A Waiting Room Reading List

What books would be at your side?

The book of ghost stories that seemed to come to life on Christmas morning.

This is not the new year post I planned to write.

But then, it hasn’t been the day I planned.

I am typing from the waiting room of the ‘Surgical Same Day Emergency Care’ unit, because I did something very silly and now need stitches.

No, not the day I planned. It is Christmastide, I had planned feasting and familial merry making. I am, I’ll admit, a little blue.

And so I’m passing the time thinking of the books I read this year, and wondering which I would pick up if I had the chance.

You’re probably glad you’re not here amidst the faint odour of bleach, the sound of people watching TV on their devices without headphones and the gallery of faces so clearly wishing they were anywhere else this Christmas holiday night. But maybe you will enjoy playing the game.

Which of these would you reach for?

The Collected Fantasy of George MacDonald

This year I have ticked off The Golden Key, The Princess and the Goblin, The Light Princess, At the Back of the North Wind.

George MacDonald has both the honour and the misfortune to be known chiefly for his influence on other writers. Rather than being well-read in his right, he is most often acknowledged as a great favourite of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien.

I wanted to excavate that heritage, maybe see if a spending a bit of time with the Scots master of the fairytale might inspire my own writing to greater heights.

I wrote about the tricks George MacDonald plays on me HERE. I would suggest a new reader starts with The Princess and the Goblin, which is a recognisable fairytale with clear protagonists and villains.

The Light Princess and At The Back of the North Wind are breathtaking, once you are able to take a step back and appreciate the whole. Each short story is like a great painting hanging in a gallery, each page is like studying a detail. A pleasing diversion. Then the story ends and you can return to the centre of the room and gaze upon the whole canvas and bask in its majesty.

My imagination is primed for MacDonald’s goblin mines right now, sitting as I am in a cave-like waiting in the depths of a labyrinthine hospital. This one scores high on the waiting room reading scale.

Baudolino

In 2025 I meant to read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and read Baudolino instead.

It’s the madcap tale of a medieval knight, who soldiers in the army of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederik I. He sacks Constantinople, studies in Paris and journeys to the mythical kingdom of Prester John.

It is a very slow read, partially because Eco alternates passages of rip-roaring action with page after page spent describing a rock, but mainly because Baudolino deals in the sort of Christian esoterica that will cast the mystical-minded reader down endless Wikipedia rabbit holes.

You might enjoy discourses on Arianism delivered by one-legged monsters that shelter from the sun beneath their own enormous feet, but I haven’t got the brainpower in this precise moment. Not a waiting room book unless I really am going to be stuck here for months on end.

This year’s historical fiction

The Witchfinder’s Sister

The opposite end of the speed-reading spectrum, I powered through this in a couple of weeks.

Another historical fiction with elements of the fantastical, The WitchFinder’s Sister by Beth Underdown is the story of Matthew Hopkins.

Hopkins hunted witches during the English Civil War, a period of dreadful savagery and wild mistrust, fertile earth for a tale of paranoia and power dynamics.

As the title suggests, a technical critique might say the book suffers from a passive protagonist. But good authors learn the rules so they can bend them, and if the problem with passive protagonists is a lack of urgency in the storytelling then I can only respond that I could not put this book down.

Most moderns write off the witch-hunting excesses of our forebears as misogyny and hysteria, and Underdown certainly asserts a powerful concern for the subjugation of women by powerful men. Hopkins may believe in his dreadful calling, but he uses con tricks to achieve his convictions.

Yet Underdown allows her story to breath with the possibility of the supernatural, in a way that doesn’t detract from the cynicism of the witch hunters yet adds to the creepiness of the book.

It’s a winner for me, and would make an excellent quick waiting room read. The time would pass more quickly for sure.

Brave New World

Yeah this isn’t the right place to read about sterile medical environments used for the mechanical production of children.

I had never read any Aldous Huxley before. I picked it up because my wife wanted to read 1984, and I thought we could read classic dystopian fiction together.

It’s often said that 1984 is the better book but Brave New World is the better prophecy, and I think that is basically right.

Hexwood

I read Hexwood because I loved Howl’s Moving Castle in novel and Studio Ghibli form, and I want to delve further into Diane Wynne Jones’s back catalogue.

The word that leaps to mind when I remember Hexwood is brave. I spent a significant part of my Hexwood reading experience with no idea what was happening.

As already noted in my recollection of George MacDonald, there is a chance this is because I am a bit dim. This is, after all, a children’s book. But it is a children’s book about a machine that warps space and time and so the novel does the same thing. It shifts to different points in the narrative and different settings and expects the reader to either keep up or stay patient enough to wait until the threads cohere into a story.

It is bold and effective, but much like Baudolino, I haven’t got the bandwidth for that right now (Howl’s Moving Castle on the other hand would be ideal waiting room reading, but that’s not the game we’re playing).

Master and Margarita

I loved this book. This one smelled of genius from the moment I started reading it. Satan, in the guise of a foreign black magician named Woland, and a cast of demons arrive in Moscow and put on all-too-real magic shows whilst baiting the city’s creatives.

It’s fun and entertaining and massages your brain as you read it. It might possibly have an antihero problem, given the reader can’t help but enjoy Woland’s antics in exposing the grubby behaviour of the Muscovites he torments. This is Satan as ‘the accuser’, although his occasional moments of overt wickedness are all the more alarming as a result.

I would absolute pick this up again, it was a joy to read. Absolutely stick it on the waiting room reading pile.

