mr knightley must not marry!!!: issue 1
several different types of monsters and, unfortunately, boys
Hi, here’s some book recs for you. Because it’s September they’re themed around BACK 2 SCHOOL. Because it’s the first time we’ve done this there are a few q&as at the end of the letter. Don’t forget to like and subscribe!
Would you like a book about ancient ritual and sacrifice, crazy Classics majors, quiet liberal colleges, a group of students who seem more like a cult, mysteriously alluring professors, and ill-advised romantic decisions? Please skip right over the annual Secret History reread and proceed instead to Pamela Dean’s TAM LIN, which replants the old Scottish ballad in 1970s Minnesota. Tam Lin is perhaps my favourite novel, and it certainly features one of the best first and last pages of all time.
(buy @ betterworldbooks)COLD EARTH by Sarah Moss is not really a school story, but it is about academia, and the end of summer, and some lessons to be learned in close confines. Those lessons are: don’t trust the dead. Moss clearly likes archeological horror - see last year’s superlative Ghost Wall for further evidence - but this one can’t quite work out whether it wants to lean into that, or a flu epidemic, or just the weird hard stretch of hunger and cold. Allow yourself to vacillate with it, and keep the lights on.
(buy @ hive)If you haven’t read Akwaeke Emezi’s FRESHWATER yet I doubt me telling you is going to make the difference but just in case, a different tack: halfway through reading Freshwater, with my head all swollen and my gums bloody from missing teeth, I stood up and walked in a tense, tight circle around my living room, thumping the book against my leg. Most college books are about who you meet at school, how they change you; Freshwater is about who you bring with you, whether you want to or not. Hold out for St Vincent, the kind of holiness that is very much He’s Not A Tame Lion, but find yourself rooting for Asụghara by the end after all.
(buy @ indiebound)It’s funny to think about when school novels were mostly about Larks. These days they’re usually tense and claustrophobic and confused (as they should be, teenagers are terrifying), but sometimes it’s entertaining to look back at Tom Jones and Enid Blyton and co. If you need to while away an evening, read STALKY & CO. by Rudyard Kipling, a terrible person who wrote quite a good book, mostly because it is very sweet. It is about three boys who regularly fall weeping with laughter into one another’s arms, or the bushes, or a bath. There is a bit where one of them is laughing so hard he falls sobbing to the ground and the other one has to kick him along the ground to get home in time. It’s fun!
(buy @ betterworldbooks)I can’t speak objectively about Melina Marchetta’s SAVING FRANCESCA, an Australian novel that rewrote my brain when I was fourteen and contains all the key beats of romance to which I now cling. It’s an anxious, sharp-tongued book about a teenage girl with depression, and her mum who also has depression, and finding the kind of friends that define you. At the end of Saving Francesca one character announces to the other that the upcoming school musical is going to be Les Mis and they shriek and leap on each other: I love youse.
(buy @ readings)ALSO READ: the Lowood chapters in Jane Eyre with sexy Helen Burns; The History of Girls, a sad and violent short story by Ayşe Papatya Bucak with some good jokes and a repeating fairytale; What Katy Did At School, especially for the moment when her family sends enormous wooden boxes for Christmas filled with oranges and fruitcakes and jarred conserves; the first half of Omar El Akkad’s American War, a dystopian future look at radicalisation with an appropriately charismatic and disappointing teacher, but stop after the good sex scene, it’s all very bleak from there; The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for a lesson that is hard to follow; Albert Goldbarth’s poem The Sciences Sing A Lullabye: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down; Salma Ahmad’s eerie, genius story Manholes, about what happens when school is definitely, definitely over.
Why book recs?
I read a lot, and I usually spite-read books I don’t like to the end so that I can better ruin the experience of those books for my friends who have enjoyed them. This newsletter will feature only good books, so you can be less like me.
What are the themes?
An attempt to make this vaguely original. Look forward to upcoming themes including BREAKFAST, GREENERY and HANGOVERS, and let me know if you have any requests.
What does the title mean?
He shouldn’t!!!!!! I cannot AT ALL consent to Mr. Knightley's marrying; and I am sUrE it is not at all likely. I am a m a z e d that you should think of such a thing.
Will this newsletter be as good as Molly Young’s READ LIKE THE WIND?
Definitely not. Sign up to that as well here.