Bowen, Bennet, Butler: What I Read in February 2025

This was the month where I realised what I need to both enjoy reading books and feel like I'm doing it purposefully: structure and planning. To that end, I spent some time finally creating a centralised list of books I want to read on my Storygraph. Then I cross-checked my various library subscriptions to see what was available in their ebook catalogues and added tags. Now if I get restless, I can quickly borrow something I already know I want to read and be immersed in a matter of seconds, without having to make any extra decisions. Decision fatigue and paralysis, I'm learning, is a big component of why I sometimes get stuck with my reading.

Overwhelm is another part of it, so taking the time to look at the podcast episodes I plan to make this year (yes, I do schedule them a year at a time!) and scoping out what needs to be read and by when was very calming. An episode I have planned for November, for instance, requires me to re-read eight Agatha Christie books, so I've spaced those out over the intervening months. Do try and guess what subject I'm covering if you like, I would enjoy that. Anyway, I never again want to be in the situation I had in autumn 2024, when I was chain-listening Edmund Crispin audiobooks on 2.5 speed just to get through them in time. Not fun!

This is a loose structure, though, with plenty of room for spontaneity and mood-reading. I did a fair bit of that this month, actually, which resulted in what was, for me, a very satisfying blend of genres and styles for the 28 days of February.

Broken Homes and Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch; Body Work by Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel and Lee Sullivan

I'm going to whisk through the by-now customary Ben Aaronovitch section; for those who are new to these monthly reading round-ups, I've cut out most of the anxiety-inducing politics podcasts I used to listen to and instead, I'm making my way through the Rivers of London series on audiobook. I managed two in February, which tells you just how much time I was devoting to podcasts before. Foxglove Summer I think is my favourite of the series so far: I enjoyed the tension that came from born-and-bred Londoner Peter Grant having to spend time in the countryside.

Body Work was more of a departure for me, being the first in the series of comics/graphic novels that runs alongside the novels. I haven't tried to read a graphic novel of any kind in years, and I was disconcerted to find that the app I used to use, ComiXology, has since been folded into Amazon. Still, I must admit that ComiXology's "guided view" technology makes reading a work like this in the Kindle app an absolute dream. I did most of it on my phone while travelling and was impressed by how seamlessly I could swipe from panel to panel even on such a small screen while not losing the sense of the artist's original page layout. Obviously, it's a different kind of story that works for this more visual format, but I enjoyed it very much.

My Brother's Killer by D.M. Devine

I read this 1961 crime novel for a recent Shedunnit episode where I investigated Agatha Christie's taste in crime fiction. She gave this book first prize in a "Don's Detective Novel" competition, and I could see why. Although some of its subject matter is much more of the 1960s than the interwar era when she became famous for her mysteries — blackmail, extortion and pornography all feature — the plot is well worked out and has a good reveal at the end. I would recommend this if you are in the market for a quick, satisfying read that straddles the divide between the golden age whodunnit and the later twentieth-century thriller.

Deep End by Ali Hazelwood

I love that Ali Hazelwood writes the same book over and over again in different settings and millions of people buy them every time. I mean that sincerely. I need things I can rely on these days. All of her stories are about a burgeoning relationship between a physically large, often Scandinavian, man and a petite, athletic, brainy woman with insecurities. Because I know exactly what I'm going to get, I find her stuff very comforting to read, even if it is at this point veering towards the predictable and forgettable. In this new novel, her usual character types are transplanted to the world of high-level American collegiate watersports, with a large swimmer and a small diver navigating their kinks and feelings. Now that I'm writing this a couple of weeks later, I'm not sure I can recall the details of the plot, but I enjoyed a nice brain break while I was reading it, and I appreciated all the little Easter egg references to her other books that were sprinkled throughout.

Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon

Despite my intention to try and read more non-fiction this year, I found that I couldn't settle to any one book of that type this month. I've got a few on the go and I hope to finish one next month. I did fly through this quite short guide to modern creativity, though, and found in it some thought-provoking ideas as I continue to refine my relationship with social media and this newsletter.

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

I already counted myself in Agatha Christie's debt, but now I can add something else to the slate: I owe her for making me read Elizabeth Bowen for the first time. Bowen was one of Christie's favourite authors, so I picked up 1949's The Head of the Day for that aforementioned podcast episode. I was completely enraptured by it. It's a tense, claustrophobic tale set in London towards the end of WW2, focusing on a quartet of characters with complicated inner lives. Two are potentially engaged in espionage and counter-espionage, while romantic and family relationships interfere. There's also a hint of Bowen's Anglo-Irish background, with a younger English character unexpectedly inheriting a rural Irish "Big House", which his mother travels over to inspect as he is still doing military service.

