Book club

[rjbman]

favorites of 2025:
* terry prachet's discworld. sorry i can't name specific books but night watch was my fav series, followed closely by witches. wish there were more death books.
* the name of the rose by umberto eco - sherlock holmes meets late medieval christianity sectarianism (recommended in part by trashpile / odradek)
* terra ignota quadrilogy by ada palmer - scifi / philosophy books set in a post-nationstate world, with heavy Enlightenment references
* all things are too small: essays in praise of excellence by becca rothfeld - excellent (see what i did there?) essay collection about going overboard and embracing the excess
* blindsight by peter watts - this is a scifi book about first contact with aliens from a ship led by a fucking vampire, and that's not the important part of it
* mood machine by liz pelly - a scathing book about how algorithms and spotify suck for music lovers and artists
* power broker by robert caro - epic story of robert moses, unelected king of new york

[iral]

here are some 2025 highlights (mostly just what i can remember reading and enjoying over the last 6 months)

Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta - picked this up from a free library on a whim and it sucked me in. The story of a nigerian woman moving to london in the 70s, fighting for her independence amidst horrible racism, living in squalor, and a violent relationship. I hadn't really had any exposure to post-colonial narratives in the UK/London, and I really enjoyed this perspective.

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux - the queen of autofiction. Written as a letter to her older sister who passed away at 6 yrs old before she was born, she grieves and reconciles the relationship that never was. Her parents never mentioned this sister while they were living, apart from a single conversation Ernaux overheard as a child. Not my favorite from her, but it's solid.

Boulder by Eva Balthasar - lesbian romance. shortlisted for the booker prize a few years ago, it follows Boulder, a cook on a ship who meets Samsa, a geologist. They move to Reykjavik and their relationship is thrown into turmoil when Samsa wants to have a child. The prose is gorgeous and the story is dark and tragic. You kind of love/hate everyone...

Who Killed my Father by Edouard Louis - sooo much to say about this one. Louis is like a millenial twink annie ernaux (linked is an excellent profile/interview he did in butt magazine). This book is one in a series about his family in the same autofictional-with-sociopolitical-commentary-mixed-in style that I'm quite drawn to. Through a non-chronological collage of anecdotes about his father, he contemplates his complicated relationship with his sometimes violent, yet loving father and the ways his father (and the french people in general) have been made to suffer under the conditions of neoliberal austerity.

https://buttmagazine.com/interviews/edouard-louis/

Oranges & Peanuts for Sale by Eliot Weinberger - one of my perennial favorite authors/essayists. having reread (my fav of his) An Elemental Thing earlier in the year, I found this other collection at the library. I continue to be impressed by his referential knowledge. These essays were mainly poetry centered, some criticism interspersed with forewards/intros to various collections of poetry. I would definitely start with an elemental thing but this one was quite nice as well. He kind of wanders around in this collection, interspersing musings on the Tang dynasty, the color blue, and obscure 20th century poets (among other topics as well), also featuring one of his most well known essays "What I Heard About Iraq in 2005", where he delivers a scathing commentary ('laying out the facts') of the US involvement of Iraq. I like how he can craft a compellling narrative out of anything. He's an incredible storyteller and while his writing doesn't feel dense, he packs a remarkable amount of information inside. Some of the essays ("inventing china", "beckett/paz", "anonymous sources") have been the catalyst for me to get into poetry or other authors. I've attached a couple of the essays below, in addition to an interview that I think portrays him quite well.

Spoiler:

From a talk about translation:
https://publications.iadb.org/en/anonym ... ranslation

what i heard about iraq
https://literaturfestival.com/wp-conten ... nglish.pdf

criticism on a translation of the psalms
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n02 ... praise-yah

the aforementioned interview
https://archive.ph/20251117021548/https ... weinberger

[foxtail_grass]

Great thinking to do a 2025 book recap! Excited to add some recommendations to the queue.

At the beginning of the year I was a part of a book club that ultimately disintegrated. It did get me back into reading more consistently, albeit reading things I wasn't particularly interested in. We read Dostoevsky (Demons), Tolstoy (Anna Karenina), Lispector (Apple in the Dark), Woolf (Orlando). The best book we read was Willa Cather's My Antonia. Lovely, sweeping Americana. I bid adieu to the group at the selection of Moby Dick...

Outside of the club three books come to mind.
1. Anne Carson's Plainwater. Anne Carson has very quickly become one of my all time favorite writers. Plainwater is what started it all for me, in particular The Anthropology of Water. What a gorgeous piece of writing. I hope to some day to have a tenth of her eloquence.

2. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. A friend recommended this solarpunk-adjacent novel and I was happy he did. It was a really fun ride. Loved how interwoven *everything* in this story is.

3. The Dawn of Everything by David's Graeber and Wengrow. Admittedly I have yet to finish this absolute tome but every time I chip away at it, my framework for human nature shifts. It is an incredibly inspiring piece of non fiction for anyone wanting an escape or an explanation of the doom and gloom of the present. Can't wait to follow it up with Graeber's Possibilities once I finish this biblio-marathon.

Here are some poems I continue to return to:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry ... by-seasons
https://poets.org/poem/poem-lana-turner-has-collapsed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ6NoB3KI4E
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... -dunk-hook

[titkitten]

i have a bunch of strong opinions about the kinds of books i like to read. the two headline restrictions are that

1. i don't like reading books whose main point is conflict among characters or really any kind of "plot": if it's a book that can be spoiled, that the sequence of events is its main draw, then i'm not interested. i prefer to read character studies, books where "nothing happens" or the point is the journey, etc. i could probably write multiple essay-length posts on the topic, and indeed i have elsewhere, but the long and short of it is that good books of this type tend to come from japanese (or east asian) authors. it's less likely that this kind of book comes from an american author.
2. i only read books whose protagonists are well-written women. of course, men can write this kind of book, but women are more likely to write them.

the upshot is that most of the books i've read in the last few years have focused on what it means to be a person, what it means to be a woman, the existential crises that we all face...

my ride or die books:

• convenience store woman, sayaka murata [trans. ginny tapley takemori]: i have gotten four people (and counting) to read this book. this book is perfect, universally appealing, i think everyone would relate to it. i would recommend it to everybody. it's so good and it is also very short and easy to read. (((warning though: if you decide to read any of murata's other books, though they deal with the same themes, they are all WAY more grotesque)))
• the waiting years, fumiko enchi [trans. john bester]: less universally relatable but in some ways i think that makes this book even more important for people to read. it's a bit harder to read, it's slow and denser. it's really enjoyable though, perfect feminist perspective on the nuanced complexities of being a woman, empathetic yet critical of everyone who participates in a male-dominated culture, including the women, super ahead of its time.

a selection of the others: very good books that just didn't reach ride-or-die status, still recommend

Spoiler:

• the details, ia genberg [trans. kira josefsson]: my favourite of this section. basically reads like an essay collection, but written by a fictional person. very short, easy to read. (the rare book that's translated but not from an asian language... this book is written in swedish originally)
• girlhood, melissa febos: actually neither written by an asian woman nor a fiction book; it's an essay collection about growing out of girlhood. spot-on indictment of how hard it is to be a woman, painful in how precise yet universal her observations are
• the vegetarian, han kang [trans. deborah smith]: my recommendation doesn't matter as this book got the nobel prize in literature. weird, horrifying book, in a good way. very uncomfortable, was extra dreary to read during the winter.
• butter, asako yuzuki [trans. polly barton]: i don't know if i liked this book per se, but it did stay with me and compel me to write several pages about it in my journal, so it made an impact. this book was a bit slow, i could have done without the pages of description about food although i understood their point. i think the marketing for this book failed it; it is not a thriller/mystery book, the whodunit (more aptly, didshedoit) is not the point of the book. as long as you know to expect a slow medidation about characters rather than a thriller, i think it's enjoyable.

these next ones didn't really stick for me but i can see why they are well liked / well reviewed

• the idiot, elif batuman: about that transition everyone goes through in freshman year, from teenager to proto-adult, and the utter confusion you experience when you try to become your own person, especially in relation to other people. the tone of this one is compelling. the narrator's confused observations belie the author's sarcasm
• there's no such thing as an easy job, kikuko tsumura [trans. polly barton]: vaguely surreal, in that japanese realistic mysticism tradition, about how much it sucks to work and the doldrums of life
• breast and eggs, mieko kawakami [trans. sam bett and david boyd]: about the burden of living in a woman's body
• my year of rest and relaxation, ottessa moshfegh: crazy book where the protag is one of the least sympathetic i have ever read. about apathy, feeling disconnected, jaded, so it makes sense that she is unlikable. apparently i posted an excerpt when i was reading
• so we look to the sky: misumi kubo [trans. polly barton]: such a weird, uncomfortable book, yet i can't help but to feel pity for everyone in it

next on my list: if anyone is interested, i would love to read in tandem with you! ping me~

• you are eating an orange. you are naked., sheung-king
• swallows, natsuo kirino [trans. lisa hofmann-kuroda]
• masks, fumiko enchi [trans. juliet winters carpenter]