What I Read in January

January is a good month for reading because there is nothing else it is asking you to do. The social obligations of December have ended. The optimism of the new year has not yet curdled into guilt. You are simply allowed to sit with a book, and I sat with several.

I came back to Penelope Fitzgerald for the fourth or fifth time — The Gate of Angels this time, which I had somehow missed until now. What I keep returning to in Fitzgerald is her certainty. She never explains more than is needed. She trusts the reader to understand what is happening beneath the surface of a sentence, and that trust is itself a form of generosity.

The Norwegian novel was Vigdis Hjorth's A House in Norway. I read it in two sittings, which is unusual for me. There is something in the rhythm of her sentences — translated here by Charlotte Barslund — that feels like thinking in real time. Not the polished retrospective thinking of most literary fiction, but the ragged, doubling-back kind. I found it uncomfortable in the best way.

The grief essays I will not name because I am still inside them. Some books you cannot summarise while they are happening to you. I put it down after each essay and do something practical — make tea, check the post — before I can continue. I think that is what it was designed to do.