Weird Fiction Review: The Beginning
Reading Resolutions
I promised in one of my recent posts that I would be starting with my Weird Fiction Review today on 1 January 2025. I also promised that I would be giving you a review of Poor Things by Alisdair Gray.
Only one of those things has come true.
I finished reading Poor Things on 23 December 2024 and had every intention of writing a review. However, two things got in the way.
First, I wrote this piece of fiction instead for Emily S Hurricane’s Fiction Gift Exchange (you can see all of the stories exchanged at that link) which was really fun and great motivation to finally write a fantasy short story that has been mulling away in my head for awhile now.
Second, I have been recovering from a cold for the last several days and I did not want to write a review for you that was half-baked and lacking in the care and thought that a book like Poor Things deserves. It was very good and I want to at least try to do it justice. So expect the review in your inboxes on 1 February 2025!
Which brings us to today’s post. Tuddah! Here, instead, is a short list of things I enjoyed reading last year plus what I look forward to reading this year.
Books I loved in 2024
Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
I love a clever narrative and these certainly match that description. Both books are told from the titular character’s perspective, but the second book uses second person perspective incredibly well. The changes in narrative style were exciting and both books kept me guessing right throughout. If you like space and necromancers and whodunnits and interesting religious undertones, these books are for you.
The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue by VE Schwab
I had never read anything by VE Schwab before and I was sceptical of how popular this book was after some disappointments in the popular fantasy space, so I was surprised by how much I liked it. It follows the long life of a woman who makes a deal with the devil to live forever. The consequence of her deal is that as soon as she is out of sight of someone, they forget they ever knew her. This book dealt with an unadulterated love of life itself against the loss of the one thing that makes it worth living: connection with others.
Hagstone by Sinead Gleeson and Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
See the below post ‘In Search of Meaning’ for my thoughts on these two books. In a nutshell: they brought me back to good reading. They were also just so beautiful to read.
Piranesi by Susannah Clarke
Another clever little book. Piranesi is an odd man who lives in a three-dimensional staircase labyrinth who starts to find ripped-up pieces of old notebooks that once belonged to him. He learns about himself and how he arrived in the labyrinth at the same time as we do. See this very good review from the excellent Past the Dragon newsletter which explains how Clarke weaves the tale out of one of C.S. Lewis’ characters from the Chronicles of Narnia. Be warned: big spoilers in that review!
Rapture by Emily Maguire
This is a beautifully lyrical novel about the life of a woman who became the Pope. Maguire does so much in so few pages, exploring the physicality of rejecting and subjugating one’s womanhood to pursue her faith against the undeniable desires which manifest in the body. The ending is seared into my brain.
Poetry I Loved in 2024
Dropbear by Evelyn Araluen
This was an incredible debut book of poetry and one that I keep returning to. The interweaving of humour and anger and sharp focus on the concept of Australian literature really ties the whole work together. Araluen is an Aboriginal poet, writer and researcher born and raised on Dharug Country as well as editor at Overland Magazine in Naarm. Here is a great interview with her from 2021 about the work. Find it in your local bookstore or ask your bookseller.
Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Alison Croggon)
You might recall from this post that I am a big fan of Alison Croggon. Croggon’s translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies is a masterpiece of poetry and translation. I love this pull quote from John Kinsella—‘Alison Croggon’s transformative and impassioned translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies attempts the extraordinary… Signature, regret, pain, trauma, wonder, euphoria, wonder, rapture and an immersion in the senses are all contained in the crispness and experiential sensibility that guides her relationship with the original poems. Croggon lives in the wild beauty of these Elegies and makes them glow in translation… This is an incendiary work.’ Beautiful. Go buy it from Croggon’s website.
Reading in 2025
Determining when is right to read a novel is a bit like figuring out if your pasta is cooked: you need to chew on a little bit of it before you go ahead and eat the whole thing.
For me, the way I chew on a novel is to spend a couple of months with it on my shelf before I crack it open. Every time I come to the shelf for the next book, I consider whether my eye lingers on its spine, whether I have seen or heard it mentioned in a post or by a friend, whether I am reminded of its existence and the promise of what it can tell me about its characters. I like to think of it as an interdimensional intertextuality; my reading life is informed by my broader life.
When some, if not all, of those things have occurred and have reached some abstract critical mass in my brain, then I will pick it up and start reading. Sometimes there is an outlier, but this is a fairly reliable formula for my reading modus operandi.
These are some of the books amassing presence on my mental reading list for 2025:
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (Yes, I know, I have heard it is incredible. Considering doing this slow read with Footnotes & Tangents on substack)
Literally anything by Anthony Trollope (I read this very beautiful critical essay on why we should be reading Trollope, which essay I highly recommend)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr (My husband read this last year and considers it one of the best books he has ever read which makes me very excited to savour it)
Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders (This is a short story collection from 1996 which I picked up at my local second-hand bookstore. I love short stories and I hope to encourage everyone to read more of them)
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (It is a brilliant device to write a poem and then write several different reviews of the poem from different perspectives. Genius. I will be reading a lot of Nabokov this year, methinks)
The Carnal Fugues by Catherine McNamara (This is another short story collection published in 2023 by a small independent Australian publisher Puncher & Wattmann. McNamara is also Australian but has lived all over the world. I saw someone on substack comment about this being an incredibly under-acknowledged piece of work—although I was excited to see it shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Award—and I cannot wait to get my copy from my local bookstore)
As many of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels and essays as I can get my hands on (UKLG is my guiding star for literary science fiction and fantasy. The Dispossessed is possibly my favourite novel of all time, but I have so much more of hers to read and re-read)
I also want to start reading more essays by my favourite authors, more poetry, more literary criticism, more more more.
Let me know what you are excited to read in 2025 or if you are thinking of reading anything I have mentioned here!
Thanks for reading—Jess
I love how your reading choices are influencing and broadening my reading choices. I just bought the last 4 books in the Rivers of London series of 9. I have reintroduced poetry into my reading choices in 2024 and enjoying rediscovering David Whyte and new to me poets.