As discussed at the start of the year, I'm pretty out of practice in reading literary fiction like this, so for the first fifty pages or so the intense interiority of the style and slow-paced plot was quite hard going for me, but by the end I was gripped like it was a thriller. I thought it had similarities both to Edith Wharton's 1912 novel The Reef and Patrick Marber's 1997 play Closer. I loved it and have already borrowed two more Bowen novels from the London Library.

Earl Crush by Alexandra Vasti

Vasti's Regency romances are of the type that show absolutely no resemblance to history at all, but I have enjoyed them in the past in the same brain-switching-off way that I enjoy Ali Hazelwood. However, this one was a disappointment because of the peculiar pacing. I'm not sure a book of this type is ever going to work if the most exciting set piece (a near-fatal runaway carriage incident) happens in the first couple of chapters and then the hero and heroine fall requitedly in love before the halfway point. What is left to happen? Not much, it would seem.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister

My reading of this 2022 thriller is entirely owing to getting better organised. I saw someone — I think the author Sarah Perry, but can't be sure — recommend it ages ago on Instagram. I scribbled down the title and immediately forgot about it. Then I rediscovered my note when I was compiling my TBR on the Storygraph, saw that my library had this available for ebook borrowing, and dived right in.

It's in some ways quite a conventional domestic noir thriller, set in northern England with the mother of a teenage son as the protagonist. Right at the beginning, events come to a head when her son stabs a man one night outside their house — an act that is completely at odds with her previous knowledge of her child. After an exhausting night at the police station, she wakes up the next morning and finds that it is... the day before the crime. And this keeps happening, with her skipping backwards through time. She decides that this is happening so that she can solve her son's crime before he commits it, and it turns into quite an interesting reflection on cause and effect.

I like how many authors these days seem to be asking the question "but what if I added time travel?" and then running with the answer. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton is one such, as is One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston. Genre is a construct anyway, so let's have more of this sort of thing, please.

Last Bus to Woodstock by Colin Dexter

This is the Shedunnit Book Club book for March, which I read a little ahead so I could record a podcast episode about it. It's the first Inspector Morse novel, from 1975. This was also my first time reading a Morse book despite loving the television series for decades.

It isn't often that I read a book that inspired a major screen adaptation and think "I like the TV version better", but that was the case here. Last Bus to Woodstock is very of 1975 in many ways, chiefly its attitude to women and sexual assault, and that's not a milieu I tend to seek out in my crime fiction. The character of Morse is consistently well-drawn and I admired Dexter's plotting, but I don't think I'll be stocking up on more of this series in book form any time soon. I will be watching random episodes while I eat my dinner, though.

Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

Oh, I wanted to like this novel so much. I formed a very positive impression of Mary Robinette Kowal when she appeared on my friend Helen's podcast last year and the premise of this book — Jane Austen but with magic — felt tailor-made for me. Unfortunately, said magic is almost entirely redundant in this world since its only use is for people to make pretty illusions for drawing room entertainment, and the surrounding comedy of manners and courtship is of pretty low quality. I was also irritated by the wholesale borrowing of entire characters from Austen's novels: there is a Mr and Mrs Bennet, a Frank Churchill, a Georgiana Darcy, a sort of Lady Catherine de Burgh, and so on. Perhaps this was meant as homage, but the copy and paste was too entire for my tastes. Not for me, unfortunately.

Why Shoot a Butler? by Georgette Heyer

I completed the month with a Heyer, since I'm reading all of her crime fiction in order this year for an eventual podcast episode. First published in 1933, as with the one I read last month, Why Shoot a Butler? is a light-hearted detective story set among wealthy English people, with more of a focus on character and atmosphere than plot. I enjoyed it as a good example of its type, rather than because I had grand expectations of an excellent puzzle. The one stand-out feature for me was the protagonist Frank Amberley, who is both the book's amateur sleuth and its romantic hero, yet remains incredibly grumpy throughout. Since he is a barrister by profession, the same as Heyer's husband, I did wonder if this was a private domestic joke.

That was my reading for February: twelve books, right on track to hit 120 in 2025. I also managed to meet my objective of reading one work of literary or experimental fiction (in this instance, The Heat of the Day) and one non-fiction book (Show Your Work!) per month, plus I managed to fit in a graphic novel as well. All very satisfactory, although I do think I could still stretch myself more when it comes to non-fiction. I'll work on that for March.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.

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