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Reading Roundup, May 2026
May. 29th, 2026 03:41 pmI feel like I’m establishing a pattern of posting a beast of a reading roundup at this time of year. It must be the sudden freedom of the end of the academic year and the burst of excitement for warm weather (and outdoors reading time!) that means I read a bunch of books in a short time. This is your warning that it’s a long post!
Howards End, by E. M. Forster
I finished my reread of HE just ahead of the final meeting of my book group, on May first. Reading it to run a book group was a very different experience, as might be expected. For posterity, the break points that I chose were:
( Read more... )
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White
Nocturnes tells a story about a lost love—someone unappreciated in their time, whose value is only seen too late. Arranged in eight chapters, the book brings us back and forth in the narrator’s life, revisiting the relationship and experiences before and after it, all with a free-flowing style which blurs those boundaries in much the same way that the narrator’s memories have been made fuzzy, from repeated handling and reworking.
( Read more... )
I would strongly recommend this book. It’s not quite like other books you might get from White, but that should only indicate his range. This is a beautiful, poetic work, well worth the time of any reader of queer classics.
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
Orlando is a boy in the late 1500s, coming of age under Queen Elizabeth. She’s a 36-year-old woman in 1928, nebulously married with at least one son. Her life between is continuous, but the telling—a ‘biography’—is disjoint, and the reader is required to make meaning from poetical ramblings in order to fully understand the story of her growth from boy to man to woman over the course of 350 years of English history.
( Read more... )
What I wish I’d known before reading is that Orlando includes a great deal of explicit and implicit racism, especially against Black and Romani people. This is widely discussed by academics, it’s on the book’s Wiki page, but as a lay reader I wasn’t aware of that reputation, only that of the book’s status as a queer classic. I’ve read that Woolf was satirizing Vita Sackville-West’s objectification of Romani culture, which, your mileage may vary on that explanation vis-a-vis the portrayal of the Romani characters in the book. But the violence against Black people and Black bodies is present from the first sentence, continues through the end, and seems a reflection of the author’s actual values.
So, I take some beautiful things from Orlando: its radical approach to queerness, and its distinctive relationship with time as expressed through prose. But I cannot shirk its racism in discussing the book, and so I can’t make—I don’t want to make—an unequivocal recommendation for it.
The Woman of Colour: A Tale, by an anonymous author
Edited by Lyndon J. Dominique
This 1808 epistolary novel, reissued in 2008 for its bicentennial, is the story of a biracial Jamaican heiress who travels to England to satisfy the conditions of her white father’s will in order to receive her dowry of sixty thousand pounds. Olivia Fairfield is smart, devout, and well-spoken—educated by a white English governess (the recipient of her letters, Mrs. Milbanke), Olivia is “more than half an English woman” and ably argues for racial equality when confronted with the prejudices of genteel England. She and her Black servant, Dido, together weather the crisis of a marriage plot, the machinations of a hostile white relative, and the trials of upper middle class society, to reach their eventual triumph.
( Read more... )
I was just really bowled over by this book, which would have been valuable as an artifact even if it were bad, but it was not bad, and actually very good on its own merits. It came to be via a colleague, and I’m very lucky for that—there doesn’t seem to be a copy on Project Gutenberg, and I’ve never seen it discussed amongst other Regency era works, though it so obviously deserves to be. And the editing by Professor Dominique in the Broadview edition, whose introduction, footnotes, and appendixes make the text and its context accessible, is a strong argument for buying or borrowing that physical reissue. I put this one down for fans of Austen, independent heroines, and historical literature!
Despised and Rejected, by Rose Allatini
This 1918 novel (reissued in 2018 by Persephone Books, and otherwise difficult to access) is a strident Pacifist argument, which ultimately resulted in its censorship and the destruction of unsold copies—probably contributing to the lack of modern digitization, despite the text being out of copyright. (And I’d love a digital copy to mark up!) That alone makes it worthwhile to track down one of the reprints.
Dennis Blackwood, a 25-year-old composer, and Antoinette de Courcy, a similarly-aged Anglo-French woman, meet during a sort of family holiday in June 1914. The Blackwoods hope that eldest son Dennis might court Antoinette, and Antoinette, though focused on the intriguing, solo vacationer Hester Cawthorn, recognizes in Dennis an opportunity to follow the expected social script. They part with promises to write to each other, and that’s the last bit of a society novel in this book. On his own again, Dennis meets, falls in love with, and flees Alan Rutherford, the socialist son of a coal mine owner; on her own, Antoinette reunites with Hester, falls out of love with her, and drifts. Dennis and Antoinette meet months later in London, after the onset of WWI, and their failed sham of a romance and Dennis’ status as a conscientious objector dominate the remainder of the novel.
( Read more... )
So, is what she delivers a flawless classic? No, definitely not. But I greatly enjoyed it. I loved Dennis and Alan and their romance, which culminates with (explicitly stated, not on-page) sex—eat your heart out, Mary Renault. I found Antoinette interesting, if frustrating after early promise. I liked the wider cast. The unflinching look at WWI era C.O.s was new to me, and well worth experiencing from a writer of the time. For me, this is a book that absolutely deserved its rescue, and should have a wider audience among readers of WWI fiction and historical queer novels.
