What I'm reading and listening to this holiday season

And a thank you to all subscribers

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Dear friends

It’s time to switch off for a couple of weeks for my annual two-week computer break, which always begins at Winter Solstice. I’ll be back January 6 with my monthly newsletter. In the meantime, I’d like to thank all of you for your support over the past year, during which The Art of Enchantment has grown to become a Substack bestseller, and I’ve expanded and deepened my offerings considerably. I’m not one of those writers who believes that an audience isn’t necessary – that the act of writing itself is enough. If I felt that no one was reading, engaging, thinking, then I simply wouldn’t want to write. Readers are everything to me, and I’m grateful for you all. And over the rest of this holiday season I’ll be digging deep, and dreaming deep, to see what enchantments might be shared with you in 2024.

I’m often asked what I’m reading, but a couple of people lately have asked me to share what I listen to. So here are my books and songs for winter 2023.

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Six books I’ll be reading this winter

I always have a big stack of books that I need to read for research or other work-related things, but as always I have a stack for pure pleasure, that I plan to gorge on by the fire.

Melmoth, by Sarah Perry

I’m a big fan of Sarah Perry, but somehow I’ve never got around to reading this one. Suitably gothic, for a winter evening.

One winter night in Prague, Helen Franklin meets her friend Karel on the street. Agitated and enthralled, he tells her he has come into possession of a mysterious old manuscript, filled with personal testimonies that take them from 17th-century England to wartime Czechoslovakia, the tropical streets of Manila, and 1920s Turkey. All of them tell of being followed by a tall, silent woman in black, bearing an unforgettable message. Helen reads its contents with intrigue, but everything in her life is about to change.

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead

It was inevitable that this novel would find me, when it is about a woman pilot. One who’s rather more intrepid than I was, when I decided to learn to fly to overcome a fear of flying, in 1999.

A soaring, breathtakingly ambitious novel that weaves together the astonishing lives of a 1950s vanished female aviator and the modern-day Hollywood actress who plays her on screen.

Marian Graves is driven by a need for freedom and danger. From her days as a wild child in prohibition America to the blitz and glitz of wartime London, she is determined to live an independent life. But it is an obsession with flight that consumes her most. Having become one of the most fearless pilots in her time, she sets out to do what no one has done before: to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole. But shortly before completing the journey, her plane disappears, lost to history. Over half a century later, troubled film star Hadley Baxter is offered to play Marian in the comeback role of a lifetime. From the first pages of the script, Hadley is drawn inexorably to the female pilot. It is a role that will lead her to an unexpected discovery, throwing fresh and spellbinding light on the story of the unknowable Marian Graves.

Journal, by Katherine Mansfield

I treated myself a month ago to a trio of books from the very wonderful Persephone Books. I love a good diarist almost as much as I love a good memoirist, and I should have read Mansfield’s long, long ago.

Katherine Mansfield's Journal is one of the great classics of twentieth century literature but has not been in print for many years. Yet it is a uniquely truthful record of a great writer at work, of the spirit of a genius in the last ten years of her life, and of the development of the modern mind during the early years of the last century. … Katherine Mansfield's Journal is far more than an intermittent record of twelve years of a writer's life: it is intensely observant, self-critical, self-chastising, confessional, atmospheric, agonised and funny, an essential document for anyone interested in women's writing of the last century and in one of its greatest writers.

Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch

How not to want to read a book about an authoritarian, dystopian Ireland. And it just won the Booker Prize.

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

Got to have a little fantasy in there somewhere, and Gaiman is always entertaining.

Under the streets of London there's a world most people could never even dream of. A city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, and pale girls in black velvet. Richard Mayhew is a young businessman who is about to find out more than he bargained for about this other London. A single act of kindness catapults him out of his safe and predictable life and into a world that is at once eerily familiar and yet utterly bizarre. There's a girl named Door, an Angel called Islington, an Earl who holds Court on the carriage of a Tube train, a Beast in a labyrinth, and dangers and delights beyond imagining... And Richard, who only wants to go home, is to find a strange destiny waiting for him below the streets of his native city.

The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper

This once little-known 5-book series has had a major revival, and has become something of a cult classic over the past decade or so. I seem to know a lot of writers who make a point of reading it every winter. I never read it when I was a child, but I adored it as an adult. In the unlikely event that you’ve never heard of it, track a copy down and cosy up by the fire this winter. It’s stunning.

All through time, the two great forces of Light and Dark have battled for control of the world. Now, after centuries of balance, the Dark is summoning its terrifying forces to rise once more ... and three children find themselves caught in the conflict. The Drew siblings – Simon, Jane, and Barney – are on a family holiday in Cornwall when they discover an ancient map in the attic of the house they are sharing with their Great Uncle Merry. They know immediately that the map is special but have no way of knowing how much. For the map leads to a grail: a vital weapon for the Light's fight against evil. In taking on the quest to find the grail, the Drews will have to race against the sinister human beings who serve the dreadful power of the dark – an adventure that puts their own lives in grave peril.

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Six songs I’ll be listening to this winter

This is a selection of songs that I keep returning to on Apple Music right now, and which look set to comprise my Christmas playlist.

Winter Song, Lindisfarne

This song by Alan Hull was his finest. Lindisfarne, who were quite big in the 1970s, are from my home ground of the north-east of England, and listening to them always makes me nostalgic. ‘Run for Home’, which always produces a tear or two, will appear in another playlist soon …

Keep Me in Your Heart, Warren Zevon

Just because I love it and always sing along.

Grey Stone, Emily Portman

This gorgeous version of the selkie story by the brilliant Emily Portman always makes me cry.

An Acre of Land, PJ Harvey and Harry Escott

A beautiful modern reworking of an old folk song, for a film soundtrack.

Jacques Brel, Amsterdam

I fell in love with Jacques Brel when I was doing my postdoc in Paris, in the mid-1980s. Most of his songs are to be wept over, but the energy of this one always lifts up my heart.

Idiot Wind, Bob Dylan

Because this one always makes me laugh – Dylan at his excoriating best. And because there’s always someone we’d like to sing these lyrics to, right? When we’re not just being nice? I hope it’ll make you all laugh too.

Wishing you all good reading and good music during this festive season,

Sharon