Short month, short list. Here are my books for February:

1. Golden Hill (Francis Spufford)
2. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)

Some months are just like that, you know? We’re preparing for a new job (my husband’s) and a big move (all of us), and there are a lot of balls in the air right now. Plus, we traveled; actually, we are just back, and as I type the children are playing hard, happy to be back in our apartment and released from their car seats after about an eleven-hour drive. A lot of nights I was too tired to read, or to read much, and that’s okay.

(One of the difficulties of tracking my reading like I do is that I can get in my head a little bit about the numbers. Sometimes I need to remind myself that it’s fine for my numbers to be down, and that usually that portents something relatively exciting happening in our regular life. I read very little during the months Anselm and Perpetua were newborns, and the months around our move to what was then the new-job-new-home and will shortly be the old-job-old-home. My life was full! That’s okay — better than okay! It’s just something to remind myself of now and again. )

Anyway, I did read some things. Golden Hill was described on its jacket as something like “the best eighteenth-century novel since the eighteenth century” and that feels about right to me. As the book opens, handsome young Mr. Smith steps off a boat and into pre-revolutionary New York City, with a bank draft for a thousand pounds in his pocket and tight lips about his purpose in visiting the colonies with such an enormous sum of money. As he integrates into New York society — well, sort of — Spufford prods at issues of race and class (and love, and lack thereof) in a novel that was seriously engrossing. There are, I would say, three major twists, one in the middle and two at the end; I only guessed one. The others make me keen to re-read Golden Hill in a year or two, to see how my impressions of its action are shaped by those latter revelations.

And what to say about Vanity Fair? I read it for the first time in university, so this was my second go at it — I remembered a very vague outline of the plot, but not so much to spoil my enjoyment. In some respects Vanity Fair was the perfect choice for this month, because it is many hundreds of pages long, and extremely funny, but the chapters are so episodic that just getting through one or two enough was satisfying. There are times in my life when all I need is a nice fat Victorian novel in which to lose myself for a bit, and this was just the ticket.