Five Brilliant Bonus Reads For Book Lovers
Five brilliant (short!) things I read last year, all right here on Substack
Welcome to Five Books For, a newsletter for people who love great stories, and happy new year! I’m so glad you’re here.
I hope you had a wonderful celebration if you like to stay up to see the new year in, and a lovely cosy early night if that’s more your thing. Here in Spain New Year’s Eve is a big deal - traditionally it’s spent with family (with people only heading out to parties after midnight has passed) and at the stroke of midnight it’s traditional to eat twelve grapes, one for each bong of the clock. This year when my husband was buying the grapes the shop assistant suggested some tinned grapes which come in a special souvenir tin, ready to be eaten without having to peel or deseed them. If you recoiled when you read the words ‘tinned grapes’, then your instincts are correct - they were gross. Unfortunately having to eat one per second for twelve seconds precluded us from getting up and grabbing some normal ones to replace them with, which meant we just had to eat them. Never again. Next year we’ll make sure we have fresh ones ready and no tinned grapes will be crossing our threshold ever again. I’m pretty sure there were grapes in the tins of fruit cocktail we used to eat back in the 1980s (along with one cherry, cut into halves) and I don’t remember them being so awful then but perhaps that’s just the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia talking. Anyway, I hope your New Year was free of food-related abominations and full of joy instead.
This is a New Year bonus edition of the newsletter which is really just to share a few extras with you of the sort I don’t often get to cover. All of the recommendations are right here on Substack and are mostly book-related, so I really hope there’ll be something for you to enjoy.
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Okay, let’s dive in!
Wolf Crawl and War & Peace Readalongs by at Footnotes & Tangents
This year I joined Simon’s Wolf Crawl readalong, where he guided a huge group of us through Hilary Mantel’s incredible Wolf Hall trilogy of novels. I first read Wolf Hall years ago but I didn’t feel like I really grasped what was great about it; I found it quite hard going in parts but liked it enough to try again when I saw Simon’s readalong and I am SO GLAD I did. What an absolutely amazing read - for days after finishing the final novel, I was too heartbroken to even think of reading anything else. Simon has taken a book (well, three books) with a very specific literary style and made them both accessible and joyful to read by sharing his own insights and reflections, lots of historical context, and a very manageable schedule.
He also runs a War & Peace readalong, which I signed up for at the same time as Wolf Crawl. Initially I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to manage both but I figured I’d give it a go and again, I was so glad I did. I read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as a teenager and loved it but somehow had the impression that War & Peace would be hard work or not as fun. I won’t lie, it is pretty dry in parts (much more so than Anna Karenina) - I had no idea that Tolstoy was quite so obsessed with the philosophy of history, but the vast majority of the book centres on a few characters who are so wonderfully drawn and fully realised that I became deeply invested in finding out what happened to them as well as being able to appreciate what he was trying to do with the literary form of the story. If you’ve ever fancied reading War & Peace but have been put it off because it feels too big or daunting, then this is the perfect way to do it (and if you want to skim the drier bits I’m sure no one will mind!)
For both readalongs, each week Simon has ‘assigned’ a page limit (roughly a chapter a day for W&P, and more variable - but roughly even - portions of the Wolf Hall trilogy, which has much longer chapters). There’s no pressure to follow the schedule exactly and I found that some weeks I ended up racing ahead while other weeks (ahem, months) I fell quite far behind but found it easy to catch up because of Simon’s weekly emails. If you don’t have a book club in your real life, then this is a wonderful way to read alongside others. How much you participate in the discussion is up to you - there are regular posts and chat threads where you can talk to other readers or you can use the readalong as more of a private project which provides you with structure and schedule, which is effectively what I did. Simon is running both readalongs again this year as well as various others which will no doubt be just as thoughtfully planned and engaging. You can see the full programme he has on offer here.
The Age Of Innocence Readalong at Closely Reading with
Haley is a literature expert who shares the most intriguing insights into the books she reads alongside her readers. I read The Age Of Innocence by Edith Wharton with her this year and got so much from it - Haley was a great guide and especially good at sharing things to look out for and themes to consider as we read the book. Reading slowly and closely in a group also means that you get to benefit from all the insights and thoughts of other readers too and I loved seeing what others thought of the story. Another great thing about reading with Haley is her academic focus on literary analysis, which gives you all the joy of a university literature class without the crazy fees or indeed the pressure to write an essay at the end. This year Haley is focusing on classic books by women which explore class, including Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen (which I recommended in the first ever Five Books For, if you’d like to read it). If you want to join one of Haley’s readalongs you can see what’s coming up here:
Investigating Lord Lucan with
Laura writes an absolutely brilliant Substack with various elements of biography, miscellany and crime both literary and true, including the disappearance of Agatha Christie, but my favourite thing of hers which I read last year was her discussion of the Lord Lucan mystery which is infamous in the UK. I remember it being discussed when I was a child in the 1980s even though he had disappeared in 1974. Laura is an expert on the case and has published a book on it, but treated us all to an assessment of five of the most likely solutions in a series of posts that had me waiting eagerly to see what was coming next. You can visit Laura’s Substack here to get an idea of the topics she writes on:
Did Frank Sinatra Really Play At My Grandma’s High School? by
Chris writes one of my favourite Substacks called Can’t Get Much Higher, where he talks about music with a focus on data-driven research - it’s so fascinating and a lot of fun to read if you’re a lover of music.
Frank Sinatra is probably my favourite artist of all time, and probably the one artist I listen to the most frequently and consistently (Spotify tells me I am in the top 0.1% of Sinatra listeners - there’s some music data!) so when I saw the title of this post I was delighted. I cannot imagine how amazing it would have been to see him live, especially in his early career, so Chris’ odyssey to find out whether his Grandma had remembered this correctly was a brilliant read. While I know it’s not technically book-related, the amount of research he had to do to find out the truth reminded me of the type of literary mystery a librarian might be best placed to solve and I really think it will resonate with a lot of you.
The Môrdreigiau Chronicles by
Last but definitely not least, my friend Leanne Shawler writes this wonderful fiction Substack, completely free. Leanne has no idea that I’m mentioning her work here and has never asked me to recommend it.
The Môrdreigiau Chronicles is a Regency romance novel but with a fantasy element which includes sea dragons and an Arthurian quest to save the world from ecological collapse. Think Jane Austen or Bridgerton with a dash of Lord Of The Rings (and no raunch!) - it’s so much fun but also beautifully written and with great characters and plotting.
Leanne has serialised it into bitesized chunks and it’s easy to catch up if you haven’t been following along thus far. Even more fun, Leanne is an artist as well as a writer and has created videos where she ‘finds’ the secret journals of the main character (which are beautifully made and hand-written pieces of art in their own right). I love how she has combined her writing with her visual art to make something completely unique and immersive.
Thanks for reading!
I hope you found something good to read here. As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the things I’ve included here. You can reply directly to this email or leave a comment by clicking the button below.
Join me next time for a whole new theme - I have some really interesting ones planned for 2025 which I hope you’ll love as much as I do!
In the meantime, I wish you happy reading.
Kate
Leanne Shawler’s book is so wonderful and hard to put down !’
I am so tempted to join the Tolstoy one!