November 2023

I was reading back on these entries recently and I realised it’s all been sounding a bit emo, so in the interest of change, November was wonderful! I went to Hay for the first time, visited New York, went to New Jersey for the first time, and started learning how to read tarot cards. These are just the highlights. There’s been lots of other fun stuff. Thanks to two transatlantic flights and lots of train journeys, as well as some jet lag, I managed to read ten books this month, although I still feel funny about saying “reading” about an audiobook.

Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling, The Importance of Being Aisling, Once, Twice, Three Times an Aisling, Aisling and the City and Aisling Ever After by Emer McLysaght and Sarah BreenI was part of the original Aisling Facebook group approximately ten thousand years ago, but had never actually read the books, and they’re so fun! I read these between my sofa, bed and the flight to New York and they were a perfect companion. I also got genuinely invested in Aisling and her happy ending.

Simple Passion by Annie ErnauxThis is the first Annie Ernaux I’ve ever read, despite her incredible body of work and recent Nobel Prize win. It’s only 56 pages, but packs an incredible punch. I’ve never read a better account of obsessive love before. She documents her state of mind during a relationship she has with a married man, her life divided into being with him and waiting to be with him again. Incredible.

Good Material by Dolly AldertonLike every woman of a certain age, I’m a big fan of Dolly Alderton. This is her second novel, and told from the perspective of Andy, who has just been dumped by his partner Jen. It’s a beautiful and moving book about love, the ways in which men interact with one another and the joy of being single. I enjoyed it so much, it sent me to re-read Dolly’s first book.

Everything I Know About Love by Dolly AldertonI loved this book when I first read it when it was first released, and I was curious to see if it still resonated now I’m a little older. I’m still single, just like I was when I first read it, and I still centre my female friendships. I’m older and wiser, and shaped by newer and varied heartbreaks, but the words still resonate. This passage left me in tears on a train to New Jersey:

Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I'm bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is- just me and the trees and the sky and the seas- I know now that that's enough.

A woman on the subway also stopped me to ask what I was reading because she said I was smiling in an intriguing way.

Intimacies by Katie KitamuraThis was a gift from my friend Clare, who has eternally chic taste in books. It’s about a young translator who has just arrived in the Hague and her relationships with a recently separated man she is sleeping with and a dictator she is translating for at a human rights abuses trial. It’s one of those books that gets under your skin and never fully reveals everything you want to know about the characters. Compulsive and good for anyone who’s an immigrant and sometimes feels a little at sea, never belonging where you’re from or where you’re living.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, narrated by Colin FirthScroll back to read my love letter, written in a haze of insomnia and jet lag, to this audiobook, the first I’ve ever “read”. Colin Firth narrates this heartbreaker perfectly, and although I hadn’t read the book since university, I gained a whole new insight. I’m going to re-read the physical book at some stage. Or at least, I hope to.