I actually did a fair bit of reading on the trip (or listening, in the case of my major audiobook project). There’s not much else to do on the plane and even I can only look out a train window for so long.

Here’s the best of what I read.

FICTION

MIddlemarch, by George Eliot. This was the aforementioned audiobook, all 31 hours of it. I thought it was time. And I thought the book was excellent – funny, wry, and smart. The narration by Nadia May really helped capture the characters and the emotion of the story. I think if I’d tried to read it (especially on a plane), I’d have missed some of the nuance.

Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy. Climate change, a remote island, a mysterious woman, a family with secrets. All this could easily be overplayed and overwrought, but McConaghy makes it (mostly) believable. The intensely evocative descriptions of the remote island near Antarctica and of the wilds of Australia help. I was also quite excited that the backstory of one of the characters bore an interesting resemblance to a memoir I also read during this period.

In Universes, by Emet North. A cut above much ‘alternate universes’ fare, with the focus on the characters and their struggles, in all worlds, to find a fulfilling life. Bonus: alien-possessed bears and weird taxidermy.

The Actual Star, by Monica Byrne. I liked Bryne’s The Girl in the Road from 2014 and finally got around this new one. Spread over three narratives, each 1,000 years apart, the book weaves together the story of twins ascending the throne of an ancient Mayan kingdom, an American woman searching for her heritage in Belize, and a far-future society facing questions about the true nature of their past and the world they’ve built.

NON-FICTION

Wavewalker, by Suzanne Heywood. The aforementioned memoir. Heywood recounts her unconventional and often difficult childhood living her father’s dream of living a life at sea, regardless of the cost to his family.

A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Because every woman who writes should read this. So I finally did.