Current reading: mid January 2025 edition

[vivdunstan]

Current main Kindle reading for me. The top 6 books in the picture below are the main books I'm currently reading. A mix of fiction and non fiction.

Comments

[greenwoodside]

Eerie East Anglia looks fun. I developed a taste for Fen Country Gothic starting as a child with The Dead Moon by Kevin Crossley-Holland and on through Dorothy L Sayers's The Nine Tailors, the folk ballad The Holland Handkerchief and Waterland by Graham Swift.

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver was an entertaining new entry in the 'horrible things going on in the fens' canon.

Hope your collection has a couple of good stories in it!

[vivdunstan]

Love "The Nine Tailors". I've read it several times!

There are some very good stories already in the "Eerie East Anglia" book, which I'm part way through. I am satisfyingly disturbed! I will try to remember to draw up a list of my favourites when I get to the end.

My mother-in-law was from Norfolk, just near the Suffolk border. And her ancestry is firmly fixed in that area, and over to Wisbech and King's Lynn as well.

[greenwoodside]

I've read The Nine Tailors twice some time ago now, and was just thinking it would be a marvellous book to reread in January.

Wisbech especially I think was a feature of Francis Pryor's The Fens. Fascinating area.

[watervole]

I went to university in Norfolk, and I joined the Norfolk Trained Bands this year.

[vivdunstan]

Nice! Martin was born in Norfolk but his parents moved to Somerset a few years later.

[vivdunstan]

Oh and I read "Wakenhyrst" some years ago. It didn't quite land for me, but it was definitely a spooky and atmospheric read.

[greenwoodside]

Yes, I definitely enjoyed the atmosphere -- for whatever reason, the fen country seems to triumph even over Yorkshire in its spookiness -- though the thing I most remember was reading the author's notes at the end which suggested that the terrible marriage in the novel was partly lifted from her family history.