Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit! Welcome to February, and welcome to our annual winter reading poll!
Tell us about a great book to curl up with on a frosty winter night, and what fragrance we should wear while reading it. (Or, do what I do and record here everything you have read since the last quarterly reading poll. And if you want more recommendations, scrolling through the literature tag will bring up all the older reading polls.)
Or, as always, just talk about something else.
My recent reading…
For fiction, I finished Armistead Maupin’s The Days of Anna Madrigal and Mona of the Manor, which brings me up to date on the Tales of the City saga. I read and loved Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, plus two books each by Anne Michaels (Held and Fugitive Pieces) and Samantha Harvey (The Western Wind and Orbital). Just last night I finished Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Mathias Énard.
Of all of those, the one I will scent is Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind. Her Orbital won the Booker, and I did find it enjoyable and thought-provoking, but it didn’t move me nearly as much as The Western Wind. For the river and the general atmosphere of water and murk, I’ll go with L’Artisan Parfumeur L’Eau de L’Artisan, even though seasonally it’s all wrong.
I read only one proper mystery, John Banville’s The Drowned, plus three spy thrillers: William Boyd’s Gabriel’s Moon (not my absolute favorite of his books), the last John le Carré, Silverview, and Nick Harkaway’s Karlas Choice.
I finally finished Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch, which I’d started in the fall, and on a much lighter note, I read three more books by Shaun Bythell, The Confessions of a Bookseller, Remainders of the Day and Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops. Another on the lighter side: Seth Rogovoy’s Within You Without You: Listening to George Harrison. I read most of The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy (collected essays and fiction). I adored Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (I think this was a Kanuka recommendation) and while it is hard going and I did skip some particularly brutal episodes of cruelty, I finished Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain.
Note: the Bunny bookends (“With their upward gaze and extra-long ears, these weighty sculpted hares look as eager to hear a story as they are able to support the books they’re read from”) are $130 at Restoration Hardware.