#37: Writing through Winter
and my favourite books I read in 2025
My manuscript deadline is looming over me, which means I have been writing through winter here in London. I sometimes feel homesick during the winter here, mostly thanks to Instagram and WhatsApp where the pictures of beach swims and summer fruit pavlovas start to appear. I felt it this winter, but lots of things helped dissolve it into something lighter and I wanted to make a list of them. But first, a different list: I read a lot this year, especially creative non-fiction. I don’t always read in the genre that I’m working in at the same time, so I read more non-fiction earlier in 2025, when my current book project was still taking shape in my brain. I try to read at least 50 books a year and I don’t always manage it, but this year I did, despite spending so much time knitting rather than reading.
The Best Books I Read in 2025
(POETRY)
Good Dress, Brittany Rogers
Chaotic Good, Isabelle Baafi
Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha
Clay Eaters, Gregory Kan
Neon Manila, Troy Cabida
No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
My Dream Job, Norman Erikson Pasaribu
I Could Not Ask You To, Helena Fornells Nadal
Mouth, Mona Arshi
Foretokens, Sarah Howe
(NON-FIC)
Whaea Blue, Talia Marshall
A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk
Sea State, Tabitha Lasley
This House of Grief, Helen Garner
Terrier, Worrier, Anna Jackson
(FICTION)
Whale Fall, Elizabeth O’Connor
Babel, R.F. Kuang
Will There Ever Be Another You, Patricia Lockwood
Writing through Winter
~
Lentil soup + an archival appointment
It’s free to make an appointment to view an object at the new V&A Storehouse in Hackney Wick. With an hour to kill before my appointment in the archives, I ordered lentil soup at the café (a new outpost of E5 bakery) and it arrived with two chunky, malty slices of sourdough. The soup was golden. I am not usually a Western-style chunky soup kind of person, but this was good. The man sitting next to me was writing out his Christmas cards with a nice pen and placing each one in a tin that fit the stack of cards perfectly. After slurping my soup, I put my things into a locker on and went up into the storehouse. Inside, I felt like I was in a cavernous dollhouse. Or an IKEA for pilfered colonial objects. To find the Study Room, I walked past steel shelves full of swords, mosaic tiles, masks, mid-century chairs and theatre costumes. The archivist instructed me to wash my hands and tie up my hair. She led me to a table where the objects I had requested were laid on the table. Three blue silk cheongsam dresses and a folder containing two-hundred-year-old skeins of Chinese silk threads. Everything was open-plan, so visitors were standing and watching me from the level above almost like I was part of an exhibit, although here, the line between exhibit and archive is deliberately blurred. When I was finished, I went back to the café and got a slice of spelt apple cake, which I ate slowly while writing up my notes.
Library knitting, bakery knitting
2025 was the year I learned to knit, or more accurately, the year knitting took over my life. One day recently I took my knitting with me from the British Library to the new St John at London Review Bookshop. It was the middle of the afternoon, just starting to get dark. Part of me wanted to stay outside during the last ~20 minutes of proper daylight, but the other part of me wanted to be inside with a vanilla custard donut, knitting. Everyone else around me was seated in pairs, tourists and people having creative-adjacent professional catch-ups. The last time I had eaten a St John donut was at the bonkers marketing party that Penguin threw for Ocean Vuong last winter (!) where they served chic mini St John donuts and free cocktails. I couldn’t work out why I had been invited to the party, because apart from a handful of poets (myself included), almost everyone else was a BookTok person. The donut was as good as I remembered, although maybe not as good as the mini version of itself. The layout of the bookshop café is now completely different since the old cake shop closed. The new space feels a bit calmer. I ordered a peppermint tea and got stuck into my knitting, an ambitious red cardigan (the Petite Knit Esther Cardigan, if any knitters are reading this). It was going to be my Christmas sweater but now it’s going to be a Chinese New Year sweater (hopefully).
Writing by hand in the library
I have been writing by hand in the library, a relatively new development for me. I take notes by hand, but I don’t write by hand that much – until I went and bought myself three new Muji pens and a Muji aluminium pencil case to put them in. It clicks shut in a satisfying way. I got the inky pens that come in lots of colours. Ever since, I’ve been making more notes and writing more chunks of my book in my red project notebook. I had been feeling stuck, and I think these pens might have gifted me an actual creative breakthrough. I normally have trouble sustaining enough focus to write by hand at home, so I take my notebook out with me and do my best writing-by-hand whenever I’m out of the house. I do it in short chunks of time, 10 minutes or 15 minutes. I set a timer on my phone and force myself to go, like I’m in a writing workshop and someone’s watching the clock. I had forgotten how it helps me think. A friend of mine said: “Isn’t it slow?” Yes, it is slow. The words come slower but the ideas – and connections between them – come faster.
Blue maps of Ursula LeGuin
The exhibition (sadly now closed) was inside a brightly lit room overlooking one of those squares in Bloomsbury. I stood very still when I saw the blue lengths of cloth hanging from the ceiling, each one printed with a cyanotype of one of Ursula K. LeGuin’s hand-drawn maps. As well as the blue fabric, the walls had been painted electric blue. Small piles of stones lined the room, some of which had been tied together with blue braided cord. A number of careful aesthetic decisions had been made in the curation of the exhibition – especially regarding the colour blue – not all of which seemed connected with LeGuin’s work, but the effect was striking. And calming. I lingered over a map of Earthsea, a delicate archipelago of islands. I walked slowly around the room twice. Afterwards, out on the street, I fished a cold mandarin out of the pocket of my coat and peeled it, the skin coming away easily. A line that had been printed in italics on the wall, “The Word for World is Forest” (also the title of a novella by LeGuin) echoed around my brain. I took two copies of the risograph-printed leaflet from the exhibition, beautifully printed in silver ink on blue paper. I saved one of them to post to a friend in Scotland.
Chilli bean mushroom noodle soup
I have a jar of Lee Kum Kee chilli bean paste that I normally exclusively use for cooking mapo tofu. But we had some beautiful frilly oyster mushrooms in the fridge, so I came up with the idea of stir-frying the mushrooms in a little of the chilli bean paste, as a topping for noodles – and they would work as a topping over rice, too. I cut the mushrooms into chunky slices. I love the feeling of cutting mushrooms, how some parts you have to cut through with the blade, but other parts you can just press down with the knife and the structure of the mushroom falls part under its weight. I stir-fried them in some oil with a little finely chopped ginger, then added a heaped teaspoon of the chilli bean paste. As always with mushrooms, I let them cook a little longer than seemed necessary, letting the flesh turn brown and crisp. Coated in the the chilli bean paste, the mushrooms began to glow red. I spooned them into a small bowl and, for another topping, took out a bunch of cavolo nero leaves. I rinsed them twice in cold water to try to get rid of the tiny moths and caterpillars hidden in the crevices of the dark leaves. But even after washing, when I cut away the hard stalks in the centre, microscopic white moths fluttered up into the air. I washed the leaves a third time. I cut them into thin strips and fried them gently in the bean paste residue still in the pan, just enough for them to soften slightly. I put them along with the mushrooms on top of a bowl of wheat noodles in chicken broth, as well as a soft-boiled egg, and a dollop of time-softened kimchi.
A gorgeous round up as always x
As a northeast coast Scot by birth, with oil work riddled through the men in my family, I LOVED Sea State! Queasily loved it. Happy gregorian new year, and thanks for the Petite Knits reminder x