No, I'm not going to attempt justify myself with apologies or excuses. I'm a terrible, awful, abysmal blogger, but nonetheless, here—just a bit earlier than usual due to the presence of one or two Christmassy/wintry titles—is my FM Dozen for 2025, an odd mix but one that includes several titles that might interest you lovely readers.
We are just back from a excellent, spontaneous, and
thoroughly exhausting week in London—our first jaunt outside of Portugal after,
at long last, receiving our official residency cards and therefore being free
to travel. We went to the theatre a couple of times (The Importance of Being
Earnest and The Devil Wears Prada, both great fun), did quite a lot
of book shopping (it's amazing how there always seemed to be an Oxfam lurking
near every place we went), and spent time indulging a newfound passion of mine,
which I may not have mentioned here before. I've always taken a casual interest
in art and art history, but for the past couple of years it has become a bit
more compelling, perhaps inspired by the thought of our relative proximity to
many of Europe's great museums. We inaugurated our London stay with a
4-hour marathon at the National Gallery, where I tortured my legs and suffered from
Stendhal syndrome. This was supplemented later in the week with (slightly) less
overwhelming visits to the Courtauld Gallery, the Wallace Collection, Kenwood
House, and the V&A—delightful all.
I really did have an excellent year of reading, even if I
was too stodgy and overwhelmed to share most of it with you, so let me make
this a good long post and share as much as I can now (feel free to skim/skip as
needed). My Dozen itself is a strange array of mysteries (my escape reading of
choice this year), art history, European history and literature, and a couple
of stray tangents, but first I'll sneak in mentions of some of the books I
haven't included in my Dozen.
Somewhat unusually, I indulged in some very satisfying re-reading
this year (something I haven't often allowed myself out of some misguided
principle or because of the haunting awareness of how many great books are
still out there languishing unread). This was partly inspired by the melancholy
stripping of my book collection to about two shelves of absolute essentials
(not including my set of FM titles, of course) and the subsequent realization
that I hadn't read many of those essentials for a couple of decades. RACHEL
FERGUSON's The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1931) was just as
delightful and innovative and modernist (or postmodernist?) as I remembered, and
BARBARA COMYNS' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954) was still
ghoulish and hilarious and yet strangely life-affirming, one of my all-time
favorite novels. I re-read several of JOSEPHINE TEY's Alan Grant
mysteries, with The Franchise Affair (1948)—perhaps not properly a Grant
novel since he only appears briefly—emerging as a frontrunner, though The
Daughter of Time remains a favorite as well. With one irresistible
exception, I've not included re-reads in my Dozen for the year (not on any
particular principle, but simply because they would otherwise shut out several
other lovely books I haven't mentioned here before).
As I explored mystery more thoroughly than in recent years,
I discovered a new love for CYRIL HARE—I've read three of his lively,
expertly-paced novels so far (including An English Murder [1951], which
takes place at Christmas and is excellent, though not particularly festive),
and will be reading the rest. This isn't a post about books I didn't
particularly love, but I'll mention that I was lukewarm on my first readings of
NICHOLAS BLAKE and ROBERT BARNARD (Blake is one of those chewy
mystery writers, with endless chewing over of facts and clues lulling me to think
of my shopping list, and Barnard was perhaps a bit too silly—and probably too
recent, truth be told—for my taste). I've also been running hot and cold on the
RICHARD COLES mysteries—the first of which, Murder Before Evensong,
was just adapted for television, though in this case the word "adapted"
might be too mild—perhaps "just eviscerated for television" is more
accurate? I loved the first book for its delightful sense of day-to-day village
life, then hated the second book and was so-so on the third. However,
I've just finished his Christmas novella, Murder Under the Mistletoe,
and enjoyed it very much (Coles puts aside the characters' conflicts and angsts
and relationship woes, which occupied too much of the second and third novels
for my taste—carefully avoiding spoilers here—and focuses simply on their unexpectedly
lively holiday feast together, so that not only is it a nice, quick, festive read,
but it can be read independently of the rest of the series without undue confusion
or spoilers).
