Susan Green

I do love Kate Constable’s annual Reading Roundup – thank you, Kate! Each year I plan to be more committed to record keeping, and each year I fail. My husband has set me up with a Goodreads account so I can keep a tally, but I have read six books so far this year and haven’t opened it yet. Doesn’t augur well, does it? However I would like to track my reading through the year. I have a few hunches; comfort reading probably peaks in winter, and my appetite for crime may increase with hot weather. We shall see.

By going back over my book group and library histories, plus my posts, I have pieced together a rough Roundup. The stats are:

57 books completed.

Of the books I actually read,
32  were fiction and
25 were non-fiction.
I generally didn’t count gardening, cookery and art books if I only looked at the pictures

15 were by Australian authors
27 were by UK authors
and there were a smattering of European and Japanese authors.

I only read 2 children’s books (!!!!) this year, which I find hard to believe…

20 books were from my own library,
of which 14 were books I bought this year.

I read 6 Kindle books, usually while I was travelling, but sometimes because I couldn’t borrow the book from the library or buy it cheaply.

I finished 24 library books this year, but I borrowed a lot more. For instance, I borrowed 33 novels that I didn’t finish. A few pages was enough with some of them. Which is why libraries are so wonderful!

The gender split was 38 female and 19 male authors.

The 2025 novels that have stayed with me are Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, The Bees by Laline Paull and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. And for non-fiction, Place of Tides by James Rebanks, Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee and Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez.

Typing one-fingered is VERY slow. My punishment for over-enthusiastic close-pruning of a wayward geranium – I pruned my fingertip.
So super-short posts until it heals.

I have read and enjoyed Bookish and Call for the Dead. And as Bugs Bunny would say, “That’s all, folks!”

...Blake left the great wen of London for the freedom of the sea.
It was as though he had been given a secret key. All the things you wish had never happened? AI and satellites playing pinball among the stars? All the ways we went wrong? Blake offered a remedy. He needed no opium, no drink or drugs or kites to attain such a suspension of doubt; he was there already, physically intoxicated by the incalculable hardship and glorious possibilities of life here on earth. He saw and felt this in his own body, incarnate in his flesh; in the planet spinning round the sun, the sea being tugged by the moon. He was an astro-priest launched into the unknown, ready to leave the shell of himself in the alien dust as the sun turned black and his spirit hurtled on.

Risingtidefallingstar (yes, all one word) from 2017 was my introduction to this writer and I was excited to see William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Hoare is one of those people who write wonderful – to me, anyway – often strange, slightly bewildering combinations of genres. Here he traces the legacy of artist, poet, visionary and mystic William Blake through artists, film makers, writers, eccentrics, poets, war heroes, outsiders, outlaws. He goes back to Milton, Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon, and forward to Oscar Wilde, T.E.Lawrence and Derek Jarman in an unclassifiable tapestry of English history, biography, travelogue, memoir, nature writing, religion, spirituality and more.

Written in a passionate, lush, headlong style, the narrative goes in multiple directions and makes unexpected connections (how about William Blake, Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash?). It’s a wild ride. And so dense and intricate that I’m going to have to borrow it from the library again. And perhaps, again after that.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

My friends are still all worked up about Eva Peron, and I try to explain that the mistreatment and moving around of her body is unusual but by no means anomalous in this country (Argentina) and particularly in this cemetery (Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires). There is a real obsession with opening graves, removing bodies, relocating them, kidnapping or hiding them, which, I think, is a national characteristic. My friends are horrified when I say that, but there’s really no point in denying it.

I like cemeteries. No, I love cemeteries. There have been times in my life I’ve been obsessed with cemeteries. I usually try to find an excuse to put a cemetery scene in my books – in How Bright Are All Things Here and Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand, they’re pivotal – and in the mid-1980s I wrote a prize-winning short story, The Lost Children inspired not just by the famous Lost Children memorial in Daylesford cemetery but by all the little, half-forgotten graveyards I’ve explored. You can read intertwined family histories, find mining accidents, drownings, fires and other tragedies, be reminded of the high child mortality of the 19th century, and discover some extraordinary names – Saddington Plush, one of the main characters in the Verity Sparks series, I lifted from a stone in the Angaston cemetery in the Barossa. I haven’t yet found a use for Sideney (was it meant to be Sidonie?) Dumayne, but I’ve saved it up for later.

