A Book Blog 2026 by Books do Furnish a Room

[Books do furnish a room]

First review of the year

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

“Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”

This isn’t my first Pynchon. I loved Mason and Dixon and The Crying of Lot 49 was ok. This one was published in 1973 and concerns the Second World War and it’s aftermath. Of course, he’s produced another novel in the last year, which I may one day read as well!

Going into detail about the plot would take too long. Suffice to say that it focuses on (initially) the production and delivery of V2 rockets by the Germans towards the end of the war. It covers the period from late 1944 to September 1945. The plot is intricate and convoluted. There are many recurring characters, and Pynchon is quite inventive with names (one of the US navy’s ships is called the USS John E Badass: today that piece of satire is uncomfortably close to the truth). The novel goes into the science and engineering behind the rockets as well as their production and the search for the secrets behind them by the various allied powers after the war. Pynchon also uses low and high culture and there are lyrics to many popular songs, some of which are certainly made up. He captures the chaos on the continent after the collapse of Nazi Germany very well.

Pynchon does endeavour to shock at times and manages it rather well, although he does have a point to make. Despite all the chaos the rocket and its technology is in the hands of the state-corporatist powers and capitalism has weathered the storm. Pynchon is also interested in ecology and the natural world and is also it seems, a bit of a pessimist as he describes the western economic system:

“a system whose only aim is to violate the [natural] Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity — most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.”

The messiness of the novel just reflects that war is a messy business and the real losers are the ordinary citizens on both sides.

It’s a magnificent novel, all 902 pages of it and it is worth the hard work it takes to read it.

9 out of 10

Starting JR by William Gaddis

 

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The Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden

“What was joy, anyway. What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact. What did people who spoke of joy know of what it meant, to sleep and dream only of the whistle of planes and knocks at the door and on windows and to wake with a hand at one's throat— one's own hand, at one's own throat. What did they know of not speaking for days, of not having known the touch of another, never having known, of want and of not having felt the press of skin to one's own, and what did they know of a house that only ever emptied out. Of animals dying and fathers dying and mothers dying and finding bullet holes in the barks of trees right below hearts carved around names of people who weren't there and the bloody lip of a sibling and what did what did she know”

This won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2025 and was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It is set in The Netherlands in 1961. The main protagonist is Isabel. She lives alone in the family home, although the home is tentatively owned by her elder brother. Isabel is lonely, obsessed with tidiness and order and apparently very self-enclosed. Essentially the novel tells the story of a period of time where Louis has to leave the country with his work and requests that his girlfriend, Eva, stay in the house: for about a month/six weeks.

It's the story of Isabel and Eva’s relationship and how it develops. As there is a queer element to this, it’s not too difficult to work out what happens. However, the novel is multi-layered and there are plenty of twists and turns. The aftermath of the war is a significant aspect part of the novel and the house itself is an important part of this. Much property belonging to the Jewish community was redistributed and that caused complications in later years. Family guilt and hidden scars are a factor. There is lots of hidden history. There are also themes of identity, power, control, class, the silence of queer desire, the risks and benefits of chaos. This is an exploration of human vulnerability and on the whole it works and the prose is good.

“What was joy, anyway? What was the worth of happiness that left behind a crater thrice the size of its impact.”

7and a half out of 10

Starting The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas

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The Housekeepers by Alex Hay

“There were a dozen clocks piled up on the mantelpiece, ticking furiously, all out of time.”

This was pure entertainment for the holiday period with no real thinking required. It’s essentially a heist novel. Many reviewers have compared it with Ocean’s Eleven or at least Ocean’s Eleven meets Downton Abbey.

This is set in Edwardian London in 1905/6. The main protagonists are a group of women of the servant classes. Led by a housekeeper, Mrs King. She and others organise what is a heist on a large house in Park Lane. It is planned for the night of a ball and the idea is simply to remove all of the contents of the house and sell them. It involves a lot of planning and a large number of people. The plot follows the planning and the inception of the idea, through the night itself and its aftermath. I suspect other books will follow. It also feels like it could be made into a movie in the Thursday Murder Club mould. It’s also a debut novel. There’s also clearly a backstory that could be written about.

This was ok as entertainment and escapism.

6 out of 10

Starting Babel by R F Kuang

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Songs of the Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell

Now must I mend my manners

And lay my gruffness by.

The earth is making merry,

And so, I think, must I.

The flowers are out in thousands,

Each in a different dress.

The woods are green and like to fruit,

The earth has donned her grassy fleece,

And blackbirds, Jackdaws, magpies, nightingales

Shouting each other down in equal praise.

This is an examination of lyric poetry (published in 1927), sung and said, sacred and profane between the fourth and thirteenth centuries: the bulk being between the tenth and twelfth centuries. There is a good deal of poetry in this as well as analysis. Many of the wandering scholars were clerics, many were troubadours, also known as goliards. Much of the poetry in here was translated by Waddell herself.

