This is a gentle but captivating story, building layer by layer. It has satisfying layers of Scottish folklore and tales of the fairy folk, but builds to something heartwarming and uplifting that manages to find a way for a man who seems lost in the past to find a way to live and connect in the present, in the changed world of his small Scottish island.
Donald and His Seven Cows would make a wonderful audiobook because it incorporates so many poems, phrases and place names in Gaelic, with the translation in English for those of us unable to read it. Even though I have no idea how to pronounce the words, and I know the spelling is remarkably misleading, I found myself sounding out the words to myself for the joy of the rhythm and poetry.
Donald takes his small herd of cows out on the same circular walk day after day, year after year, cow generation after cow generation. At first it seems as if he is simple, but as he walks, he has deeper thoughts about the earth and the seas and space. We gradually discover that he is no idiot and no fool either. He went to school with the other children and he can still recite Hiawatha, but people assume there is something wrong with him because he seems to do the same boring thing every day. He is attached too securely to ritual, repetition, the way things used to be done.
At first he seems to be content in his life. He’s not interested in joining modern society with their fancy cars and oil heating. But younger people reject him, thinking him odd. They don’t know that he hasn’t always stayed on the island. They don’t know about his past and nobody takes the time to find out. He remembers a time when his mother was there, “Take care of the weakest calf in the herd,’ Mum said, ‘and then the whole herd will love you.”
Nonfiction books are one of the best tools for seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. Nonfiction November’s fourth prompt is to highlight a book that has opened your eyes to diverse perspectives. Ironically, my top pick opened my eyes to the life of a visually impaired and later blind man, some of his difficulties self-imposed after being challenged to a digital detox.
The week 4 prompt for Nonfiction November is hosted by Rebekah at She Seeks Nonfiction.. She asks, “is there a book you read this year from a diverse author, or a book that opened your eyes to a perspective that you hadn’t considered? How did it challenge you to think differently?”
In any other recent year, my answer to that question would have been one or more books by Indigenous, Black or autistic authors. In fact, I’m still making my way through two such nonfiction books from NetGalley, which are both fascinating, dense, and overdue. Both include a vast number of examples and discussions with other people, so diverse perspectives galore:
Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds (2025), Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe-Canadian)
Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System (2025), Nancy Matsumoto (Japanese-American)
Another fiction highlight of this year was Edenglassie by Melissa Lucashenko (Aboriginal Bundjalung-Ukrainian-Australian) that opened my eyes to a real life difficulty for Indigenous people and those descended from them, i.e. who has the right to call themselves Indigenous. It features a militant woman of Aboriginal heritage who is heavily invested in all things Aboriginal and acts as a gatekeeper. When she is attracted to someone who was brought up as a white Australian but is trying to rediscover his Indigenous heritage, she initially rejects him for being ‘too white’.
I suppose it’s not really the first time I’ve encountered this; my ‘gateway drug’ was culture shock experienced by expats (being one myself, in what should be the most unchallenging of environments, a English in the Netherlands and Germany, and yet). This evolved into an interest in immigrant and refugee experiences and the second generation that grows up with a foot in either culture, with the second and subsequent generations being accused of losing their culture or being white on the inside (with nicknames like ‘coconut’). The latest iteration in my reading has been the Indigenous experience, and now the issue of people who know they have some BIPOC heritage and want to reclaim it. It even goes as far as descendants of settlers/colonisers who want to learn about the people who were displaced and take it too far, the wannabes, as one character in Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence calls them. In fact, the customer who haunts Louise’s Indigenous-themed bookshop is one such woman. In that respect, my eyes have been opened gradually.
If you like a bookish challenge, then November is the month for you, with various bloggers challenging you to read novellas, nonfiction, German literature and more. It’s also the season for darker reads. This is what I planned to read.
The number of blogging events in November is enough to turn you insane. Rather than let my potential pile of Halloween books sink back into obscurity now the day itself has passed, I shall reframe it as a pile of darker reads for the darker months. I also have a selection of novellas and short-form nonfiction that I shall select from as they take my fancy for Novellas in November#NovNov25. There’s little point in predicting which nonfiction I will actually read from the treasures upon my shelves, except for the ones I’ve already posted about for German Literature Month. However, that means I do have three short nonfiction candidates for #NonfictionNovember, plus another four nonfiction ARCs that I still need to review, some overdue. November is nuts!
Dark reads for darker days
Books for the darker months
Heading into Halloween, I gathered together some of my ‘darker’ books. These are generally murder mysteries with the occasional thriller as I’m not much of a fan of horror or ghostly goings on. Some of the crime books are cosier than others.
The left hand pile includes several of my half-read books and some short story collections that aren’t strictly dark reads, though it does include a couple of definite possibles:
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), Edgar Allen Poe. In the tatty book on top. Novella.
There’s a Monster Behind the Door (2020), Gaëlle Bélem, tr. Karen Fleetwood, Laëtitia Saint-Loubert. Set in 1980s Réunion in the Caribbean. Won the Republic of Consciousness Prize. Novella.
When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), Benjamín Labatut, tr. Adrian Nathan West. Fictionalised lives of mathematicians, physicists, chemists and astronomers whose genius verged on or tipped over into obsession, madness and physical destruction. Reading now. It’s brilliant. Novella.
The middle section standing up and the right hand pile all have themes of darkness, thrillers or crime. I’m going to try to get to the following before the end of the year:
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Manuel Puig. 1001 book from Argentina. Two prisoners bond as they talk about films. LGBQT+
A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), Marlon James. A fictionalised account of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976. Left over from 20 Books of Summer. It even has ghosts as characters.