So. These are my credentials. It stands to reason that Someone Is Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys is right up my alley. Enriquez is an Argentinian journalist, novelist and short-story writer. She’s followed her passion for music and cemeteries around the world, following her favourite bands and/or visiting legendary graveyards in Italy, Spain, France, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Germany, the USA, Cuba, the UK and even Rottnest Island, WA. It’s both amazing and fabulous, in the true sense of the words, full of ghost stories and legends and extraordinary real-life historical details. Like the totally bonkers story of what happened to Eva Peron’s corpse. I can’t do justice to it; you’ll have to read it yourself.

I loved the way she weaves these complex narratives out of monumental masonry, inscriptions and statues. The book is a hybrid of journalism, travel writing, history, memoir: she’s a generous writer, with an eye for the macabre and the poignant, alert to politics and injustice and sheer absurdity. The story of the drowned graveyard! I’ll give you a precis; when the cemetery of the small town of Villa Epecuen in Buenos Aires province was flooded, the local authorities didn’t like the look of tall monuments and the tops of mausoleums sticking up above the water. So they had workers in boats go around and smash them up. Of course, the water receded. And left behind were all these ravaged, truncated monuments, coated in salt from the floodwater.

Enriquez and her Australian husband have recently re-located to Tasmania, and I expect she will be able to find a story or two on her travels around the island.

Grave in the Chinese Section of the Castlemaine Cemetery. Photo taken circa 1967

That night, Anna told me many threads of stories. Some were about this little farmstead in Vega where she lived now, others were about strange-sounding islands across the sea. Sometimes the whole tale tumbled out of her, sometimes it would unspool slowly. Some of her stories were about ducks, some were about island life, and others were about trading. Some were about the early nineteenth century, others about the previous week, as if time passing changed nothing. It was a bewildering tangle, but Anna knew where each one belonged, like a weaver threading a loom. Unlike me, she could already see the beautifully crafted cloth. She wanted me to understand that her people were woven into the fabric of this place. She was the descendant of a family of ‘eiderdown kings’, folk who gathered and sold a rare and precious product – the feathers of the eider duck. From the north-western shores of Europe, her people had brought eiderdown to the world.

I’d read Rebank’s previous books – A Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral – about his experience of farming in the Lake District of the UK, and so I knew of his passionate engagement with restoring balance to British agriculture. I can understand how his years of struggle and activism had left him feeling tired and despairing; ‘I could no longer see the point in trying to mend our fields when everything around us was so broken. I once had endless reserves of hope and self-belief, but they were beginning to run out.’
He had encountered elderly ‘duck woman’ Anna and her work seven years earlier; somehow he knew that he needed to go back to see her. Place of Tides is the record of the season spent with Anna and her friend and apprentice, Ingrid, on a remote island off the coast of Norway. Since the Viking era, islanders have gathered and traded the magically light and warm down of wild eider ducks. From when they start in the bitter cold, to when the down is finally gathered  in the long flowering days of summer, the trio work to ensure the survival of this ancient tradition.

I enjoyed everything about this story; the rhythms of the work and weather and season, the evolving relationships between the two duck-women and Rebanks, the harsh island landscape of rocks, sea and sky, the gentle lessons in connection that helped heal the burnt-out Rebanks – and of course, the ducks.

I have long believed that journaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude. As it happens, reading also enacts that shift. Rather than feeling trapped and alone with your thoughts, you’re in conversation. You’ve got company.

Suleika Jouad, a writer and artist of Tunisian heritage based in the US, has kept journals for most of her life – and she found the practice a lifeline when she was diagnosed with cancer in her early 20s. In 2021, she published a best-selling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, about her experience of illness.
During the pandemic, she created The Isolation Journals, an online journalling community, and The Book of Alchemy grew out of that project. It’s a selection of 100 journal prompts – all written by different people –  on 10 themes, such as Memory, Fear, Rebuilding, the Body. There’s an essay by Jouad about each theme, and then a short introduction by a range of contributors. Some of them are famous (Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Gilbert, John Green, Oliver Jeffers, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie)  – but most of them are unfamiliar to me because they’re American.

Actually, much of The Book of Solitude is, culturally, very American. Do I need to explain myself? A little quote from Jouad might do it:

Journaling through illness gave me a productive way to engage with my new reality. Rather than shutting down or surrendering to hopelessness, I could trace the contours of what I was thinking and feeling and gain a sense of agency over it. And once I figured out how to contend with my circumstances on the page, it became possible to engage with the people around me and to speak the truth of how I really was. In turn, they began to do the same, and together we accessed new depths of intimacy and love. It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

Yes, there’s a lot of self-help, confessional therapy-speak here, from Jouad and her contributors. Many of them have suffered from addiction, alcoholism, illness; they’ve been in dysfunctional or co-dependent relationships or come from fractured families. Occasionally I found the language so cringe-worthy that I found myself muttering, ‘I’m too old for this shit’ as I settled down with my notebook and pen. But still, mixed in with the heavily introspective, inner-discovery/self-help/personal development stuff, there are some gems. I adored The Badder, the Better by Adrienne Raphel. The task was to simply write a (very) bad poem. Which I did. I wrote several. One of which – yes, I insist – I will share with you.

