Ian Rankin keeps his picks short and decisive. James Bailey's Muriel Spark biography, Like a Cat Loves a Bird, earns a recommendation precisely because Rankin wasn't sure he needed it — which is the best reason to trust one. Frances Crawford's A Bad, Bad Place is a prize-winning debut crime novel set in 1970s Glasgow: clever, authentic, humane, with unforgettable protagonists and pitch-black humour. Rankin knows Glasgow crime fiction from the inside, so his endorsement carries weight. The most provocative recommendation in the roundup belongs to Guardian reader David, who calls The Rouse by China Miéville 'surely his opus' — a 1,200-page prose-poetry, stream-of-consciousness novel with shades of Lovecraft and MR James. David's framing ('take a very deep breath') is honest about what the book asks of you. Miéville alongside Alan Moore as 'the real doyens of weird fiction' is a defensible take, and if you're already in the Miéville orbit, The Rouse sounds like the destination. Louise Kennedy is reading three books simultaneously while on tour, and her selections form an accidental syllabus on time, privilege, and decline. Emma Cline's Switzy follows a wealthy man whose dementia strips him of every protection his money offered. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth circles a woman whose charm is her only capital and is about to be spent badly. John McGahern's Memoir is already breaking Kennedy's heart before he finishes primary school. Three books about the limits of what people think will save them — Kennedy didn't note the pattern but it's there. Sophie's recommendation of Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is the roundup's most emotionally direct endorsement: she stayed up past her bedtime, torn between finishing and not wanting it to end. Paris in the late 1970s and 80s, a love story, characters who feel imperfect in the way real friends do. Hargrave is best known for historical fiction and literary YA crossover work; Almost Life sounds like a step toward the adult literary mainstream without losing what makes her prose distinctive. The most structurally interesting reading project belongs to Mark, who has challenged himself to read only non-Anglosphere writers in 2024, each from a different country. The constraint is doing real work: it delivered him Independent People by Halldór Laxness, a 500-plus-page Icelandic farming novel he expected to be unrelentingly grim and found instead to be humorous, atmospherically precise, and beautifully translated by JA Thompson in collaboration with Laxness himself. Reading in translation is a skill Mark has been developing — he now has an ear for when translation is working even without access to the original. That's a reading practice worth stealing.
