What I Read in October 2023

Cosy season really hit in October: we’ve had a lot of things going on behind the scenes and I had a scary hospital appointment mid-month, so decided to keep the entire month fairly relaxed. It worked in my favour. I quietly worked on getting my NetGalley ARC ratio to a good point, and managed four ARCs in the end! I took on the beast that is Babel and completely fell in love with Robin Swift’s Oxford, and even got ’round to a Love Island memoir – it’s the variety for me. All things considered, I feel balanced and reset and I’ve been happily embracing autumn and all of its colourful quirks. Plus, I worked on a big bookish project all month which further fuelled my reading productivity.

Landbridge: Life in Fragments by Y-Dang Troeung

Thank you to Penguin Books and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: ★★★★/5

This gorgeous memoir felt like far more than a memoir. Born in, and named after, Thailand’s Khao-I-Dang refugee camp, Y-Dang Troeung was just one when she fled her homeland and was admitted to Canada. There, she became the poster child for the Canadian refugee project and the horrors of Pol Pot’s brutal, senseless Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

Admittedly, I didn’t know a whole lot about this part of history, which made this book all the more special to read. It’s written in a beautifully lyrical way that transcends prose, dialogue and memory. The chapters are fairly short, which moves the memoir quickly and simultaneously absorbs you into the ‘story’, and some of them are letters from Troeung to her son, offering a scrapbook effect. A truly beautiful read.

Moving Mountains: Writing Nature through Illness and Disability edited by Louise Hayward

Thank you to Footnote Press and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: ★★★.5/5

Moving Mountains is an anthology of nature writing and essays, all from the lens of those living with illness and disability. I found it to be an immediately rewarding and illuminating read, as the author opens it with a brilliant introduction that covers the beauty of nature, their motivations for writing the book, and an insight into, specifically, why it’s important to see nature through the eyes of those with disabilities.

I found this to be a beautiful and thought-provoking read. Nature shines through in all of the essays, but so does humanness and a look into how many people live in our society. I am not chronically ill but I still took a lot from this book, understanding deeper how wild landscapes offer a sense of both solace and belonging.

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Rating: ★★★★★/5

Hot off the heels of reading Yellowface, I spotted Kuang’s Babel on Kindle’s monthly deals and instantly picked it up. I’d actually forgotten that I put this book on my 2023 Book Pledge, so it’s a happy coincidence that I got to it! I’m really intrigued by Kuang as an author, having read The Poppy War and Yellowface before this one. There’s no doubt Kuang is a talented writer, but I’m most excited to see which genre she masters, as there’s lots of cross-genre work going on thus far in her works.

Right from the off, I really enjoyed Babel and I think I can firmly call myself a Kuang fangirl. There’s true mastery in world-building here: the story is set in speculative versions of 1800s London, Oxford and Canton, immersing the reader into discovering these destinations as outsiders. Robin Swift is a sweet protagonist: he is brought to England from his home country of Canton by a mysterious guardian, plied with books and academia and newness. Although Robin immediately develops a love for the city of Oxford and Babel, the Royal Institute of Translation, it soon becomes a prison-like place for him.

As Robin begins to study language and etymology at Babel, he also begins a learning and understanding into who Professor Lovell is and what he stands for. Thus begins an epic story that is packed with found family, complex characters and a fight for what they believe in, and conflicts of power. Babel is a stunning historical fantasy that sweeps its reader into an examination of colonialism, using silver as a brilliant analogy for the wealth that is people.

This book is also a love letter to language and academia, and it’s quite breathtaking to think of just how much research the author poured into it. For a huge novel (it’s around 600 pages), I think it’s well-paced and absorbing enough. I love a slowly undulating read and this did just that for me.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Rating: ★★★★/5

CW: rape, war crimes, assault.

The thoughtful team at Fitzcarraldo Editions made Minor Detail free to download for a period in October, and I gratefully downloaded a copy immediately.

This short novella is a devastating but important read. It’s set in Palestine shortly after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, killing and burying her in the sand. Several years later, a woman becomes fascinated with this ‘minor detail’ of history. Minor Detail is written in an accessible, to-the-point style, but it’s between the lines that the story comes alive. Divided into two long chapters, one part focuses on the atrocity itself, and the other on the rumination of this slice of history. There’s a really brilliant observation on borders and what they mean, on people and a population in exile, and this is an important read.

The Flames by Sophie Haydock

Thank you to Transworld Digital and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: ★★★.5/5

Perhaps it’s because I started reading this at the same time as my now-beloved Babel, but I found The Flames a little tricky to get into at first. The Flames is a mesmerising debut novel from Sophie Haydock. Set in the 1900’s, we journey through the lives of four women that were muses and more to Egon Schiele, the controversial artist. Through the lens of Adele, Gertrude, Vally and Edith, we are transported to Vienna at the dawn of the 20th century.

The opening of The Flames is a little slow and felt almost awkward to me, but it picks up once we unpick the threads of Schiele’s muses. Historical facts are woven with glorious, dazzling fiction, painting a picture of an opulent city against more humble beginnings. Each of the four women hold intricate stories of their own, and Haydock brilliantly brings to life what they may have been like, what they felt during Schiele’s time, and how they influenced Egon and his art. I really felt like we spent enough time with each of the women, too.

Although I knew nothing of Egon Schiele before, this novel has captured my interest into his world and I’m desperate to get on with some intense research. It’s a gorgeous little historical fiction that centres the muses, not the famed.

The Wild Between Us by Amy Hagstrom

Thank you to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Rating: ★★★.5/5

I’m not much of a spooky or horror reader, so I felt like I wasn’t really making the most of October and its associated themes. However, I was accepted for the NetGalley ARC of The Wild Between Us, a mystery fiction set in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and it was an apt read.