This
Is the torture of poorly-chosen words
That stick
Like toast crumbs, or those extremely large fish-oil capsules
In my throat.

This
Is the sadness of random, unbeautiful words
That fall
Like lead balloons
On my bare foot
Breaking my little toe.

This
Is the pentacle of my ambitions
Five points
Love, life, art, work and death
A little bit like a compass rose, but with one extra direction 

Pointing
Down
To the grave.

I have more poems. I’d love to share them. No?  Are you sure?
Your loss!

Ninety days ago, I challenged myself to follow all 100 prompts. And I’ve stuck with it. I’ve only missed one day. In spite of my occasional grumpiness with the prompts, it’s been a good discipline to write around 500 words each day. I’d lost the writing habit, and now I am itching to get back to some ‘real’ writing – which to me, means fiction.
Only ten days to go! I will then follow my very own prompts.

…in order to understand how brains get to be different, we need to pay attention to what is going (on) in the world outside those brains. We now know that our brains can change throughout our lives as a result of the different experiences we have, the different attitudes we encounter, the different lives we lead. There is definitely some kind of biological script behind the production of a human brain, but the social stage on which it appears has a powerful part to play in shaping its owner’s successes (and failures).

The ‘Lost Girls’ are the many girls and women who have lived with the burden of feeling wrong, different, out of step, excluded; who have struggled with school, employment and relationships, who have found socialising an impenetrable puzzle and crumbled under the demands of daily life. With a diagnosis of autism, they may have obtained appropriate assistance…and their experiences would have informed what form that assistance should take. As we are now discovering with so many aspects of physical and psychological health, science has assumed that the default human is male. There’s so much to get cross about here!

In this engaging book, Gina Rippon, who is an Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging, introduces us first to the history of autism research. For many decades, ever since the condition was first investigated in the early 20th century, it was understood that autism was a primarily male condition. The prevalence, measured in different countries and over time, seemed always to come out at around 4:1 males to females. Some scientists suggested that autism was the result of an ‘extreme male brain’, or that being female provided some kind of protective effect, theorising that females had a inbuilt evolutionary advantage; that their brains were ‘hardwired for empathy’ in the words of prominent scientist Simon Baron-Cohen.

Either way, girls and women were missing from the picture of autism. In a telling statistic, Gina Rippon tells us that when she first started looking at autism research, she found that 70% of the studies were of males only. That’s why the subtitle of her book is How Science Failed Autistic Women and the New Research That’s Changing the Story.

After looking into what she calls autism’s ‘male spotlight problem’, she explores the ways in which female voices slowly came to be heard, and the question began to be asked; are females ‘less autistic’, or are they ‘differently autistic’?
As an example, highly focused and obsessive interests are a marker of autism diagnoses. Things like trains, weather patterns, number plates, makes of planes or mathematical calculations are suggested on the diagnostic tests. But autistic girls rarely have a passion  for these things. It was an Australian-based researcher, Tony Attwood, who looked more closely at autistic girls. The topics of fascination might be boy bands or Barbies or stuffed toys, but it is the level of focus – the acquisition of an encyclopedic knowledge – that is the same. Just because Barbies and boy bands are ‘girly’, these girls were overlooked.

Another example: it is around puberty and the change from primary to secondary school that many autistic girls begin to struggle. They have developed skills and strategies to fit in – masking, camoflaging, self-monitoring, observing and learning from their peers – but these exhausting tools don’t work so well in the complex social world of adolescence. Depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder and eating disorders tend to be diagnosed at this time rather than autism. I was fascinated to read that sensory issues tend to be more common among autistic females and this may feed into the development of problems with eating and food. Strong averse reactions to the smell, appearance, colour and texture of food, plus tendencies to rigidity in eating patterns, can give the appearance of anorexia, but the issue is not body image and the standard approaches miss the mark.

There’s so much more in this book, and I don’t think I can do justice to The Lost Girls of Autism in a short review. If you have any interest in neurodivergence, it’s a must-read.