In my new realm of art history, I read some excellent books
this year, but only included one in my dozen. The Collector of Lives:
Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art (2017), by NOAH CHARNEY and INGRID
ROWLAND, was revelatory about Renaissance artists and Vasari's ongoing role
in sculpting (ahem) our views of art and artists. Apparently best known as a
poet and journalist, JAMES FENTON kept me engrossed in his book of art
essays, Leonardo's Nephew (1998), a random find for me that I'll
henceforth treasure. Subjects include Pisanello, Bernini, Degas, Picasso, and,
most engrossingly of all, Pierino da Vinci, the titular nephew of Leonardo, who, had he not died young, might have given his venerable uncle a run for his money. I've
noted lots of little tidbits to remember for future museum visits. (I've also just
noticed that Fenton wrote a history of the Royal Academy of Arts, which would certainly
have been on our London to-do list if not for its highly inconvenient temporary
closure. I've now added that book to my TBR.) And I recently read ANDREW
GRAHAM-DIXON's Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found (2025) hot off the
presses. I had eagerly anticipated it, but found it disappointing. His brief
summary of the Thirty Years War to provide context for the world Vermeer lived in was absolutely riveting and horrifying—perhaps he
should have been an historian rather than an art critic?—but his interpretations
of Vermeer's paintings (which he tends to present as THE meanings, as if no
one could possibly see anything else in them now that he has solved their
puzzles) had the presumably undesired effect of reducing, for me, both the
paintings and Vermeer himself. Given that we can never really understand the life
or mind of a person from the 1600s, even with far better records than exist for
Vermeer, Graham-Dixon's portrait of the painter as obsessively and
single-mindedly concerned with his religion, and furiously focused on religious
symbolism in his work, is not, even if true, one I particularly care to have in
mind when viewing his gorgeous paintings. Fortunately, I can report that, in
actually viewing several Vermeers in London last week, I was successful in
forgetting all about this book, which is how I intend to keep it. I forget everything anyway…
But that's enough snarkiness for a list of favorites. Now
for my dozen faves of the year:
12) GRAHAM GREENE, Travels with My Aunt (1969)
I've read a fair amount of Greene in the past, but I had no
idea he could be so cheerful and entertaining. I'm sure most of you are
familiar with it, but if not, this is a sort of a humorous B-side to his thrillers
and more serious novels, about a stodgy middle-aged man, firmly set in his
routines, who is turned upside down by meeting a long-lost aunt, with whom he
ventures on world travels and gets involved in unexpected intrigue. A high
point of my reading year, despite being initially acquired mainly because it
was one of the few English-language books I could find for cheap in Lisbon one
day when I was desperate to read a physical book. I love my Kindles, but it
does get to be a drag reading on them all the time.
11) HENRY JAMES, The Spoils of Poynton (1896)
Actually, make that two re-reads that I've allowed into my
Dozen. This is possibly my favorite James novel, but my re-read was really
triggered by memorable circumstances. Less than a week after our arrival in
Lisbon (and I'm assuming as an official "welcome to Europe" just for us),
the massive power outage in Portugal and Spain occurred. Without internet
access or cell phone signal, we had no information about what was happening. We
didn't know anyone in the neighbourhood and didn't speak Portuguese (Andy has come along
amazingly since then, while I am progressing slowly). We were in the dark in
more ways than one for that entire afternoon and evening. Since we had no way
of knowing how long the outage might last, I avoided using up my Kindle or
phone batteries, and plucked this book from my shelf—one of the few survivors
of my pre-move book cull. We sat on our balcony a lot and observed the natives,
who didn't seem overly fretted about the situation, so we decided to take it in
stride as well. Not that we weren't quite relieved when the power came back on
late that evening, but I'm thankful for the unforgettable inspiration behind a delightful
re-read.