“After inheriting his uncle’s lodge, Silas Matheson hopes the grandeur of the California Sierra Nevada will be a fresh start for his two young sons, and a chance to finally face his demons. It was here, fifteen years ago, that Silas and his friends Jessica, Danny, and Meg ventured into the mountain wilderness and Jessica vanished without a trace. When his boys go missing in the same dark woods, the fear and guilt that Silas has been running from ever since come crashing back. Silas’s panicked call brings in the local search and rescue unit, and two familiar Danny and Meg.

As the frantic search gets underway, the three friends are plunged into a painfully recurring nightmare, each of them thinking, This can’t be happening again. With a storm brewing and the boys’ fates threatened with every desperate hour, the secrets of the past begin to surface, and this time, for Silas, Danny, and Meg, there’s no escaping the truth.”

This is a heart-wrenching mystery that unravels in a dual-timeline narrative, which works perfectly here in building suspense, creating mirrors and stacking up the mystery. I found it a little hard to follow in an eBook format, since I like flipping back and forth to check on dates, which is definitely something to consider. Our protagonist Silas, once magnetic at high school, is now a newly single father of two. After returning to his uncle’s lodge where one of his friends went missing on a group hike, he must face his demons when his children both go missing on the mountains.

Hagstrom does a brilliant job in warping time and creating a pressure-cooker effect here. There’s tension right from the start, delivered beautifully against a backdrop of stunning nature landscapes, then the frantic, realistic dialogue adds to this. I did find one or two passages read a little cliche, but the story itself was good enough to balance that out.

I found it difficult to like any of the characters, except for the two little boys, and I suspect this was intentional. Danny and Meg were full of leftover teenage angst, and Silas seemed inherently flawed in every way. But, it did provide a juicy story to uncover and, annoyingly, I was captivated at every turn. (Perhaps I just haven’t read a mystery in a while, and this really scratched an itch!)

I devoured The Wild Between Us in a matter of days, so it’s safe to say I enjoyed it. The characters are well-developed and the scenery throughout the book really appealed to the nature lover in me. Although the back-and-forth started to grate on me a little, I think that was largely down to the format. There’s an odd chapter or two in the middle that really slowed the pace of the story but, again, that can be forgiven for how captivating I found the rest of the book.

The Wild Between Us is due to publish on 7 November 2023.

Becoming Molly-Mae by Molly Hague

Rating: ★★.5/5

Something not many of you know about me is that I’m actually a fairly big fan of Molly-Mae from Love Island, scandals and controversies aside. I’ve found her career trajectory to be completely fascinating and her content is pretty relatable. Plus, she’s actually local to where I’m from! So, I wanted to, at some point, read her autobiography.

Written and published when she was just 23, I went in knowing what to expect: a behind-the-scenes glimpse into her rise and rise. My rating for Becoming Molly-Mae is solely for this book. There’s no doubt that Molly-Mae is a curious character and her voice shines throughout. However, the writing sounds like a mix between a copy-editor not nailing her tone and a transcribed audio note all at once. The sentences and paragraphs are choppy and aren’t hugely in-depth, which adds to the Molly-ness of the book.

I really like that Molly-Mae chose to cover topics like parental divorce, body image, endometriosis, and early career ambitions in her book. These really sing to young people – again, I know I’m not the target audience! – and are a great way to use her platform. But, the chapters don’t go into any depth. Instead, the chapters are broken into short, readable segments that could be longer Instagram captions. This does create a readability that appeals to younger audiences.

Another part of the book heavily focused, of course, on Molly-Mae’s Instagram life. There’s even a detailed passage – probably one of the longest in the book – discussing exactly what she does on a week-to-week basis! I found it fairly alarming

I read this in about three days and it was definitely a compelling read. An autobiography of somebody aged 23 can only hold so much, so I can’t help thinking it’d have been a stronger read with sections written by experts. There’s a section about friendships that I cringed whilst reading: I certainly had those some feelings aged 23… but they’d all mellowed out with a bit more life experience!

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Rating: ★★★★/5

It seems like all of us in the SBJ Book Club love The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and after Anh’s multiple rave reviews, I had to pick up a copy when I saw it on Kindle’s Daily Deals. (On a side note, I really recommend Jessie’s Patreon community if you love her YouTube content. The Patreon includes early access to videos, monthly exclusive content and videos, and several interactive events and book clubs. Our Discord is SO much fun and everybody has impeccable taste in books!)

The Road is a quiet, bleak and unsettling story. A man and his son navigate a post-apocalyptic, burned and ravaged America together, in search of the coast. There is nothing left in the ravaged landscape, save for ash on the wind and remnants of what was. They have nothing besides a pistol – for defence – and a cart of scavenged food, and each other.

I really enjoyed this and am sort of glad it was my first McCarthy. The lack of chapters, the repetition and the uncanny, eerie quietness of the book sung to me. McCarthy’s simple, literary tone creates a desolate setting and really unsettling mood: I often finished a reading sprint and found myself shocked to be ‘in real life’. The slowness builds tension perfectly. We don’t really know what is happening in the book’s world; we’re as much in the dark as the characters are. The son’s voice lends a naïveté and poignancy to the read, as well.

November Hopefuls

I’ve been slack on using my TBR jar all sorts of reasons but, as the end of the year draws closer, I need to be a little more intentional with the books I’m picking up. I want to finish my 2023 Book Pledge reads, after all! At last, I’m in a good place with my NetGalley ARCs, so I’m excited to get to these books.