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Finished:
**Sunless Solstice, by Lucy Evans and Tanya Kirk** (eds.), a collection of Christmas ghost stories. My favorite was “The Blue Room” by Lettice Galbraith, but I also particularly enjoyed the last two: “The Visiting Star” by Robert Aickman, a theater story that felt like a precursor to Thomas Ligotti, and “A Fall of Snow” by James Turner, which uses the mundane surprise of a heavy snowstorm in southern England to put the reader off-balance for what happens next.
**Smee and Other Stories, by A.M. Burrage**. Despite the terrible print quality, I ended up being glad I bought this. Burrage’s work is comparable in several ways to E.F. Benson’s—smoothly written ghost stories with a variety of interesting premises, limited by their unshakeable focus on the British upper class—but I would say he was more consistent in quality. (On the other hand, when Benson was on his game, I’d say he was the better writer of the two.)
The title story is still my favorite by Burrage, but in my opinion, every other one in the book was good too. The collection also includes two essays he wrote on the horror genre: “The Supernatural in Fiction,” which lists its leading authors as he saw them (similar to Lovecraft’s more famous essay, but less in-depth); and “Un-Paying Guests,” which discusses the tradition of Christmas ghost stories, and provides several “happened-to-a-friend-of-a-friend” examples. (It reminded me a bit of James’ “Stories I Have Tried to Write.”)
Finished: The Conqueror- Gertrude Atherton (1902)
Started:
**The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia
Highsmith**
**Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch**
**Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by Vincent Bugliosi**
Started & Finished:
**The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger**
**The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson**
**Holes, by Louis Sachar**
**Carrie’s War, by Nina Bawden**
**Apt Pupil, by Stephen King**
Finished:
**If We Were Villains, by M. L. Rio**
**Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain**
Ongoing:
**In Harm’s Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors, by Doug Stanton**
**The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov**
DNF:
**This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone**
**Dune (Dune, #1), by Frank Herbert**
Continued. I enjoyed the initial world building, no matter how some people allege that it’s poorly written. I even wish the next, action-packed part was slower and more verbose, but then … the lecture on ecology in Kynes’ final scene feels a bit forced; I’d rather read it as an intermezzo. I’m that kind of person.
**Vie de Samuel Belet, by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz**
Continued. Classic literary fiction, early 20th century psychological novel that takes place in rural Swiss Alps. Kind of romantic—I came for poetic depictions of landscapes, stayed for a slow, thoughtful depiction of rural life, but then the main character goes crazy for his first love and it drives me insane. I thought Young Werther was insufferable and I’m not sure if this lad getting wasted and almost turning arsonist is much better.
**Mornings in Jenin, by Susan Abulhawa**
Continued/stalled. It took me while before I got used to the format; the short scenes are a very effective way of communicating different aspects of traditional rural life and then refugees’ often harrowing experiences though. The book is apparently well researched too.
**Long Walk to Freedom, by Nelson Mandela**
Finished. The most impressive parts were a couple of Nelson Mandela’s speeches, but those are available elsewhere too. Other than that … The first part traces Mandela’s gradual transformation from a regular person living under colonial rule into a freedom fighter; that’s interesting, esp. with the sometimes humorous stories. But I didn’t realize that he was imprisoned in his 40s and spent ~25 years locked up, i.e., quite old. The latter part of the autobiography is focused on his experience in prisons more than the anti-apartheid struggle at large, although he apparently got to correspond with activists outside in the later years. So it feels incomplete to me, or maybe I haven’t fully processed it yet.
**Modernizace Japonska zachycená v tradiční poezii tanka a haiku, by Sylva Martinásková**
Started. What the title says: it should be about traditional Japanese poetry adopting new themes from industrialization and modernization more broadly. Very dry writing style; I think it’s a PhD dissertation published for the general public, but I’ve read more lively academic works (mostly anthropology though).
Started:
**Prophet Song, Paul Lynch**
Ongoing:
**Piranesi, Susanna Clarke**
Finished:
**Small Things Like This, Claire Keegan**
Week 1 of 2025 was amazing.
I finished:
The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector [5/5]
With My Dog Eyes by Hilda Hilst [3.5/5]
I am reading The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk but I’ll take it slow this week.
Still reading **East of Eden** by John Steinbeck
Finished:
**A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin**
Continued:
**Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy** (participating in r/yearofannakarenina)
Started:
**A Feast for Crows, by George R.R. Martin**