I posted the first snapshot of my reading on New Year’s Day, expecting to follow it with another in February which somehow didn’t come off thanks to 
my gallivanting to London and Stockholm. This month I’m staying put with enough time on my hands to post the second.
The novel I’m reading is Your Absence is Darkness by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (transl. Philip Roughton), a doorstopper, or at least in my terms, which I’m halfway through. Set on an Icelandic fjord, it follows a writer suffering from amnesia but careful to hide it from the small community which seems to be welcoming him back from who knows where. Stefánsson weaves the stories of the characters and their ancestors through the writer’s narrative as he waits for a party to begin. I’m enjoying it but it needs a few hours at a time rather than dipping in.
The short story collection I’ve just started is Irish writer Norah Hoult’s Cocktail Bar, originally published in 1950. A little soon to judge, but I was impressed by the opening piece about a couple hosting a wedding in London, determined to recreate a truly Irish experience, who 
are left feeling somewhat disenchanted by their younger guests’ behaviour.
The non-fiction book I’m reading is poet Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue which uses as its framework Key’s adored album and comfort listening, Joni Michell’s Blue, the hook which sold me her book. Key reflects on her ambivalence about living alone in her forties when she’d expected to follow the conventional route of marriage and motherhood, something she’d yearned for. Beautifully written and often raw, it’s a very intimate memoir, overly so at times.
What about you? What are you reading?
