Here's all the books I didn't read over Christmas

... and some I adored this year

Hello friends,

I’m just back from an icy, sun-blazed walk in the woods with my dog. Kids are back in school, we are returning to a routine once again. Which I am both sorry and excited about. We had a lot of sickness over the holidays, but it wasn’t awful sickness, which meant that while we did have to cancel lots of things, we were all well enough to bake and do puzzles and watch movies, and have, in the end, exactly the break our tired and addled selves needed. It was the first Christmas after my brother in law was killed suddenly in an accident at the end of the summer, so there was much grief and holding, too. We all needed, I see now, to shut the world away and reset ourselves somehow.

I’d planned to read LOTS of books over Christmas. I’d planned to write you a post about them all in the lead up to the holidays. I neither wrote the post nor read the books. I read a third of one book. I watched 3 Pirates of the Caribbean movies, 2 Home Alones and did 1 hologram Harry Potter puzzle. We also watched Small Things Like These, which was both wonderful and yet not as good as Keegan’s book.

Two days ago, as the cold front began to move in from the Arctic and the first signs of soft, wet snow were falling, I went out to walk the dog. I felt like listening to something as I walked. I scrolled through the books I have on the go on Audible, and none of them felt right. And then it struck me - it was Tender is the Night time.

My copy of Tender is the Night I’ve reread every 4 or 5 years since I was 19

Every 4 or 5 years, I re-read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, I’ve been doing so since I first read it on the terrace of a youth hostel just outside Cannes when I was 19. It was a grand old building, not unlike the hotel Rosemary stays in with her mother in those wonderfully evocative first chapters - I felt like I was in the book as it read it that first time. Listening this time, it has been fascinating to realise things I’ve missed in all my eye-to-page reads. That sweeping opening scene on the beach is so brilliantly depicted, so filmic the way we are brought into this world. I felt that sun burn on Rosemary’s shoulders and thighs all the more as the icy wind cut into my own hands and legs as I walked…

Anyway, by way of hello! again after the break, and a check in before my first post this coming Friday (a guest post on R E S T plus a delicious nourishing practice from the brilliant

Chloe George

this week I’m also recording what promises to be a fascinating conversation with

Lauren Barber

about how Human Design has helped us both, which I’ll be sharing the following week) - anyway in advance of all that I thought I’d share a list of books with you - books I read this year that I adored, and books I’m very much looking forward to diving into in the coming weeks and months instead.

some of the books I loved this year

5 books I read this year that I adored
The Song of the Whole Wide World by Tamarin Norwood
This book is devastating in the honest, life altering, perspective-shifting way it describes a pregnancy and 72 minutes of life of Norwood’s son Gabriel. I read this book and felt utterly changed.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey
This book, too, shifted my world for good. How I view the planet I live on, how I look up at the night sky, both forever will be a little different after these 120-odd pages. (It’s of note that this and Norwood’s book are exceptionally short - amazingly concentrated writing - Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day is another short, devastating book I read this year).

All Fours by

Miranda July

I’ve written and talked extensively about the impact of July’s book has had for me - along with

Chloe George

Caro Giles

and

Lindsay Johnstone

I’ve even done a series of conversations picking apart topics and themes that really got us thinking. Again, a book that had me think differently and really had me feel seen. And also laugh out loud. I also can’t stop thinking about this conversation July shared about a real-life ‘pat-down’ she and a friend of hers did - an idea that she describes in the book.

"Have I Been Wanting To Be Touched In A Motherly Way?"

Underland by Robert MacFarlane
This book is mindblowing. It’s an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds ‘as they exist in myth, literature, memory and the land itself.’ But it is mostly the physical places that MacFarlane travels that will stay with me for a long time - underground ghost rivers, catacombs, mining shafts, burial grounds for toxic waste … a world beneath our feet that has changed how I see the world above ground.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, this book cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment. I particularly was drawn to the ways Shibli depicts the shifting impossibility of mapping the geography of a place constantly being renamed and aggressively assimilated into another.

Chasing Fog by

Laura Pashby

After reading this wonderful meander through the unpredictable, liminal, unseen landscapes that fog creates, I’ve found myself pulling in to the side of the road to let my eye soak up a foggy scene and walking towards patches of mist and heavy cloud on walks with the dog, thinking - Laura would like this! Laura guest posted here on beauty & bone earlier this year with an excerpt from her beautiful book - take a read here:

fog is weather that becomes a space

Books I’m going to dive into in the coming months

Eve - How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. I’m actually already a 1/3 of the way through this. It’s utterly compelling, extraordinarily rich on research and detail, and completely fascinating. I’m really looking forward to the Menopause chapter, I’m hoping it’ll shed some more light on why we’ve evolved to go through menopause, with a view to me understanding more how I’d like to embrace and navigate this time.

The Giant on the Skyline by

Clover Stroud

I’m a big fan of Clover’s writing, having first come across her a number of years ago when a friend gave me a copy of These Wild and Sleepless Nights. I love how Clover interrogates and explores aspects of her own life, have enjoyed reading her Substack posts and conversations on the book and am really looking forward to finally diving into it!

Wake of the Whale by

Alice Kinsella

& Daniel Wade
This book looks quite unlike anything I’ve read before - part documentary, part poetry, part history - the book explores Ireland’s treatment of whales over the centuries (of which I knew nothing) and ask ‘if the attitudes that brought whales to the brink of extinction are now threatening our own’ …

Sins of my Father -

Dr Lily Dunn

I’ve been dying to read this since I came across Lily’s brilliant writing on her Substack And a Dog earlier this year. She is a fabulous, rigorous writer (and mentor - I’m also taking part in her

London Lit Lab

workshops this year) and her story is a remarkable one to tell. I’m really looking forward to some time with this book.

Mouthful of Birds by Samantha Schweblin
This was recommended by one of the guests at a short story workshop I took part in earlier in the summer with Stinging Fly as the perfect example of the short story form. It blends the surreal and the everyday, the nightmarish and the beautiful - and so sounds just up my alley :-)

Threatening Women by

Belinda Vigors

I’ve just got an email letting me know my preorder of this book, which explores why Ireland contained more women and children in mother and baby homes than any other country in the world, is in the post. Traversing a vast epoch of time from the medieval to the mid-twentieth century this book ‘delves into the cultural history behind Ireland’s shaming and containing of ‘disobedient’, deviant, and ‘transgressive’ women. Check out more in this post.

Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha
I’ll just share with you the dust jacket for this one, it describes what’s to come so well. 'Barely 30 years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current assault on Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverising a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime’

So hard to choose just a handful, my ‘to read’ list is about 40 books long!
What should I add ? What have your stand-out books this year been? What are you looking forward to reading? I’d love to hear in the comments, so do please share!

And I’m really looking forward to slowly stepping into a new year of writing, sharing, sparking off each other this year. Layla x

This is the little notebook I keep year to year - at the front all the books I’d like to read, at the back a list of those I’ve read each year, month by month.