10) JULIAN BARNES, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art
(2015)
I had to leave this art history-related title in my top 12,
because I'm still finding myself inspired by it. It was great fun to read, and
I made voluminous notes, which I'll refer back to before future museum visits. Barnes
seems to know everything, and his essays on Géricault, Delacroix, Van Gogh, Courbet,
Bonnard, Vuillard, Manet, and many more taught me as much as an art history
degree would have (or so I choose to think). It also inspired me to re-read Flaubert's
Parrot (1984) for the first time in 30+ years, which I enjoyed rather more
than I did all those years ago (when I surely had little grasp of what the
novel was really about). This was followed by an attempt to read his more
recent The Sense of an Ending (2011), which didn't work for me. If
anyone has suggestions of other, more Parrot-y novels of his, do let me
know. In the meantime, I believe my next Barnes will be The Man in the Red
Coat (2019), a non-fiction work about the Parisian Belle Époque.
9) MARY ELEANOR WILKINS FREEMAN, Silence and Other
Stories (1898)
I've long been a fan of American novelist and short story
writer Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman (if one can be called a fan for having once
read one or two of her collections). I even blogged about her briefly here.
She's now best remembered for her ghost stories, but her many stories on
non-ghostly matters contain some powerful treasures (along with a fair amount
of unremarkable periodical fiction written to pay the bills). This collection must
go on my Dozen because I simply must tell you about the title story. By Jove! "Silence" is one of the most harrowing stories I've ever read, and absolutely bloody brilliant to boot. I was white-knuckled gripping my Kindle
for the duration. The story of an Indian attack on a New England village during
the French & Indian War, the brilliance is that it is seen and experienced almost
entirely through the eyes of the women of the village, including the village
witch and a young girl whose fiancé is kidnapped in the attack. Its suspense
and power stem partly from the fact that we see little of the actual violence, leaving it to our imagination, as the women are sheltering while the men fight off the attack. The
dynamics between the women are riveting, both during the attack and in the period of recovery and rebuilding after. The story might be compared to Susan
Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" or Harriet Prescott Spofford's
"Circumstance", the latter also featuring a colonial setting. Most of
this collection's other stories pack less of a wallop, but "The Little
Maid at the Door", set on the outskirts of Salem during the witch trials,
comes close. It's not a perfect story, but again the author's shifts in
perspective—from a very convincing, and downright eerie, portrayal of the genuine
superstitious terror of two of the town's righteous citizens to the tragic
consequences of that superstition—are excellent. Wilkins Freeman's work is
public domain and readily available online, and you should check out these stories if
you're interested in very powerful, highly original storytelling, but don't
blame me if a sleepless night results…
8) JOSÉ MARIA EÇA DE QUEIROZ, The Maias (1888)
(translated by Margaret Jull Costa)
I mentioned this book in one of my pathetically few posts
earlier this year, so I'll just reiterate here what a gorgeous thing it is. Part
soap opera (with an incest theme no less!), part a mockery of Romanticism and
noble feelings, it's entirely entertaining and has a perfect, melancholy but
funny ending. Do have a look at it if you like sprawling 19th-century dramas,
and give Portugal's native son a bit more of the attention he deserves. (And
this makes three 19th century books in this year's Dozen—who could have
foreseen that?!)
