Book Club #4: January
To have none. Not to be tied.
To be free & kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio [...]
Sometimes to read, sometimes not to read.
To go out yes – but stay at home in spite of being asked.
As for clothes, to buy good ones.
- from Virginia Woolf's New Year resolutions, 1931
We are almost a month into 2024 and I hope you are all being kind to yourselves (I am trying to be kind to myself and that is why this newsletter is very late, just barely squeaking in before January is over!)
If you do one literary thing this month I recommend the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition at The British Library before it closes on Feb 25. Whether it's the Brontë siblings' tiny handwritten childhood stories or Ursula K. Le Guin's notebook for Earthsea, it's a precious chance to see artefacts from the genre. I, personally, was agog at the Beowulf manuscript, the only surviving original copy of one of the oldest poems in the English language.
What's up
Hugo Awards excluded top books by R. F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao without explanation
N Scott Momaday, first Native American to win the fiction Pulitzer, dies aged 89
What's on
Commensality, a Goodenough Library exhibition on the college's history of communal dining by our Archivist, Luis López, till Feb 29
Queer Fantasy, ft. Tamsyn Muir, TJ Klune, Samantha Shannon and Tasha Suri (Online, Feb 2)
Black to the Future: Imaginary Cities, ft. N. K. Jemisin and Victor LaValle (Online, Feb 6)
The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour: Goblin Market, ft. Felicity Jones (British Library, Feb 20)
Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza (London Review Bookshop, Feb 28)
What's out
Last month I recommended Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett as a top snerdleread and I am pleased to report that the sequel, Emily Wilde's Map of the Otherlands, is just as delightful and full of academic in-jokes. For a different strain of campus drama, Kiley Reid's Come and Get It follows the juicy gossip of Arkansas college students.
Big month for post/anti/decolonial releases: Sathnam Sanghera maps how British imperialism shaped the globe in Empireworld; on the fictional side of things, Álvaro Enrigue transmutes the Spanish conquest of 16th-century Tenoxtitlan into hallucinatory colonial revenge in You Dreamed of Empires; Tania James spins an 18th-century bildungsroman about the man who built Tipu's Tiger in Loot; Vanessa Chan tackles colonialism and occupation in The Storm We Made, a brutal family saga set during the Japanese invasion of Malaya in World War II.
Next up...
Book Club is finally coming out of hibernation! we will be holding our first meeting of 2024 on Wednesday, Feb 7, at 8.10pm in Freddie’s. We will be reading two short stories, Continuity of Parks and House Taken Over, by Julio Cortázar (links on request). Thank you to Mario Yon for the suggestions!