Recent reading
May. 21st, 2026 09:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI do fairly little reading in my workday at the bookshop, despite being surrounded by books. Recently I started picking books up of the store shelves at complete random to try the starts of them, partly to give myself more points of reference in what we stock, but also because I do very little reading of things that haven't been recommended to me, and it's interesting to read a first page having no idea. The first two things I read were litfic about people being sad in late life, one of them with vivid material detail like the sawdust falling out of the imprint where a tack is pulled from a plasterboard wall, and one of them with absolutely nothing I liked. Neither seemed to have plot.
I think it is good for me to read small bits of things I hate, because then I went home and read the first page of Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching. I have owned that book for years, and read the first page at least three times, but this time I went, "Oh my gosh this is so much better than those books I picked up at random," and kept reading.
White is for Witching is great. It is about a girl called Miranda, who we learn on the first page has vanished, perhaps died. It has the most beautiful descriptive language and it is about an extremely eerie haunting (one of the narrators is a house) and it has a strong sense of structural coherence despite having twists and turns that I could never predict. One of the things it's like is if Oyeyemi read two Shirley Jackson novels and decided to combine them. I am not entirely sure I know all the things I could know about the plot's causes and consequences, because I paused in the middle to read a whole different book and that was a bad idea, but that's okay, I will want to read it again. As well as the rest of Helen Oyeyemi's books, possibly.
The book I read in the middle of that one was The Works of Vermin, by Hiron Ennes. I had been waiting for it at the library for ages. (Leaflemming has several times asked why I don't just use Libby, the library ebook app, and one reason is that I'm out of the habit of reading on an e-reader, but the other is that I have so much access to books that the library reserve system is a useful filter.)
The Works of Vermin takes place in a city built into and on top of a giant rotting tree stump that straddles the poisonous River Catoptric. One of the protagonists, Guy, is an exterminator, whose team goes out and deals with the weird creatures that keep climbing out of the river and infesting the tree; he is poor, his job is poisoning him, and he's barely keeping ahead of the debts tattooed onto his body. The other protagonist, Elspeth, is a genius of a perfumer in the upper city; she is materially comfortable but has been poisoned by the city in a different way, and chafes under the close watch of an employer she cannot escape. When a giant centipede arrives in the city and begins causing trouble, their lives become entangled as they deal with the consequences.
This is a very queer book full of parasites, much like Ennes' first novel, Leech. It is a giant weird magical city book whose focus is surprisingly small and personal. It did not work for me perfectly but it did work for me really well.
Also reading: the only book that has so far grabbed me into reading on in my bookstore random reading is Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk. (Spoilers if you care, but in this case I suspect you don't.) This is in fact the third book in a loose series, and it does a very sneaky job of starting with a whole section from the perspective of a baby. The baby's narration is impossibly un-baby-like - this is not trying to do naturalistic child perception like Jane Smiley does in Some Luck - but in its manneredness it is vivid and funny and interesting, even if it's just a bit too much like someone who thought about philosophy of language in undergrad. But there is a question about how much of it is being reconstructed afterwards which makes that interesting, since as the baby grows into a small child he knows he's already forgetting and overwriting some of his past. Good descriptive writing, story zips along, people are rather given to contempt, but maybe any minute now some of this insightful characterisation will be applied to something other than faults.
And then there is another section and Edward St. Aubyn has deceived me into reading a book about a middle-aged man having an affair during a mid-life crisis. In a way I am grateful for this deception, since I have never actually read the classic novels about these, since all my sources of recommendation warn me away from them like good trustworthy lighthouses. This one is wry and absolutely embroiled in psychoanalytic self-destruction. I will keep reading and see if the section from the point of view of his wife helps any, but Edward St. Aubyn's good initial sales pitch has soured greatly.
I think it is good for me to read small bits of things I hate, because then I went home and read the first page of Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching. I have owned that book for years, and read the first page at least three times, but this time I went, "Oh my gosh this is so much better than those books I picked up at random," and kept reading.
White is for Witching is great. It is about a girl called Miranda, who we learn on the first page has vanished, perhaps died. It has the most beautiful descriptive language and it is about an extremely eerie haunting (one of the narrators is a house) and it has a strong sense of structural coherence despite having twists and turns that I could never predict. One of the things it's like is if Oyeyemi read two Shirley Jackson novels and decided to combine them. I am not entirely sure I know all the things I could know about the plot's causes and consequences, because I paused in the middle to read a whole different book and that was a bad idea, but that's okay, I will want to read it again. As well as the rest of Helen Oyeyemi's books, possibly.
The book I read in the middle of that one was The Works of Vermin, by Hiron Ennes. I had been waiting for it at the library for ages. (Leaflemming has several times asked why I don't just use Libby, the library ebook app, and one reason is that I'm out of the habit of reading on an e-reader, but the other is that I have so much access to books that the library reserve system is a useful filter.)
The Works of Vermin takes place in a city built into and on top of a giant rotting tree stump that straddles the poisonous River Catoptric. One of the protagonists, Guy, is an exterminator, whose team goes out and deals with the weird creatures that keep climbing out of the river and infesting the tree; he is poor, his job is poisoning him, and he's barely keeping ahead of the debts tattooed onto his body. The other protagonist, Elspeth, is a genius of a perfumer in the upper city; she is materially comfortable but has been poisoned by the city in a different way, and chafes under the close watch of an employer she cannot escape. When a giant centipede arrives in the city and begins causing trouble, their lives become entangled as they deal with the consequences.
This is a very queer book full of parasites, much like Ennes' first novel, Leech. It is a giant weird magical city book whose focus is surprisingly small and personal. It did not work for me perfectly but it did work for me really well.
Also reading: the only book that has so far grabbed me into reading on in my bookstore random reading is Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk. (Spoilers if you care, but in this case I suspect you don't.) This is in fact the third book in a loose series, and it does a very sneaky job of starting with a whole section from the perspective of a baby. The baby's narration is impossibly un-baby-like - this is not trying to do naturalistic child perception like Jane Smiley does in Some Luck - but in its manneredness it is vivid and funny and interesting, even if it's just a bit too much like someone who thought about philosophy of language in undergrad. But there is a question about how much of it is being reconstructed afterwards which makes that interesting, since as the baby grows into a small child he knows he's already forgetting and overwriting some of his past. Good descriptive writing, story zips along, people are rather given to contempt, but maybe any minute now some of this insightful characterisation will be applied to something other than faults.
And then there is another section and Edward St. Aubyn has deceived me into reading a book about a middle-aged man having an affair during a mid-life crisis. In a way I am grateful for this deception, since I have never actually read the classic novels about these, since all my sources of recommendation warn me away from them like good trustworthy lighthouses. This one is wry and absolutely embroiled in psychoanalytic self-destruction. I will keep reading and see if the section from the point of view of his wife helps any, but Edward St. Aubyn's good initial sales pitch has soured greatly.
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Date: 2026-05-21 11:11 am (UTC)