7) FRANCESCA WADE, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
(2025)
"'Forget grammar,' she wrote one day (perhaps around
dinner time), 'and think about potatoes.'" How anyone can resist Gertrude
Stein's playfully wacky, gloriously pompous, and ultimately transformative experimental
work is—well, to be honest, not remotely beyond comprehension, but I do
adore her no matter what anyone says. And after her lovely Bloomsbury book, Square
Haunting (2020), I would read just about anything Francesca Wade puts on
paper. But what made the book extra thrilling, apart from my passion for Stein,
was that, as she notes in the introduction, Wade was the first researcher to
make an in-depth exploration of the archive of Leo Katz, an eccentric Stein
scholar who had for many, many years promised major revelations from
his extensive interviews with Alice B. Toklas in his book-in-progress, which
alas remained "in progress" and never actually written right up until
his death. The book offers irresistible glimpses of Gertrude and Alice, and—more
extensively than most books about Stein—of Alice after Gertrude's death. Some
of the incidents are familiar, some definitely not. There's a rather
hair-raising tidbit about Stein's first purchase of a Picasso, a portrait of a
girl, when Gertie was unsure of the legs and feet and Picasso's increasingly
desperate dealer offered to cut it in half and discard the lower portion (she
ultimately took the painting whole). There's Virginia Woolf's reaction, in a
letter to a third party, to attempts to urge the Hogarth Press to publish
Stein's massive early novel The Making of Americans: “We are lying
crushed under an immense manuscript of Gertrude Stein’s.” They didn't publish
it. And there's a quite harrowing tale of the escape from Paris, as the Nazis
approached, of Picasso's world-famous portrait of Gertrude, tied to the roof of
their car. (Note that comma—it was the painting tied to the roof, not Gertrude
herself.) I was engrossed from start to finish, as much for Wade's sharp,
engaging prose as for the promised Katz revelations—which partly concern the
turbulent time following Alice's discovery of a hitherto-unknown love affair
from Gertrude's past, with a woman who had continued to be her friend and with whom
Alice had also become friends. Oh, and then there's the little matter of the
prison break Alice helped bring about…
6) BEVERLEY NICHOLS, Murder by Request (1960)
People have been telling me for years that I should read
Nichols' gardening- and house-oriented books, and I confess I've never done it.
But I didn't realize he'd written mysteries as well. Nor could anyone have
imagined that I'd come across one of them, complete with dustjacket if a bit mildewy, in a bookshop in Lisbon. Murder by
Request was the last of five mysteries he wrote—the others being No
Man's Street (1954), The Moonflower (1955) (aka The Moonflower Murder), Death to Slow Music (1956), and The Rich
Die Hard (1957). Have any of you read these? I don't fancy my chances
of finding any more of them in Lisbon, and my recent Oxfam visits failed to turn
them up as well, so they may constitute the substance of a future British
Library run. The setting of this one is a "nature cure establishment"
at which Nichols' detective, Horatio Green, becomes a reluctant resident. I
found it all quite entertaining.
5) EVA MENASSE, Darkenbloom (2021, translated by
Charlotte Collins)
It's possibly unfair that I should include a work of
contemporary fiction in my Dozen, since this was likely one of only two or
three such works I read this year. That said, it's a dark delight that I really
loved, so what the heck. There are definite shades here of W. G. Sebald and
Olga Tokarczuk, for fans of those authors, but it's also very much
its own thing. It's set in 1989 in an Austrian village, near the border with
Hungary, wrestling with its World War II demons while coping with the
uncertainty of East German and Hungarian border openings in the book's present
day, as the Iron Curtain begins to collapse. So much fascinating history covered here, many things that I knew about on
some level but had never considered as part of a whole. I'd never thought about
the many people who were alive to see both of these historic turning points, or of how they might have processed the change and upheaval they had
witnessed. Highly recommended if you're interested in this topic. It seems that
only one other of Menasse's novels has been translated, Vienna (2005),
but I definitely want to check that one out as well.
4) VICTOR L. WHITECHURCH, The Canon in Residence
(1904)
I very nearly score a fourth 19th century title here. I
happened across a mention of this novel after reading one of Whitechurch's later mysteries. The mystery was adequate and entertaining, but fairly forgettable,
but this tale, after it's Alpine opening, becomes—yes!—a cheerful village comedy.
It's the very amusing tale of a young clergyman, in the early stages of stuffy
conservatism to which his ilk are prone, who, on holiday on the continent, finds himself without his ecclesiastical garments,
which have been stolen by a fellow hotel guest with an urgent need for their
disguising properties. His own subsequent behavior in mufti, as well as that of
the fake clergyman wearing his clothes, lead to misunderstandings and rumours when
he's back in England among the new constituency he takes on as a newly-minted canon. It's rollicking good fun, and
indeed a very FM-like novel, if only it weren't written by one of those pesky men…
3) DOROTHY L. SAYERS, The Nine Tailors (1934)
Here's the other re-read of the year that I'm allowing into
my Dozen, because it was one of the high points of the entire year. I first
read it in 2008, and my re-read highlights what an abominable memory I have.
