The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2025, pt. 16: Lesley Hall

 

 

The Pleasures of Reading, 2025

by Lesley Hall

 

 

During the past year I spent a fair amount of time immersed in two older lengthy romans fleuve. I signed up to an online reading group re-reading and discussing Anthony Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975) which is very English of a certain class and generation. Of my own accord I embarked (actually, I see I read the first volume back in 2024, but it was this year that the sequence really got its hooks into me) on the very different Lanny Budd series by left-wing US novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair had not really been on my horizon before, although I had some apprehension that his earlier works had had significant social impact and gained him a reputation as an important muckraker. This series consists of eleven long volumes (published 1940-1953), covering a period from before the First World War to the Cold War era.

The novels are a vast panoramic mixture of very assorted elements with a global perspective on the political currents of the time: the significance of the rise of fascism to the trajectory of the narrative struck considerable contemporary resonances. Lanny Budd is American but born and brought up in France within a cosmopolitan and artistic milieu: he is introduced doing Dalcroze exercises in company with his English and German friends (who go on to play significant continuing roles). 

While a good deal of his adventures are straight-up thriller material, there are also observations of the differing social mores of the places he visits and the very diverse groups he mingles with, the social and technological changes going on, and a whole lot else, including the importance of art and music, his experiments with psychic phenomena, his “New Thought” guru stepfather, the new modern theories of child-rearing. I was also struck by the extent to which Lanny was by no means a two-fisted macho hero, but a mild-mannered art expert with useful family and social connections (excellent cover for his exploits), and his behavior toward women is exemplarily gentlemanly. Plus, there is a wide range of vivid women characters, if perhaps the occasional touch of “man of his day” authorial gender essentialism. One might cavil just a little at the way in which Lanny manages to find himself at the hot spots of history and in the presence of major players – some of these are plausible, given his convictions and missions, but others seem a bit too coincidental. But, really, the whole story just keeps moving along and took me with it, leaving me at the end of the final volume quite worrying that Lanny and his wife Laurel being strongly anti-Communist democratic socialists and anti-Stalinist activists was not going to save them, a short while down the line, from the adverse attentions of McCarthyism.

Of more recent works read in the past year, the ones that impressed me particularly (a very miscellaneous range!): 

Maggie Helwig, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community (2025): brilliant and intense account by an Anglican priest and long-time humanitarian activist about the homeless community outside her church in Toronto.

Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives (2025): I am always up for reading Lucy Mangan writing about books and reading.

Susan Sontag, On Women (collected 2023 but mostly written in 1970s).

Two romances that had what I like in romances, which is a good deal of hinterland in both the character’s own lives and in the world around them: Cat Sebastian, After Hours at Dooryard Books (2025) set in 1968 in a used bookstore in Greenwich Village and not the image of the liberated late ‘60s people envision, partly because the main characters are gay men at a time of continuing prejudice but also because that time was actually pretty dark. (I saw someone somewhere suggesting this was actually a historical novel incorporating a romance plot. Fair.) It also avoided what I find an annoying twist common in romance. Zen Cho, Behind Frenemy Lines (2025): contemporary-set romance, that had elements that made me wonder is Zen Cho going to add political thrillers to the several genres she has written in for the next act??

Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward #2) (2025): I mentioned her previous A Case of Mice and Murder as among my pleasures last year. This met the high bar already set and I am already in eager anticipation of the next volume in this series.

 

Lesley Hall was born in the seaside resort and channel port of Folkestone, Kent, and now lives in north London. She has retired from a career as an archivist of over 40 years, though she's still active in her field of specialization. Her recent essay "Send in the Clones?: Naomi Mitchison and the Politics of Reproduction and Motherhood," was published in Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time Edited by James Purdon, Edinburgh University Press https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-naomi-mitchison.html. She has published several books and numerous articles on issues of gender and sexuality in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain, and is currently researching British interwar progressive movements and individuals. She has also published a volume in the Aqueduct Press Conversation Pieces series, Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of her Life and Work (2007). She has been reading science fiction and fantasy since childhood and cannot remember a time when she was not a feminist. Her reviews have appeared in Strange Horizons, Vector, and Foundation, and she has been a judge for the Tiptree and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. She has had short stories published in The Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women (1996) and The Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women (1995) and, most recently, is the author of the series The Comfortable Courtesan: being memoirs by Clorinda Cathcart and Clorinda Cathcart's Circle: https://www.clorinda.org. Visit Lesley's website.