We must find the flaws that have allowed us to lose sight of these lost girls, we must challenge the fuzzy and imprecise diagnoses, and we must confront the gender stereotypes that are distorting our quest for answers… Maybe we can (gently) deconstruct the elaborate camoflages that have allowed autistic girls to…’hide in plain sight’. We must listen to these lost girls so that autism researchers, autism therapists, autism advocates and the wider general population will have a clearer idea of what we should be looking for, what we need to explain, so that we can better understand the autistic world.
From the other side of the looking glass, by understanding female autism, we could learn about…the human race’s overpowering desire to belong’.

Since in Ashdod everybody always ended up on the beach, in order to maintain my friendships I felt I needed to make an occasional appearance there. I’d the wait on the sand… for everyone to return from their swims, glistening with water and joy. Oh, how I yearned to join in…
Despite my sense of acceptance by my new friends, I still wouldn’t disclose my scars, so intense was my fear of disappointing, and witnessing that disappointment. And I feared pity. This anxiety hasn’t faded over the years. No matter what I’ve achieved since, how much  love has come my way or how many books on feminism I’ve read, I still feel ashamed about my scars as if they’re some sin I’ve committed. I’ve just learned to cover up this anxiety with giant smiles the way I cover my body.

Lee Koffman spent her early years in Russia. Her congenital heart defect needed multiple surgeries, and even though her parents paid not to have the surgeon known as ‘the butcher’ operate, nevertheless little Lee was left with massive scarring on her chest. At least she survived. And she was well.
Until she was hit by a bus, nearly lost her leg and ended up with yet more severe scarring.  Soviet medicine was strictly utilitarian; no cosmetic surgery. As a little kid, the scars didn’t bother her so much, but as a teenager, moving to Israel (and later, Australia) she encountered a hot climate, beach culture and the cult of the ‘body beautiful’. Hiding her scars became an obsession.

Awareness of these imperfections continued into adulthood, through her success in academia and as a writer, through relationships, a couple of marriages and motherhood. This book is part memoir and part investigation into the ways our appearance – or Body Surface, as Kofman calls it – shape us and the ways in which other people regard us. She talks to people with scarring from accidents and burns, people born with dwarfism, albinism and other congenital health issues, obese people, people who are into extreme body modification. She looks into the world of fetishists; people (almost always men) she calls ‘Wabi Sabi lovers’ who are only turned on by very large women, or amputees, or women with scars; and the world of high fashion, where the ‘new rules of beauty’ see models with conditions such as albinism and ‘cat-eye’ syndrome, as well as amputations, on the catwalk and in magazines. At the end of the book, she turns back to herself, and talks about how she’s emerged as both resilient AND messed-up on account of her scars.

And how shall I end my story? I used to fantasise that writing this book would become my Ultimate Healing Act. Yet now that I’ve finished it, I still haven’t found an epiphany or a grand redemption. Mine, then, isn’t the popular ‘I’ve been through hardships and now I resolved them all’ narrative…

Imperfect was our library book group selection for this month. Some – me included –  found it interesting enough to to want to finish and discuss; it opened our eyes to the disastrous shortcomings of the Soviet medical system, youth culture in Israel and the desires of sexual fetishists out there seeking all kinds of ‘imperfect’ bodies.
A few of us had sympathy or compassion for Lee Kofman, but others thought she was narcissistic, shallow and irritating and so gave up on the book.
And one member couldn’t even bring himself to start reading. So, all in all, a successful choice!

This may sound paradoxical, but I believe that until we stop saying that beauty, or appearance really, is ‘skin-deep’, until we concede how much it matters, we cannot make it matter less. To change private lives and public attitudes, the conversation about Body Surface must first be honest, move beyond cliches and politeness, make space for any genuine feelings – be these joie de vivre or frustration and grief. And yet in another paradox, the lower our expectations might be to always love and always accept our appearance as it is, the better chance I think we stand of healing the psychic wounds Body Surface may generate.

It’s England in the early 20th century; the Willowes, an upper-class family, live on their country estate, Lady Place. Laura Willowes, or Lolly as her family call her, is her father’s beloved youngest child and only daughter. Possessing a ‘temperamental indifference to the need of getting married’ she remains at home as his companion after he is widowed. But when he dies, she is whisked away to live with her brother Henry, sister-in-law Caroline and two nieces.

Lolly was a gentle creature, and the little girls loved her; she would soon fit into her new home… London would be a pleasant change for her. She would meet nice people, and in London she would have a better chance of marrying. Lolly was twenty-eight. She would have to make haste if she was going to find a husband before she was thirty. Poor Lolly! Black was not becoming to her. She looked sallow, and her pale grey eyes were paler and more surprising than ever underneath that very unbecoming black mushroom hat. Mourning was never satisfactory if one bought it in a country own.