Splinter (orig. Splitter) (2008), Sebastian Fitzek, tr. John Brownjohn. Set in Berlin. Marc Lucas’s life has been shattered by the death of his pregnant wife in a car crash. He applies for an experimental programme to wipe the bad memories, then decides not to go ahead. From that point on, nothing is certain. What is real, what is in his head? Reading now. German lit.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Murder and the Undoings of a Great Victorian Detective (2008), Kate Summerscale. The murder that sparked the inspiration for the detective novel, but destroyed the career of one of the first real life detectives. Nonfiction.
Novellas in November #NovNov25
In 2020 I made novellas my focus for November. I gathered together piles of every book of 200 pages or less, fiction and nonfiction, then read as many as I could. You can see those piles and read about my theories on book length, translation and male vs. female authors in my 2020 post. It’s rather depressing just how many of those books are still unread on my shelves. This year, I’ve picked a more modest pile, but I will only read a couple of them this month. It is more a list of novellas and short nonfiction that I want to read in the coming year.
Novellas in November 2025
The books I’m most likely to actually read this month are:
Fludd (1989), Hilary Mantel. 186pp.
There’s a Monster Behind the Door, (2020) Gaëlle Bélem, tr. Karen Fleetwood, Laëtitia Saint-Loubert. 176pp.
There are several nonfiction books in the pile which I could read for Nonfiction November, but even though it might boost my numbers, it would increase my reviewing load, so it’s swings and roundabouts, whatever I do. I picked up several of the books in Dutch at a recent library sale. I’m particularly interested in the one by Mo Yan, which is about growing up in China, and the one by Mukhtar Mai, English title In the Name of Honour, which is about a Pakistani woman who spoke out after being gang-raped to punish her brother. The Girl in the Moon Circle also comes from an unusual country, Samoa, picked up at the BookCrossing convention in April, as was the Bruno Schulz surreal short story collection The Street of Crocodiles (1933), translated from Polish by Celina Wienieweska. It was a real case of bookish serendipity as I had just seen it mentioned in Patti Smith’s memoir/essay collection M-Train, thinking I’d never come across a copy. Schulz was considered one of the preeminent Polish authors between the wars, but was a victim of Nazi violence in 1942.
Novellas in November is hosted by Rebecca at Bookish Beck and Cathy at 746Books. Click on the Bookish Beck link to post to the current Linky to share posts of anything related to novellas and read other people’s posts. They’re starting with My Year in Novellas, which I have yet to consider. They are also hosting buddy reads for Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (apparently brilliant) and Sister Outsider by Audre Lord. I would love to read Seascraper, but I’ve already bought too many books this year, so I will resist, but I look forward to reading other people’s reviews.
Week 1 of Nonfiction November 2025 starts a little early and runs from 27 October to 2 November. It’s hosted by Heather at Based on a True Story and asks about Your Year in Nonfiction: favourites, new reading topics and reasons for taking part.
There are several hosts for Nonfiction November this year. The first week is hosted by Heather at Based on a True Story and focuses on the nonfiction we’ve read in the past year.
Week 1 prompt: Your year in nonfiction
Celebrate your year of nonfiction. What books have you read? What were your favorites? Have you had a favorite topic? Is there a topic you want to read about more? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?
The majority of my nonfiction books this year have been digital ARCs via NetGalley (NG) and occasionally BookSirens (BS), rather than reading my own books. Another source, particularly for January in Japan, was my local library. For this year’s Nonfiction November, I want to read several of the physical books on my TBR, combining it with German Literature Month because I have several books about German history. I like the idea of theming my reading for the month, even though I have plenty of other NF books about other subjects. Whatever I do, I need to read some of my physical books to make space on my TBR shelves for the books I’ve bought over the last couple of months, but I won’t post a TBR pile because I have no idea how many I’ll manage to read. As for topics I’d like to read more of in the coming year, I have plenty lined up that I haven’t got to this year: travel, food writing, Black and Indigenous history and culture and that one book I’ve been promising my son to read for several years now (Utopia by Rutger Bregman).
Favourite nonfiction 2024-2025
The best nonfiction books I’ve read since last November have been about nature and creativity.
November is German Literature Month #GermanLitMonth. Just read and blog about a book originally written in German from Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Optional weekly themes are:
• genre week (1-9 Nov.)
• city week (10-16 Nov.)
• Thomas Mann week (his 150th birthday) (17-23 Nov.)
• GDR week (24-30 Nov.).
November is German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline from Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Tony from Tony’s Reading List. Optional weekly themes are genre week (1-9 Nov.), city week (10-16 Nov.), Thomas Mann week (17-23 Nov.) and GDR week (24-30 Nov.). I’m not sure I’m that organised. In fact, I know I’m not.
However, I am intending to try reading a couple of books from Germany and also some books about Germany this month which are on the TBR and will also fit in with Nonfiction November. I visited Dresden for a couple of days recently, so I’m keen to learn more about the DDR. I couldn’t resist buying Katya Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall when it came out, but I haven’t read it yet. I’ve also reserved the English translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos from the library, hoping it will arrive soon and I’ll have time to read it. I’ve already kicked off my month with a book that seems suitable for Halloween, Splinter by Sebastian Fitzek, translated by John Brownjohn.
German books on my TBR
This is my first time properly participating in German Literature Month because I didn’t think I had many German books to read. However, on closer inspection, there are a couple I didn’t realise were originally written in German, plus I’ve added a few to my shelves in the last year or so, some deliberately, some haphazardly. I even almost bought a book in German while I was in Dresden, failed to do so, then bought it online afterwards. And there is one book I tried my hardest to buy in English, but kept coming back to me in German, so in the end I decided it was fate and I kept the German version. Heads up: I’m unlikely to read either of my German language books this month. Maybe I can post about them this time next year.
Market Garden Reader 