For 17 subsequent years, I thought of it (and recommended it) as a "winter
novel." Indeed the first eighth or so of the novel does make wonderfully
vivid use of an extreme winter in a village in East Anglia, but the rest
unfolds at various seasons until the mystery of the corpse in the village bell tower is finally resolved. I know how wonderful Gaudy Night is, but
I have to say this one gets my vote for the very best Sayers. Indeed, it's also one
of those mysteries that one could very nearly imagine without any murder at
all, because its village setting and cast of characters are so wonderful to
spend time with. I've promised myself I won't wait 17 years for another
re-read.
2) MINA CURTISS, Other People's Letters: In Search
of Proust (1978)
Discovered by accident while looking into Proust's letters, edited and translated into English by Curtiss, this is her delightful memoir of the eventful
search for them and the people she met along the way—including Proust's
housekeeper, Celeste Albaret, who had a few years before (1972) published a
memoir of him (in print now from New York Review Books). I found it completely irresistible, but made no notes on it at
the time (seeing as I finished reading it the day before we moved to
Lisbon, I hope I can be forgiven for that particular slackness). But a second
reading is going to have to happen soon—perhaps I'll review it then, even after
it's already appeared in my Dozen. At any rate, you need not love Proust to enjoy her adventures and encounters with those who knew him. It might also be of interest to some of you that
Mina was the sister of Lincoln Kirstein, who was the co-founder of the New York
City Ballet among other things, and who is mentioned in cultural records of the
time by more famous people than you can shake a stick at.
1) SUSAN GILRUTH, Death in Ambush (1952)
It's partly the seasonal spirit that leads me to place this
one at the top of my list, and partly because it was acquired during (and therefore provides fond memories of) our trip
to London. (The British Library is a dangerous place with its
3-for-the-price-of-2 deal on its own publications—I escaped with only 6 Crime
Classics this time, due to the fact that I was already eyeing a growing pile of
books in our hotel room as a result of my Oxfam visits, and becoming vaguely
worried about getting them home; otherwise it would surely have been 9, or 12. Or 15?) But in its own right, Death in
Ambush is an irresistibly charming, lighthearted, Christmas-themed mystery,
the first of Gilruth's seven mysteries to make its way back into print, though
it's actually the second she published. It's a cheerful village whodunnit—not absolutely a comedy per se, though it certainly has its wry humour, but its village setting
and characters reminded me of the Mrs Mallory mysteries by Hazel Holt, or indeed
of a sort of Provincial Lady Deals With Death. Lee Crauford, our heroine,
is staying with friends, a doctor and his wife, in the South of England, when a much-loathed former judge is murdered. Practically everyone in
the village has a motive to kill him. Lee doesn't (intentionally) do much sleuthing herself, but as she gets pulled into the
social rounds of the village, she comes across clues and passes them on to her
"friend", Scotland Yard Detective-Inspector Hugh Gordon, whom she had
met in Gilruth's earlier novel, Sweet Revenge (1951). Their relationship
is undoubtedly flirtatious, despite her status as a married woman, and the introduction
by Martin Edwards gives us the background that Gilruth's own marriage (to a doctor,
no less, which must have given her insight into the life of a doctor's family,
entertainingly portrayed here) had ended a few years before she began writing
(no mention of whether a real-life Detective-Inspector was involved). It's quite a fun read, and I'm very much hoping the BL will get round to reprinting her other books in due
course. Otherwise, here are a few more titles for the next time I head from the British Library shop upstairs to the reading rooms.
And that's that!
What are some of you lovely readers' favorite books of the
year? Recommendations are welcome. And merry Christmas, happy holidays, delightful
gatherings and festivities, or lovely quiet times by a fire with a good book,
whichever you prefer!
