reading – findingtimetowrite

#6Degrees of Separation April 2026

This month’s starter book for our fun series of literary links, as hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best is The Correspondent, an epistolary novel by Virginia Evans. I haven’t read it, but am quite a fan of epistolary novels, which feel like such an 18th century thing, back when people could only express their thoughts and concern for each other through writing lengthy letters. However, I wanted to go with a spring/Easter theme, since it’s Easter Sunday in the Western tradition today. Making it really hard for myself, right?

OK, I had to do some mental gymnastics to get to my first sort of Easter link via epistolary novels, but it’s The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, because it’s got a religious theme. These are letters written by a senior devil to his less experienced nephew, who is trying to corrupt a human. I haven’t reread this recently, but I remember thinking it was quite funny in my irreverent teens, but it shows the author’s strong Christian values.

These are values he also shows, albeit indirectly in his Narnia series, particularly perhaps in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, my second link, which I liked for Lucy and its blue-turquoise cover. The religious references went completely over my head at the time but there is something about Aslan’s country and resurrection in there, so it fits the Easter theme.

It is also the time for Jewish Passover celebrations and the only book with Dawn in the title that I could find that I’ve heard of is Elie Wiesel’s Dawn, second in the so-called The Night Trilogy, about the crisis of conscience of a Holocaust survivor who has settled in Palestine and is tasked with executing a British officer.

From a divided Palestine to a divided Britain but with a tiny strand of hope in Ali Smith’s novel Spring, part of her Seasonal Quartet. It’s been a while since I read her books, and I want to read the entire quartet again in order and without long gaps between them.

A far more escapist view of Brits travelling, this time abroad, and set in the spring months is my oft-mentioned The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, one of the few ‘gentle’ reads which I really like.

The Vintage edition cover of The Enchanted April has that cool 1920s feel which fits with its publication date of 1922, and the final link is to this particular cover of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which also fits perfectly with its publication date of 1911. Another book about the redeeming power of nature and flowers, beautifully illustrated by Inga Moore.

So I’ll close off with a magnolia and cherry tree that I saw yesterday on the outskirts of Berlin (see the top of the post), wishing everyone celebrating a Happy Easter, and a beautiful spring if it’s the season in your part of the world.

March 2026 Summary

Another month that has felt endless: there was so much going on, just not quite so much in terms of my reading. Other than that, it went swimmingly… perhaps even drowningly, as I engaged in far too many things. I had guests, birthdays, booking my China trip, started Korean classes at the Cultural Centre, attended London Book Fair and Leipzig Book Fair, visited older son in Cambridge, started my part-time job and attended a Florence + the Machine concert in Berlin. I’d better slow down a little in April, right?

Reading

You can see that this month has been largely dedicated to the International Booker Prize. Eight of my books were from the longlist, but even so I failed to read two which made the shortlist. Of the ones I read, I was particularly struck by The Remembered Soldier and The Wax Child, neither of which made the shortlist. I was on board with, but not wowed by, The Witch (although this was probably my favourite of the second tier), The Director, Women Without Men and The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran. And Ia Genberg does not seem to be the author for me.

In addition to my dutiful Shadow Panel reading, I also enjoyed another selection of Bora Chung’s short stories (although my favourites are still in the volume Cursed Bunny). I tried to persevere with the book about a district of Berlin that has a bit of a reputation, but I found the author disparaging rather than humorous, so abandoned it.

I suppose in April I’ll have to read the two shortlisted International Booker titles if I can get hold of them (they are around £7 on Kindle, which I find a bit outrageous). However, I also want to take a step back and focus on books I want to translate and reread Genji at a chapter by chapter pace together with Tony on his blog.

Watching

I’ve decided to include exhibitions, theatre and concerts in the Watching tab alongside films. But there have been quite a few films this month as well. My love for East Asian films continues unabated, with two particularly memorable ones: Korean film Joint Security Area JSA (Park Chan-Wook’s first major film) and Japanese film about Kabuki theatre Kokuho. But I can also highly recommend Thai film A Useful Ghost, which starts out as a farce and then gets highly political. Marty Supreme was also well made, entertaining and well acted, although I wasn’t quite convinced by all the motivation and the ending. But I also gave my first half star review, sadly, for a Tamil film that simply jumped on the bandwagon of popular Korean culture and was full of cliches.

I attended two very different concerts in March: one of my favourite performers Florence Welch at the beginning of the month (and her opening act Paris Paloma was new to me but highly enjoyable also). And then two choirs singing mainly church music in the St Matthew’s Church towards the end of the month – equally stunning.

