I’m feeling slightly guilty about having left you without a newsletter post at the weekend, so I thought maybe I should make up for it by suggesting some earlier posts in Talk about books that you might have missed first time or just might like to be reminded about. The following are some of my own favourites from the first year-and-a-half of the newsletter. See what you think.

Reading Wuthering Heights with aphantasia
When I first read Wuthering Heights I was in my 30s. More than 20 years later, I learned that I have no visual imagination (Dec 2020)

Tana French, The Likeness
A novel of doubles, reflections, parallels — and deceptive resemblance (Feb 2021)
The second novel in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series has an alluring premise: a discarded undercover identity being adopted by the detective’s doppelgänger; and it further illuminates the relationship at the heart of the first book.

Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale
The complications of gaining an inheritance by marriage (Mar 2021)
On first reading of Fingersmith, I thought the plot was too complicated. But conspirators can’t often afford elegance, precision and minimalism.

Midnight’s Children: “A thousand and one dead ends”
A cure for optimism (Apr 2021)
Salman Rushdie’s second novel is the most important English-language work of fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. How was he supposed to follow that?

“To overreach the devil”: William Empson partly rewrites Marlowe’s Faustus
Empson’s insightful errors, no. 3 (May 2021)
William Empson thought that Marlowe’s Faustus must have had a plan to cheat the devil and escape hell, otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. It’s a good insight but I believe Empson reached the wrong conclusion as to Faustus’s intended escape route.

Judicial misconduct
Scott Turow’s judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers (Jun 2021)
Corrupt judges and blinkered, self-righteous prosecutors threaten the integrity of the criminal justice system in Scott Turow’s novels — but they’re not all like that.

Creature and creator in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
“Did I solicit thee | From darkness to promote me?” (Sep 2021)
Victor Frankenstein is a negligent and deluded creator, more conscious of his responsibilities to his own species than of what he owes to the being he has created. Have we any reason to expect better from our own creator?

Fugitive women: Lisa Lutz, The Passenger; and Laura Lippman, Sunburn
“You can never see anything clearly when you’re running” (Sep 2021)
Two gripping pieces of crime fiction about women on the run, both perceived by the people they’re trying to leave behind as being more blameworthy than they are.

Peter Abrahams’s impaired heroes: Oblivion, Nerve Damage and Delusion
Three novels from the mid 2000s by Stephen King’s “favorite American suspense novelist”, featuring protagonists who have the odds stacked against them, even more so than is usual in suspense fiction. (Dec 2021)

“An exemplary case of unacknowledged self-persuasion”: Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

Ian McEwan’s 1997 novel is (apart from a few chapters) the first-person narrative of Joe Rose, a successful science journalist and popularizer of scientific topics from dinosaurs to quantum mechanics, who suffers a crisis when he finds himself unwittingly taking part in an accidental but fatal “game” of Prisoner’s Dilemma. (Feb 2022)

Candia McWilliam, Wait Till I Tell You

Candia McWilliam writes in an oblique style, which sometimes leaves the reader unsure what is supposed to have happened, combined with a very satisfying level of particularity and detail. (Mar 2022)

“Solemn oaths undone in cruel slaughter”: Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

The first of Ishiguro’s novels not to have the protagonist as a first-person narrator examines the founding myths of the English and Welsh nations and imagines a perfidious King Arthur. (May 2022)

If you’d like to look for more old posts, you’ll find full archives via the “Sign-up and archives” link at the top of the page. Thanks for reading.