Amanda Cockrell's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Menewood is the sequel to Nicola Griffith’s novel Hild about the woman who would eventually become St. Hilda of Whitby.

Hardly anything is known about Hild before her thirties except for her parents and where she was born, and Griffith has imagined a densely detailed early life for her. I was fortunate enough to receive a review copy of Menewood and I loved it for the same reasons I loved Hild – Griffith’s absolute genius at creating a sense of time and place within the culture of seventh-century England.

That world comes alive, from the birds in the air to the winter floods to the tangled relations of Hild and her accumulated “family” in the valley of Menewood. Menewood brings us complicated, brave, arrogant, valiant, flawed characters I did not want to part with.

This second novel ends well before Hild actually enters the firm historical record, and so I am hoping for more of her story. It doesn’t matter whether the actual St. Hilda lived this imagined early life – Hild is wildly alive on these pages.

I have always been a huge Terry Pratchett fan and this biography, by his personal assistant of many years, speaks so strongly with Pratchett’s voice.

A great deal of it is derived from Pratchett’s notes on the autobiography that he began when he was tragically diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Wilkins’ text takes us from Pratchett’s early childhood (when the headmaster of his school decided he wasn’t going to amount to much) through the beginnings of Discworld, and on to his collaboration with Neil Gaiman on Good Omens, among other adventures.

The chapter titles themselves are Pratchettian: Chapter 3 is called “Smutty Magazines, Unfinished Custard and the School Uniform of Satan.” Just go read it.

My college reunion is coming round again and I usually find myself rereading Gaudy Night beforehand.

Although it was published before I was born, it speaks to the issues that bedevil educated women, maybe particularly female writers. It’s set at a women’s college in Oxford and is the only one of Sayers’ mystery novels that doesn’t have a corpse. Instead, it has a creepy, increasingly dangerous somebody with a grudge against women dons. Or maybe a woman don herself. That’s the trick, because it’s not that easy to figure out.

It’s an excellent book for those pondering whether you can have a life of the heart and a life of the mind. To write well, must one be an alcoholic/drug-addicted male with serial wives or a depressed female with her head in the oven? Or is it possible to balance, if only precariously, on that angelic pinhead and have both work that matters and a love life that matters, without one being the servant of the other?