I saw two exhibitions in London: the Samurai exhibition at the British Museum (and even I, who thought I knew most things about samurai, had new things to discover there) and an exhibition about traditional Japanese crafts (pottery and glass) at the Japan House. Delightful!

April is going to be about Brancusi at the Neue Nationalgalerie, cherry blossoms, Franz Ferdinand in concert (tonight!) and opera. So… taking it easy but not too much!

February 2026 Summary

Well, this has NOT been a month of reading, whether performative or not. I don’t think I’ve ever read so little since starting my blog, and am two books behind on my Goodreads goal (which I thought was a relatively doable one, I usually go well over). I suppose it’s a combination of too many activities, including job hunting, but especially seeing so many Berlinale films, which really ate into my reading time. I might also add that a few of the books I was engaged with this month are real chunksters (Chevengur, the Murakami below and now The Remembered Soldier). However, I have got hold of a few of the books on the International Booker longlist, so I hope to speed up as I read those.

Just six books read, and only two of them reviewed – although I do intend to review two more. My one claim to fame is that they are all from indie publishers (even the bestseller type one by Daniel Glattauer is from Hanser Verlag in Munich, which doesn’t belong to any of the major groups), so fit into the #ReadIndies category.

I continued my pursuit of Japanese literature with From the Fatherland, with Love, which was infuriating at times but also really good fun and explosive as one might expect from Murakami Ryu. Metropole was intriguing and disquieting, a book that I couldn’t read very quickly. The Romanian book is a memoir by one of the best authors of roughly my parents’ generation. The Glattauer was disappointing. I will review Last Words in Montmartre this coming week – it was short but so powerful and depressing, a real cry of despair, that I couldn’t read more than one chapter a day. Finally, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran is on the International Booker longlist AND is translated by Ruth Martin, who was our tutor on the translation summer school a couple of years ago and actually discussed some of the passages from this very book with us.

Other than ~~not~~ reading, I have of course been watching quite a few films; seven at the Berlinale, but others both in the cinema and at home. 14 films in total must be quite a record for me in a short month, that’s practically one every other day. The most memorable films were:

No Other Choice (although I don’t think it’s Park Chan-wook’s best, but it had the same frenetic movement and heavy-handed satire of Mickey 17 by his fellow Korean director Bong Joon-ho). I’ve noticed that with other films that came out this year, even the ones I liked (I will not mention Wuthering Heights, which I haven’t seen) like Bugonia or One Battle After Another, that subtlety no longer seems to be in fashion. The message is bludgeoned on your head.
On Our Own – which started out in a slightly annoying Gen Z shenanigans fashion, but then became much deeper and more moving
The Rose Come Back to Me documentary – a must-see for fans
We Are All Strangers – just a simple slice of life, if you like, from Singapore, but done with the subtlety that has been missing from others

Most disappointing? It pains me to say this, because these are both about themes that preoccupy me a lot and the main actresses gave a sterling performance, but Promising Young Woman and The Last Showgirl just didn’t have enough depth to set them apart. I’m also continuing my series of films set in Berlin and watched Nico, about a German-Iranian woman in her 30s who’s a devoted social carer, cheerful and happily integrated in her German life, until she is the victim of a racially-motivated attack. Again, a serious theme and with excellent acting, but resolved a little too simplistically. However, it was a good companion piece for The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran.

International Booker Longlist for 2026

The longlist for the International Booker was announced yesterday and, although I am now finding it harder and more expensive to order English-language books, I will attempt to join the wonderful Shadow Panel once again and read my way through at least some of these. There is only one East Asian representative on the list – and the only book I’ve already read: Taiwan Travelogue.

The judges this year have clearly not shied away from established publishers and authors, as there are quite a few on the list who’ve been on either the longlist or the shortlist in previous years. I am slightly disappointed to see such a heavy European representation; other than Taiwan Travelogue, there are only two from South America, one from Iran and one written in German by an author of Iranian descent but born in Germany. None from Africa, unless you think that Marie Ndiaye fills that gap.

I was planning to read The Wax Child by Olga Ravn, The Deserters by Mathias Enard and Women Without Men by Sharnush Parsipur anyway, and I’ve added The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (translated by Ruth Martin, and a work that we discussed during our translation summer school a couple of years ago) and The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje. I don’t know if I have the money or the will to attempt any of the others, although the Charco Press one looks interesting, as always.

#6Degrees of Separation February 2026

I might even be on time this month with the Six Degrees of Separation meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. The starting point for our game of literary links is Flashlight by Susan Choi, which sounds like exactly my type of novel (about cross-cultural identity and family traumas, with a good dash of mystery). But I haven’t yet had the chance to read it and now it’s a bit harder to get hold of it in the flesh.

