I read this novella all in one sitting on the train to Bath, and I haven't been able to stop thing about it. Set in the 1920s, the main character is shellshocked WWI veteran who ventures into the British countryside to restore a mural in an old church. But it feels like more than an anti war novel, its about the end of summer, the passage of time and modernity, finding your place in a changing world. A Month in the Country is a celebration of brokenness — not the suffering of brokenness but, rather, the vulnerability that brokenness brings.
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.
All this happened so long ago. And I never returned, never wrote, never met anyone who might have given me news of Oxgodby. So, in memory, it stays as I left it, a sealed room furnished by the past, airless, still, ink long dry on a put-down pen.”
Mar 18, 2025
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Tom Birkin, a WWI vet, moves to an idyllic northern English small town to restore an uncovered mural at the town’s old chapel. This short and focused poetic little story is subtle but great, and basically a 1 day read for anyone.
Jan 5, 2023
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Stuck overnight in the empty halls of John Lennon International airport, I read this a couple of times and drove myself effectively insane, having significant ramifications on the following months. Great story.
Dec 3, 2024
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I found this book on the shelf of a small lake cabin my family used to stay in sometimes (smells like moth balls, canoe paddles as decor, bunk beds) and devoured it during our stay. This book is slow in the way that Green Card (1990) is slow. The tension builds to a romantic crescendo later in the book and you’re like oh my god!!! Nevil Shute was an Australian author better known for his nuclear apocalypse novel On the Beach that scared the shit out of me in middle school. I recommend A Town Like Alice to people as the best novel you’ve never heard of with the caveat that it was published in 1950 and has an unmistakably colonial perspective. Read it if you loved Atonement.
Feb 22, 2022
Top Recs from @takingtheHelm
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this quote from Dune really had me thinking about how far ahead of his time Herbert was: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
Mar 10, 2025
“Dance yrself clean” by LCD soundsystem has been on repeat — the whole song is great but when it hits the 3:06 mark I transcend
Mar 9, 2025
Mar 6, 2025