And here we go again. There is very little to report on the writing front right now (although there is definitely some of that going on from time to time) and I am six months late in reporting on my reading. But let’s pretend that no-one’s noticed (which may in fact be true, given the number of readers this blog has) and carry on as if everything is normal, OK?
So this is what I read in March 2025.
Literary Landscapes edited by John Sutherland. I got given this coffee table book a few Christmases back and it’s a lot of fun. Basically, it’s a collection of illustrated essays about the real places that have informed recent and not-so-recent literary classics, such as Elena Ferrante’s Naples, that kind of thing. If you’re a writer and you have a coffee table handy, I would definitely recommend it.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming. A few years ago I set out on a quest for no good reason to read all the Bond novels in order. I’d somehow got out of the habit, to the extent that if I wanted to keep them all in the same edition (and of course I did – what kind of a monster do you think I am?) I found that I had to buy this one secondhand. This is, of course, [spoiler alert] The One In Which She Dies At The End, and there’s a definite sense of Fleming stretching himself emotionally a bit here, and the results are better than most of the rest of the series. Stick around for next month, when we look at You Only Live Twice, which is actually very odd indeed.
Echo Burning by Lee Child. This was another series that I’d started from scratch and then drifted away from. This is the fifth Jack Reacher novel and it wisely eschews the downright weirdness of The Visitor for a more conventional smalltown corruption plot. There is absolutely no messing about with Child’s prose, which delivers exactly what you want at the pace you want it.
Legion of Bones by T.A.Frost. This is the final novel in what you might call “the serious trilogy” by Toby Frost, who is much better known for the extremely funny Space Captain Smith books. If renaissance period zombies are your thing – and, honestly, why shouldn’t they be? – look no further. In my opinion, it’s a terrible reflection on the state of the publishing industry that Toby ended up self-publishing these books, because they are absolutely excellent. They are witty (of course), fast-paced and genuinely exciting, with a terrifically feisty heroine in the shape of Giulia Degarno.