My reading this month covered it all, from meditations on how to improve your mental state to terrifying tales of meaningless existence. Which pretty much sums up the time we’re living in, I suppose.

Fiction

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Meditations for Mortals is Oliver Burkeman’s follow-up to the powerful book Four Thousand Weeks and is just as life-changing as that modern classic.

Meditations is structured as a four-week mental retreat with daily instalments on such topics as healthy productivity, scruffy hospitality and self-compassion. Like Four Thousand Weeks, its core lessons are about being really present in the moment and reconceptualizing our anxious relationship with productivity and other 21st century demands. Burkeman offers ways to rethink everything from our plans for perfect futures to the to-do lists that dominate so much of our present. One of my favourite takeaways from Meditations is his suggestion to reimagine to-do lists as streams to dip into rather than buckets to empty.

If you’re constantly struggling with anxiety and burnout, then Meditations for Mortals may be the read you need at this moment in your life.

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205363955-meditations-for-mortals

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Carter and Lovecraft by Jonathan Howard

Police officer Daniel Carter retires and becomes a private investigator after a strange and horrific case that results in the suicide of his partner. But his life is turned inside out again when he inherits a bookstore run by Emily Lovecraft, a descendant of HP Lovecraft — yes, that HP Lovecraft.

Things take an even weirder turn when a series of impossible murders take place, and Carter and Lovecraft are drawn into a mystery that rewrites everything we know about our universe and hints that HP Lovecraft wasn’t writing fiction after all.

It’s a dark and eerie new series from Howard, the author of the Johannes Cabal the Necromancer series. But while the Cabal series is blackly comic, Carter and Lovecraft is blackly noir and infinitely more terrifying.

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23848134-carter-lovecraft

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If Wishes Were Retail by Auston Habershaw

If Wishes Were Retail is the charming tale of Alex, a teen who can’t find any other job but working for a genie who has opened a mall kiosk selling wishes to mall-goers. The genie has little understanding of this world and is constantly offended by it, so he requires Alex to act as his guide. Alex hardly has it all together, though, as she is from a dysfunctional and disintegrating family and just wants to get the hell out of town and off to university and a new life. Of course, it’s never that easy when families — or genies — are involved.

If Wishes Were Retail is surprisingly complex under its surface world of laughs and ridiculous situations. There’s a whole subplot involving gnomes that touches on capitalist exploitation and the precariousness of work, as well as the main story’s exploration of family dynamics and community. To say that the genie changes everyone’s lives — including his own — would be an understatement.

I wish there were more books like this!

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217535769-if-wishes-were-retail

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The Hammer by KJ Parker

Like most KJ Parker works, The Hammer is a dark and witty tale grounded in logistics, engineering, manipulation and clever plots with long payoffs. It follows Gignomai of the met’Oc clan, an exiled noble family living in a distant colony where they are separated from the other colonists by a history of violence. Both groups are also wary of the natives who live farther inland, who appear to believe the colonists aren’t real — until they do and things get ugly.

Gignomai acts as a sort of hub for all the different groups when he exiles himself into the wilderness to build a factory that will allow the colony to gain independence from the homeland. It all seems very rational and simple, but life rarely works out way.

The Hammer is darker than Parker’s other works and takes the reader to an inevitable and horrifying outcome, where Gignomai’s actions turn out to be motivated by vengeance and the world of the colonists and natives alike is forever changed.

The Hammer probably isn’t for everyone. But if you like your fantasy grim, clever and merciless, this may be the read for you.

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8241571-the-hammer

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The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Silvia Moreno-Garcia impossibly keeps getting better as a writer with each book — which bodes well for readers given she seems to write a book a year. The Bewitching is one of her finest yet — a slow burn of story that combines a multigenerational saga with dark academia infused with witchcraft, folklore, class struggles and even a bit of Lovecraft.

The story is told from three points of view across different ages — Alba, a young woman in 1908 rural Mexico; Beatrice, a graduate student in 1930s New England; and Minerva, a graduate student and dorm warden in the present. Minerva is studying the writing of Beatrice, who wrote a novel about the disappearance of her roommate. The stories of all three become intertwined with a supernatural threat that reaches across the generations.

It’s another masterpiece from Moreno-Garcia that will leave you awake at night — partially because you want more but mostly because you’re keeping an eye on the shadows.

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/220458657-the-bewitching

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Non-fiction

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s New Gothic Novel Is Bewitched, Bothered, and Emboldened

“My great-grandmother told me a story about how her uncle went missing and he was taken away by witches. That was one of the originating stories.

“She also told other stories about witches and what they did and how dangerous they were, how to defend yourself from witches, that sort of stuff.

“Then I went and I looked at some of the folk studies that have been done around witches in different parts of Mexico. I was comparing the knowledge that I had, my own personal family knowledge, to folk tales that I know and seeing how they mapped out. They map out really well—my great-grandmother could have been a folklorist.”

Goodreads interviews Silvia Moreno-Garcia about her new novel, The Bewitching.

Link: https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/1595.Silvia_Moreno_Garcia

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All you leave behind comes with you: On travel, nostalgia and reading Calvino by Thomas Wharton

Thomas Wharton on why he takes a copy of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities with him whenever he travels.

Link: https://thomaswharton.substack.com/p/all-you-leave-behind-comes-with-you