Seemingly without any choice in the matter, she is moulded by Caroline and Henry into the typical Edwardian maiden aunt. Time passes. The girls grow up. When WWI intervenes, she volunteers but there is no drama or excitement for Lolly – ‘Four times a week she went to a depot and did up parcels. She did them up so well that no one thought of offering her a change of work’. After the war, her stifled, restricted way of life continues. Somehow she retains a sliver of vivid individuality, symbolised by her ‘extravagant’ (according to her sister-in-law) habit of buying huge bunches of cut flowers for her little room. It is these flowers that lead her to a momentous decision. In a greengrocer-cum-florist, she sees a bunch of chrysanthemums which change her life.

She looked at the large mop-headed chrysanthemums. Their curled petals were a deep garnet colour within and tawny yellow without. As the light fell on their sleek flesh, the garnet colour glowed, the tawny yellow paled as if washed with silver. She longed for the moment when she might stroke her hand over their mop heads.
‘I think I will take them all,’ she said.
‘They’re lovely blooms,’ said the man.
He was pleased. He did not expect such a good customer at this late hour.
When he brought her the change from her pound note and the chrysanthemums pinned up in sheets of white paper, he brought also several sprays of beech leaves. These, he explained, were thrown in with the purchase. Laura took them in her arms. The great fans of orange tracery seemed even more beautiful to her than the chrysanthemums, for they had been given to her, they were a surprise. She sniffed. They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination. She stood very still to make quite sure of her sensations. Then: ‘Where do they come from?’

And that is how Lolly decides to reject her family and her conventional role in it, her brother’s patriarchal control of her  (and her money) and London life to go to live in the village of Great Mop. But no spoiler here, except to say that the satirical social novel of the earlier chapters takes a sharp turn, or rather, twist.

It’s always a treat to discover a new book by a new writer. And Lolly Willowes is delicious. Sly, subversive, it seems to be about one thing – the liberation of an English spinster –  and then it turns out to tell a different story altogether. When it was published in 1926, Lolly Willowes was popular in the UK, France and even in the US where it was the very first Book of the Month Club selection. The author wrote a handful of other novels, poetry, and short stories which were published in the New Yorker. She’s a marvellous writer. Yet she seems to be mostly forgotten today.

…Flora’s panniers opened in readiness for the haul of pollen and nectar she would surely be able to take back to the hive from this marvellous place. She climbed up and positioned herself over one of the creamy white florets, and the contact of the feet on the flower’s virginal petal made them both tremble. Flora held it softly then sank her tongue into its depths. The exquisite taste sparkled through her mind and body like sun on water, and she drank until each floret was empty.
Behind her, the green-fleshed flowers waited their turn. As Flora combed the minute gold pollen beads of the neroli into her panniers, she felt their patient desire. When she looked again, their green lips had parted to show a glimpse of inner red, and their white fringing had a more festive look…
Despite herself, Flora’s own scent pulsed more strongly from her body. So strong was their desire for her that they actually moved towards her, their inner petals moistening under her gaze, She hovered, mesmerised by their lust.
‘Come to me instead,’ crooned a high voice. Flora turned to see a big black Minerva spider sitting in her hazy cobweb. ‘What a sweet servant. Come, let me hold you.’

Who knew that the life of a forager bee could be so sexy, and so dramatic? As soon as she emerges into the hive, it’s clear that Flora 717 is a mutant bee. She’s oversized, strong, dark, hairy and ugly –  and would have been instantly destroyed if not for the intervention of one of the Queen’s inner circle, the powerful Sister Sage. Initially,  Flora works as a sanitation bee, the lowest of the low, cleansing the hive and obeying the precepts ‘accept, obey and serve’. But before long, she’s promoted to nursery attendant, feeding the newborn bees – and it’s there that she encounters an irresistible temptation. She is moved on to foraging outside the hive (usually an end-of-life role for worker bees), and there faces terrible dangers. There are wasps, spiders, pesticides, sterile monocultures, winter cold and of course, beekeepers. I don’t want to give anything away, so I won’t. But it’s enough to say that her courage and rebellious nature enable her to change the future of her hive forever.

Laline Paull’s The Bees was a book group selection, and for once it was that rarity, a novel we all enjoyed. Really, it had everything. Suspense, danger, mystery, sex and violence plus a feisty heroine in Flora 717. Our group picked up echoes of any number of dystopian novels (but with honey), as well as Cinderella, Watership Down and Game of Thrones. There are evil lady bees, madly entitled drones, plots and jealousies, friendships and even love. Utterly engaging, exciting and unexpectedly moving, it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read so far this year.

And I will never look at a little forager bee in the same way.