Howards End, by E. M. Forster
I finished my reread of HE just ahead of the final meeting of my book group, on May first. Reading it to run a book group was a very different experience, as might be expected. For posterity, the break points that I chose were:
( Read more... )
Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Edmund White
Nocturnes tells a story about a lost love—someone unappreciated in their time, whose value is only seen too late. Arranged in eight chapters, the book brings us back and forth in the narrator’s life, revisiting the relationship and experiences before and after it, all with a free-flowing style which blurs those boundaries in much the same way that the narrator’s memories have been made fuzzy, from repeated handling and reworking.
( Read more... )
I would strongly recommend this book. It’s not quite like other books you might get from White, but that should only indicate his range. This is a beautiful, poetic work, well worth the time of any reader of queer classics.
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
Orlando is a boy in the late 1500s, coming of age under Queen Elizabeth. She’s a 36-year-old woman in 1928, nebulously married with at least one son. Her life between is continuous, but the telling—a ‘biography’—is disjoint, and the reader is required to make meaning from poetical ramblings in order to fully understand the story of her growth from boy to man to woman over the course of 350 years of English history.
( Read more... )
What I wish I’d known before reading is that Orlando includes a great deal of explicit and implicit racism, especially against Black and Romani people. This is widely discussed by academics, it’s on the book’s Wiki page, but as a lay reader I wasn’t aware of that reputation, only that of the book’s status as a queer classic. I’ve read that Woolf was satirizing Vita Sackville-West’s objectification of Romani culture, which, your mileage may vary on that explanation vis-a-vis the portrayal of the Romani characters in the book. But the violence against Black people and Black bodies is present from the first sentence, continues through the end, and seems a reflection of the author’s actual values.
So, I take some beautiful things from Orlando: its radical approach to queerness, and its distinctive relationship with time as expressed through prose. But I cannot shirk its racism in discussing the book, and so I can’t make—I don’t want to make—an unequivocal recommendation for it.
The Woman of Colour: A Tale, by an anonymous author
Edited by Lyndon J. Dominique
This 1808 epistolary novel, reissued in 2008 for its bicentennial, is the story of a biracial Jamaican heiress who travels to England to satisfy the conditions of her white father’s will in order to receive her dowry of sixty thousand pounds. Olivia Fairfield is smart, devout, and well-spoken—educated by a white English governess (the recipient of her letters, Mrs. Milbanke), Olivia is “more than half an English woman” and ably argues for racial equality when confronted with the prejudices of genteel England. She and her Black servant, Dido, together weather the crisis of a marriage plot, the machinations of a hostile white relative, and the trials of upper middle class society, to reach their eventual triumph.
( Read more... )
I was just really bowled over by this book, which would have been valuable as an artifact even if it were bad, but it was not bad, and actually very good on its own merits. It came to be via a colleague, and I’m very lucky for that—there doesn’t seem to be a copy on Project Gutenberg, and I’ve never seen it discussed amongst other Regency era works, though it so obviously deserves to be. And the editing by Professor Dominique in the Broadview edition, whose introduction, footnotes, and appendixes make the text and its context accessible, is a strong argument for buying or borrowing that physical reissue. I put this one down for fans of Austen, independent heroines, and historical literature!
Despised and Rejected, by Rose Allatini
This 1918 novel (reissued in 2018 by Persephone Books, and otherwise difficult to access) is a strident Pacifist argument, which ultimately resulted in its censorship and the destruction of unsold copies—probably contributing to the lack of modern digitization, despite the text being out of copyright. (And I’d love a digital copy to mark up!) That alone makes it worthwhile to track down one of the reprints.
Dennis Blackwood, a 25-year-old composer, and Antoinette de Courcy, a similarly-aged Anglo-French woman, meet during a sort of family holiday in June 1914. The Blackwoods hope that eldest son Dennis might court Antoinette, and Antoinette, though focused on the intriguing, solo vacationer Hester Cawthorn, recognizes in Dennis an opportunity to follow the expected social script. They part with promises to write to each other, and that’s the last bit of a society novel in this book. On his own again, Dennis meets, falls in love with, and flees Alan Rutherford, the socialist son of a coal mine owner; on her own, Antoinette reunites with Hester, falls out of love with her, and drifts. Dennis and Antoinette meet months later in London, after the onset of WWI, and their failed sham of a romance and Dennis’ status as a conscientious objector dominate the remainder of the novel.
( Read more... )
So, is what she delivers a flawless classic? No, definitely not. But I greatly enjoyed it. I loved Dennis and Alan and their romance, which culminates with (explicitly stated, not on-page) sex—eat your heart out, Mary Renault. I found Antoinette interesting, if frustrating after early promise. I liked the wider cast. The unflinching look at WWI era C.O.s was new to me, and well worth experiencing from a writer of the time. For me, this is a book that absolutely deserved its rescue, and should have a wider audience among readers of WWI fiction and historical queer novels.