The reader is introduced to some obscure poets and lyricists: most of whom I had not heard of. Some of the clerical ones I had heard of: Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Abelard and the later Roman poets like Boethius and Virgil.

Some felt familiar: the following reminded my of Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral:

O Spring the long-desired,

The lover’s hour!

O flaming torch of joy,

Sap of each flower,

All Hail!

O jocund company

Of many flowers,

Of many-coloured light,

All hail,

And foster our delight!

The birds sing out in chorus,

O youth, joy is before us,

Cold winter has passed on,

And the Spring winds are come!

On the whole I enjoyed this, particularly the lyrics that related to the natural world, but the whole was fascinating and I learnt a lot. You can tell this is an older publication as one of the original reviewers was C S Lewis.

8 out of 10

Starting The Disinherited by Perez Galdos

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The Haunted Library edited by Tanya Kirk

A Tales of the Weird collection about libraries and books, selected by Tanya Kirk who is a librarian at St John’s College in Cambridge. There are stories by S Levett Yeats, M R James, Algernon Blackwood, H D Everett, Mary Webb, Margaret Irwin, Hester Holland, Alfred Noyes, L P Hartley, A N L Munby, Russell Kirk, William Croft Dickinson, Penelope Lively and C J Faraday. The introduction is good and the whole collection is one of the better ones in this series. The stories vary in date from 1895 to 2020. This is an updated version of a 2016 collection curated by the same author.

There is one of M R James’s more well-known stories and a quote in the introduction by actor Christopher Lee illustrates their power:

“He writes his stories so that we might feel just as if we were reading a newspaper, and his characters seemed at first impression to be the kind you could meet on any street. Then by dint of one phrase or sentence a very different picture would emerge from such an apparently normal situation. To me, that is the very essence of terror.”

There are a couple more stories in the Jamesian tradition and a particularly good one by C J Faraday, written in 2020. She is also a fellow of St John’s College. The Mary Webb story is a rather light-hearted pastiche and is also very effective. There is also humour in Penelope Lively’s contribution when a very snobbish woman buys what turns out to be a haunted typewriter and starts to take on traits of the previous owner who was very loud and gauche. Hartley’s story concerns a writer who starts to realise on of his nastier creations may be alive. The structure of this story is unusual and works well. There are a couple of stories about evil books and evil booksellers. I’ll end this with a quote from M R James on writing ghost stories:

“On the whole (though not a few instances might be quoted against me) I think that a setting so modern that the ordinary reader can judge of its naturalness for himself is preferable to anything antique. For some degree of actuality is the charm of the best ghost stories: not a very insistent actuality, but one strong enough to allow the reader to identify himself with the patient: while it is almost inevitable that the reader of an antique story should fall into the position of the mere spectator.”

9 out of 10

Starting Bog People: A working class anthology of folk horror edited by Hollie Starling

 

[Madeleine]

I think Christopher Lee knew M R James when he was at Cambridge.

[Books do furnish a room]

I think he may well have done Madeleine.

Brotherless Night by V V Ganeshananthan

“Many people have died there: some killed by the Sri Lankan Army and the state, some by the Indian Peace Keeping Force, and some by the Tamil separatists, whom you know as the terrorists. Many people, of course, have also lived.”

This is a novel set during the civil war in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and early 1990s. It concerns Sashi, who is sixteen  and her four brothers, charting their progress through the turbulent times of the civil war. The novel won the women’s prize for fiction in 2024.

Sashi’s progress towards her goal of becoming a doctor is charted over the years in parallel with the development of the violence and unrest. Although this is fiction, it is very much based on the real events and Ganeshananthan charts the violence from all sides: the Sri Lankan government, the Tamil Tigers and the Indian peacekeepers. Because it is effectively a family saga the impact on the family is at the centre with losses of friends, family and beloved colleagues. The title has some meaning.

Ganeshananthan makes the complexities and nuance of the situation clear, all sides have blood on their hands:

“I did not wait. Neither did the war. It was with us now. Since Dayalan and Seelan would not tell us, I went out and asked my friends what they had heard or knew, and in that way began to collect information about the new lives people were choosing. Were they responding to the war or were they making it? Boys joined in droves; the ranks of the militant groups swelled. Almost every week now one of our neighbours told Amma about those they knew who were going. People spoke about it more and more freely. Some of the parents were proud. “What did we expect them to do, after all,” said Jega Uncle, Saras Aunty’s husband. His nephew had joined. “After what they did in Colombo, how did they expect us to react?””

Ganeshananthan looks at the space between militarised societies and questions of choice and coercion, In the relationships between the Tamil Tigers and the Tamil population I saw parallels with the IRA and the Catholic population in Northern Ireland.

The novel is by no means perfect, but it is very effective and stays in the mind.

8 out of 10

Starting Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra