyer, A Memoir of Susan Sontag by Sigrid Nunez and The Invention of Charlotte Bronte by Graham Watson.
Obviously, although I WANT to consume them all in one epic inhalation, I’m not realistically going to get many read in January. But this will be an ongoing project over the rest of the year.
Finally (because this might go on forever otherwise), my Christmas books. This year there were only two physical books:
I’m currently reading Body Work by Melissa Febos and it’s brilliant. The other book is Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy. I’d never heard of the author before, but it’s about a nun who goes on the offensive when Saint Sebastian’s School, run by the Sisters of the Sublime Blood, is subject to an arson campaign. Sister Holiday, our hero, is described as a ‘chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun’ and I am totally there for her.
I was also gifted some Audible books: Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich, The Proof of my Innocence by Jonathan Coe, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore and The Trap by Ava Chase.
I have more plans, but for the moment, that’s enough. Mr Litlove and I usually spend New Year’s Eve making our plans for the next year; what we want to achieve, what we want to keep working on, what we want more of, what we want less of. We’ll be doing that tonight, and I will certainly be making a resolution to blog more in 2025. It’s been so great to be back. Wishing you all a contented, creative, bookish New Year with all my love.
