a quick book inventory
what i've read for the first quarter of 2025
April – ughhh. How did we get here? Or as Edna St. Vincent Millay more artfully puts it ‘To what purpose, April, do you return again?’. A whole quarter of the year has chunked itself out of the calendar and suddenly here we are. The hawthorns are blossoming, there are daffodils and tulips in the supermarkets – and I haven’t written a single Substack post like I resolved to do in the New Year. Eeep.
But better late than never, right? To ease myself back into this form I thought I’d just do a little dive into the books I’ve read thus far this year. There’s no point in me fucking about with anymore of an intro here so let’s just jump into them chronologically:
The Wild Iris - Louise Glück
Frequently as a poet, you read stuff that actually makes you angry with how good it is. Glück inspires me because of her reserved capabilities; she pares back any extraneous baggage leaving only the most delicate and precise of language, whereas I am gluttonous with words, fattening up the white space of the page with as many ‘shiny’ images I can find. This meditative collection, exploring (partially) depression and relationships with the divine through the continued motif of garden flowers is so lightly penned but so punchily impactful. It strikes me as conveying a writer deeply in touch with herself whilst managing to maintain a sense of emotional remove that keeps the poems uncluttered. Gorgeous! Stunning!
Either/Or - Elif Batuman
It would be amiss not to mention The Idiot in this context. I read Batuman’s first novel at the end of last year and was enthralled with it. Nothing happened for like 150 pages and yet I was totally there for it! It also reminded me of how exciting it can be to Have A Crush. This sequel, then, struck me as pretty unnecessary. Batuman’s voice continued to have that charming quality that pulls you in for great bouts of wondering and wandering about - but it felt as if the first novel could have set very happily on its own without this follow-up.
The Carrying - Ada Limòn
This is a re-read for me! Limòn has a signature style in terms of the personal-universal, with this kind of zoom in and zoom out effect that casts an eyeball kick comparison between the image and the profoundly human. I think I was quite enamoured with her sound patterning this time around - it's beautifully crafted stuff, truly at the top of her game.
Black Swans - Eve Babitz
Great fun! Loved her voice and her humour. Having saturated myself in Didion, it was refreshing to read cultural essays that revelled in the chaos and joy of the writer herself. It’s that sense of candour that’s really admirable about Babitz; and the tongue-in-cheek humour. As a society we have really lost the art of the short term passionate love affair. Thank god Babitz was not born in the age of the situationship.
Rosemary’s Baby - Ira Levin
I watched Rosemary’s Baby for the first time last year and was floored. The original book is a great pulpy horror, with the text to film adaptation being scene by scene faithful. I think what rings so solidly for me with this is how the horror plays into real structural nightmares of medical sexism and the denial of female bodily autonomy - the mass gaslighting of Rosemary is so sickening in its accuracy, whilst the public ownership of her body as nothing more than a vessel for reproduction remains upsettingly disturbing even in contemporary times.
Bluets - Maggie Nelson
I consumed this in under two hours after missing the train back to Edinburgh from St Andrews (huge thanks to Holly for letting me devour her literally-just-bought-an-hour-ago book before her). A hugely interesting concept embracing the hybrid form, with lots of great fragments of clarity and wonderfully stitched in references. I have not stopped thinking about the Leonardo Da Vinci quote - “Love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing”
A Breath of Life - Clarice Lispector
I mean what an insanely gorgeous piece of art. Meditative, self-reflexive, confessional, philosophical. Its resonance in terms of her own cancer diagnosis is exceptionally profound, but even disregarding those contexts it delivers page after page of wonderfully lucid contemplations on the nature of creation and life. I only wish I had the ‘superunderstanding’ to describe this with any justice. Simply a one of kind visionary piece.
frank:sonnets - Diane Seuss
We’ve been sharing poetry books around our circle of recent, adding our own annotations to each text like a Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Travelling Poetry? …) situation. This is a Jordan entry to the club so many thanks to her - Seuss has been on my radar for a long time but as far as I can tell she’s rarely stocked on this side of the pond. I very much enjoyed her takes on the modern sonnet; loved the autobiographical textures that essentially narrativise the collection. It balances so much of the personal with the American universal in a way that is immensely, introspectively probing and simultaneously diagnostic of wider society. Intelligent, brutal, sardonic - loved it.
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
My main question with this book was - if I’d never seen Fight Club, how long would it have taken me to realise that the narrator and Tyler were one & the same? I fear it would be earlier than Palahniuk might hope but I can’t be certain! A lot of wickedly dark elements, in turns far more gruesome & chaotic than the film. And then it gets… dare I say sentimental? Just a kind of whimper towards the end of something toeing some interesting boundaries. Bret Easton Ellis would never!
Cairn - Kathleen Jamie
I’ve dipped in and out of her Scots collection The Keelie Hawk whilst I’ve been studying modern & contemporary Scottish poetry, and then also glanced at a few of her poems in class. As I develop more as a writer, I find myself desiring to get into nature & eco-poetics (who can deny the original muses?) - she is great at aligning the natural world with problematic climate situations. I think this is a really measured work of creative non-fiction that crosses genre boundaries in its interweaving of fragmentary essays with poems. I love the binding structure of this, the idea of the careful stacking of the Cairn. I look forward to really getting my nose into more of her stuff!
Selected Poems - W.S Graham
I have gone half-mad writing about this half-mad poet for class. A writer singularly fixated on the idea of language itself to the degree of basically only writing meta poems about language. The sea? Language. The arctic? Language. The forest? Language. As a huge lover of words, it tickles a very specific spot for me. I also just happen to think he’s great craic; a tempestuous and lonely drunk with a billion insane anecdotes about his character. My personal favourite: ‘his publisher Faber assumed (possibly hoped) he had died’
Atlantis - Mark Doty
Another Sisterhood collection (shoutout to Grace). I opened the book immediately to the most gorgeous descriptions of salt marshes and knew immediately this was My Kind Of Stuff. This hits a lot of amazing notes - incredibly imagistic, full of loss, of paint and colours, seas and the city. Having read some of Doty’s interviews, this is a truly spectacular mind at work. Stands stunningly at “the edge of immensity”, delves gorgeously into “the sheer intricacy of wreck”.
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Exposing myself here as a first time reader. Wayyyy darker and freakier than I expected from page one! Really makes you wonder what the hell those Brontës were going through in Yorkshire. Has made me incredibly angry about the upcoming casting now that I truly understand the characters… There was a slight bit of dragging somewhere in the middle but overall fab classic! Heathcliff absolutely sucks!
Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Ocean Vuong
I’ve only read Vuong’s fiction before, from which I am well aware that he can craft an amazing image. This is an incredibly balanced collection, that feels light whilst immensely penetrating. I really adored the poem that presents itself as fragmented journal entries, which manages to string itself both chronologically/narratively whilst having that splintered structure of disjointed thoughts. So many gorgeous lines - I think the one I’ve left most strongly with is ‘I will forget to write / a bit of light into the room’.
That’s all folks! Hopefully now I’m finished with classes (terrifying, horrible, crying, screaming, tortured by the passage of time) I’ll be able to test my skills in Substack writing once again. Or, I might get so consumed in writing my diss that I’ll woefully neglect this blog. Let’s hope its the former…
“april - how did we get here?” i felt in my bones