The Iliad

The reading highlight of the year. I’ve tried to read The Iliad three times, and finally nailed it on the third attempt.

Loved it, learned so much from it, but it’s no waiting room read. Just as Baudolino requires ready access to Wikipedia, so The Iliad required three factors to be in place:

1. The right translation. E. V. Rieu worked for me.

2. A reading group to read it with and to chat nonsense with along the way.

3. A podcast to listen to after every book/chapter. The Ascend the Great Books podcast is the right answer.

This is the format that will take us through the Odyssey in 2026, preparing us for Nolan’s movie offering in the Summer.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This is the book I actually have with me, my Christmas read, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. You don’t expect 14th Century poetry to be fun, but it is, especially in the Armitage translation. Armitage prioritises the bouncy alliterative mouthfeel of the original, and it’s a joy to read.

It does however lack some of the accuracy of Tolkien or Winny, which means some of the original motifs are missed. There is an enormous question mark over whether Gawain and Arthur could choose not to behead the Green Knight, the event that starts the whole story (so this isn’t a spoiler). In the Armitage, it seems not, whereas in the more literal translations it seems they could, which changes the entire moral dynamic of the story.

I’m only halfway through, but I’m preparing a big old 10/10, and it’s short too, so definitely one for the waiting room reading list.

A few spooky short stories

This was my second advent project, alongside SGGK. It was my attempt to understand why Andy Williams thought there should be spooky ghost stories at the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

I wrote a post about it here.

I started with M.R. James, Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad, then J.B. Priestley’s The Demon King and A.E.D Smith’s The Coat. Initials are clearly very important to the genre. I actually have more initials than I let on. Perhaps I should put out short stories as L.N.J. Stokes.

None of these tales have chilled me to the bone, although the manner in which The Demon King came to my attention raised a little shudder.

My father in law, knowing I am a fan of such things, gifted me an old book of ghost stories. It had been his father’s, and he had tried to read it as a child.

It frightened him so badly that he planned to burn it, but never got around to it and so it loitered, menacingly, on the bookshelf for some 60 years.

This Christmas, he gave it to me. He had spent some time patching up the spine, and it looked very fine with its embossed bat on black cloth cover.

I opened it at random and the pages fell to pg 451.

For years I have been working on a series of novels I call Daemonium Rex, which is of course Latin for…

‘It’s in keeping that such strangeness should occur at Christmas between sessions of banter and seasonal song’, as we learn in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

I’m not sure I would be reaching for ghost stories here. When I leave a ghost story behind I like to look at the warmth of my surroundings and enjoy the smiling faces of loved ones, and allow the spooky tale to remind me to hold them all the closer, and share our fortune with others.

I don’t have warm surroundings to look at right now, although I see plenty of others in need of good fortune. Still, I’ll save the ghost stories for back home.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

And now we come to the books I wish could read, because it would mean I was home with my children.

We have taken our time with the Harry Potter series. We started reading it together when our eldest was 5 and a half. I tried a few times, tucking her in and reaching for The Philosopher’s Stone instead of the big colourful kiddy books she had lived on thus far (on which, more later). I would get a few lines in and she would demand something with pictures.

Then one glorious evening, she didn’t. She let me read a couple of pages, and the next night she asked me to read some more. And we were hooked. We were a Harry Potter family.

I just missed the Harry Potter novels. I had friends in school who loved them but did everything they could to hide it, because we were a bit too old and cool for them.

Reading them for the first time with our daughter was an unparalleled joy. We would read a book and then watch the movie together. We took a trip to Harry Potter studios together, a day of family wonder and delight.

3.5 years later we arrived at the end of The Deathly Hallows and it was like flying home from holiday. We left behind a place in which our family had made some beautiful memories.

Since then, we have moved onto…

The Borrowers, books 1-4 (we’re part way through book 5)

Actually that isn’t entirely true. We took a detour via Mowgli’s Brothers, the first story in The Jungle Book. Not much like the Disney movie is it? I hadn’t realised it was a book of short stories, and our daughter didn’t take to it.

So we then moved onto a book of all five The Borrowers novels, and they have kept us going all year. The story of mouse-sized people who live beneath the notice of ‘human beans’, borrowing what they can from us to sustain their families, we have very much enjoyed the adventures of precocious Arriety and her parents.

Our 9 year old struggled with some of the archaic terms for parts of the grand Victorian house in which the borrowers live in Book 1, so I iron them out and explain them as we go.

As I type this we are getting on for bedtime, and I’m missing it, stuck in this hospital. Tears are pricking my eyes thinking about it, so we had best bring this to a close.

Innumerable books for our 1 year old

But before I do, I should admit that by far the majority of this year’s reading has been picture books. I have read Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hospital Dog (oh the irony), Dogger, Funnybones and umpteen others an uncountable number of times. Although not as many times as my wife who spends hours every day feeding our littlest’s insatiable appetite for reading.

She loves books so much, she communicates in quotes she has learned by heart. Quotes she doesn’t understand at all, but she enjoys the reaction she gets. “No, no, no, Butterfly please don’t joke” (Monkey Puzzle), “Marry me!” (Cinderella), and most recently she has a good go at naming reindeer before enthusiastically shouting “dash away, dash away all!” (A Visit From St Nicholas).

I very much hope in time we will progress onto Narnia and Hogwarts and Middle Earth and beyond. But right now, head somewhat foggy with impact and anxiety, I think a bit of time reading Tiger That Came to Tea might be just what the doctor ordered (to use an uncommonly apt cliché).