Tag: Household Rancour

Books I intend to finish in 2026

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Kobo ebook reader showing the cover of The Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon) at 70% read

I started them in 2025, and am enjoying them enough to finish them. I just didn’t get them over the wire before the end of the year.

The Priory of the Orange Tree (Samantha Shannon) would probably have got there but for the fact that it’s a library book. My e-loan expired on Boxing Day, when I was somewhere around the 65% mark. I went straight back to the hold queue, and managed to borrow it again on New Year’s Eve. Now I have until the 15th, and the pressure’s off. Maybe too much so. We’ll see if I can finish it before then. Anyway, it’s great fun: an epic fantasy that’s attempting to, and generally succeeding in, evoking all the dragon mythology of East and West, and throwing in 16th century politics too.

Towers in the Mist (Elizabeth Goudge) has in fact been in progress since before 2025. I can’t remember when I started it, but it was probably some time in 2024. I was enjoying it, but was finding it harder work than I had the brain for at that point. Now I suspect it’s getting in the way of my starting The Players’ Boy, which arrived several months ago and which (most unusually for me and Antonia Forest) I haven’t yet opened. I’m sure I will be in the mood for atmospheric historicals sooner or later.

Public Schools and the Great War: the generation lost (Anthony Seldon and David Walsh) is research for the work in progress now tentatively known as Household Rancour. It’s about as depressing as you’d expect, but very interesting, and very useful for my purposes. I’m very glad that I stumbled across the recommendation while idly scrolling with no thought of writing in my mind.

Everything I’ve Ever Learned About Change (Lesley Garner). Everything I’ve Ever Done That Worked was one of the books that shaped my mind and attitude when I read it in my teens, and I still consciously apply many of its principles (Be A Music Listener; When The Sea Is Rough Mend Your Sails; The Sea Is Your Dinner Companion, etc). Now I’m 40 and have worked more of this stuff out for myself, so Garner’s later books (I also read Everything I’ve Ever Learned About Love last year) aren’t blowing my mind in the same way, but I’m still enjoying this, whrn I remember to read a chapter over lunch.

Spirituality in Season (Ross Thompson) follows the liturgical year, starting with Advent, and I’m reading it in real time, so to speak, so if all goes well I’ll finish it at Christ the King – the end of November.

Everyday Nature: how noticing nature can quietly change your life (Andy Beer) is a book with a section for each day. I started in the autumn of 2024, was going quite well in the spring of 2025, and then, like so many things, put it down when my mother died. So now I’m trying again. I’ve read the bit about dunnocks twice now and still can’t tell the difference between them and sparrows.

On a similar note, The Morville Year (Katherine Swift), a collection of garden columns. But that follows the old year and runs March-March, so I’m saving it.

Return of the writing brain

kathleenjowitt1 Comment
Sky, winter sunlight, and bare branches are reflected in a puddle on a tarmac path

My writing brain started up good and proper yesterday. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s having managed to post here every day for a month and more. Maybe it was having a day in which I’d promised myself I’d do no work and only minimal Cursillo admin. Maybe it’s because it’s almost eighteen months since the baby was born and that’s just how long it takes for a brain to get going again. Maybe it’s because I did some actual proper singing and it unblocked some metaphorical tubes. Or maybe I’d just knitted some arbitrary length of combined sock. Who knows.

Anyway, in the morning I found myself rereading some things I’d written. I fixed an plot hole in one of them. And I found myself thinking more and more about the project I was working on up until, well, a little more than eighteen months ago. Actually, it’s been bouncing around in my head for the last few days, but yesterday it started demanding my attention. And now it’s telling me I need to read the book on the Dance Band Era, and get hold of a wind-up gramophone and play the 78s, and rescue all the rest of the dance band 78s, and read I don’t know, who survived the First World War and wrote about it? Siegfried Sassoon, read Siegfried Sassoon, and oh yes, definitely David Blaize, and probably pick up that First World War history that I got about as far as 1915 in, and find out about twilight sleep and would an upper middle class woman be expected to breastfeed in 1924, and work out a better name for my hero (he is called Julian at the moment, which is a bit misleading)… And probably reread Romeo and Juliet just for the hell of it except that’s probably not the best use of my limited time, or rewatch it, except goodness knows I never get three straight hours free these days. And I would say read Surprised by Joy if I hadn’t just read it and concluded that, while I’m very pleased for C. S. Lewis that he got out an environment that was making him miserable, it would have been useful for me if he’d stayed on and could have written about what it was like being at school and watching form by form carted off to war, knowing your time was coming. (And good grief I don’t think his Professor Kirkpatrick as written would have let him get away with the logical fallacies in Mere Christianity, but that’s not remotely relevant.)

I started getting lines writing themselves again. I found myself wanting to reread what’s already there to make sure I hadn’t written them already, or written something that they would contradict. The cogs were turning, turning, getting up to speed. The writing brain was well and truly running. It kept me up mapping what fandom (such as there is) calls the Montacrew onto early twentieth century public school dynamics (let the reader understand). And then the toddler woke up and insisted on a really, really long feed.

You recall that I am meant to be resting and recovering. So yes, today was a washout (although I did some more singing practice and am feeling a lot better about my impending performance – and finished reading Touch Not The Cat, which is very slightly relevant.) So no, I haven’t actually added any new words to this project yet. But I’m so very glad to see it again.