So for the first link in today’s post, I’ll choose another book that has been on my TBR list for a long, long time, but I haven’t yet read, for whatever reason. In fact, it’s the one that has been there the longest: Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of short stories about the aftermath of the Vietnam War and its survivors. Opinions about it are divided though, and I can well understand that, as I sometimes struggle with journalists’ views of Eastern Europe and Romania in particular (as not being nuanced enough).

My next link is to an anthropologist writing about Romania which also received lower ratings from irked local readers. This is a book I’ve not yet read, but one I own by an anthropologist I respect (and whose other books I’ve read). Katherine Verdery’s My Life as a Spy is not so much about the Romanian people as about the government surveillance she experienced while doing fieldwork in Romania in the 1970s.

From a putative spy to a real one – or at least a fictional one written by a real one. John le Carré is certainly my favourite spy novelist and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is one of my favourite books by him. Not least because of its (partial) Berlin setting and its disillusionment with spying methods.

Next in my set of links is another book published 1962, although it has the feel of a much older book, because it depicts a vanished world in pre-WW2 Italy: Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which I really should reread some day.

For a long time I kept confusing Giorgio Bassani with Giorgio Vasari, and was puzzled why a 20th century writer was so interested in and knew so much gossip about The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in the 12th to 16th centuries.

I think I’ve written myself into a corner now, as I can’t think of any other intelligent links, so I’ll just use a simple trick and for my final book choose one that has a painter as the main character (and is once again a book I haven’t read in a long, long while): Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. I don’t remember much about the plot points, but I do remember it as being very atmospheric and somehow inspiring for a teenager who was keen to become an artist (or rather, a writer) herself.

This month I’ve travelled to Vietnam, Romania, Cold War Berlin, pre-war Ferrara, Renaissance Italy and Canada. Where will your Six Degrees of Separation take you?

January 2026 Wrap-Up

I used to think that 6 was my lucky number and was really looking forward to 2016… and look how that turned out. So I’ve learnt to dampen down my expectations for 2026 and certainly the month of January around the world seemed to provide plenty of proof that I was right to do so. However, my personal summary of this seemingly endless month hasn’t been too horrid: I’m clearly lucky and privileged. I spent the first few days of the New Year with my older son and then a friend came over briefly to visit. I got to see the rather lovely exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie of largely impressionist and contemporary art from the private Scharf Collection. My bookcases got delivered and built. I got to go back to Romania to see my parents and also managed to see doctors and quell any anxiety I had about my health.

I also got to read some interesting books, although I can’t say any of them really blew my socks off.

Ten books read, only one of which was in English in the original (the non-fiction one). Four books for January in Japan, and I’m happy to say that I’ve reviewed every one of them. Two very interesting takes on Japanese history, a slightly sinister and enigmatic novella and a crime novel about industrial espionage. Three books in German borrowed from the library, two of them also crime fiction set in interesting periods of German history in Berlin (1939 and 1968). A reread of a Catalan crime novel by one of our Corylus authors at my parents’ flat. A memoir by one of the best-known Romanian women writers since the 1980s and a non-fiction work about our very personal relationships with AI.

This last book Love Machines was very eye-opening, containing some information that I knew from before (because I’m fascinated by this subject and read everything I can about it), but also a lot that I didn’t. James Muldoon does a good job of remaining fairly non-judgemental about people’s use of AI, but does warn of the dangers of leaving all that sensitive personal data to corporations (although I wouldn’t feel comfortable with governments having access to it either). I often feel like saying: ‘Honestly, guys, why are you willing to give out so much personal stuff online – maybe you should have grown up with the experience of having your phones tapped and checking out your flats and hotel rooms for bugs.’

In February I’m not quite ready to leave the Far East yet, and I also want to participate in the wonderful #ReadIndies initiative, so I have books from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam lined up (and the publishers Pushkin Press, NYRB, Honford Star and Tilted Axis respectively).

I also watched quite a lot of films (by my standards) this past month, eight new ones and one rewatch (Ponyo). I started on a project of watching films set in Berlin (thanks to FilmFriend, a platform I have access to thanks to my local library) and was quite taken by the energetic, natural style of Victoria and was struck by the curiosity that is Angry Young Men meet GDR propaganda in Ecke Schonhauser. Ozon’s adaptation of L’Etranger had some choices I couldn’t quite agree with, but it was visually very attractive. The most memorable film of the month was Sentimental Value.

My film plans for February include: more Berlin films, No Other Choice, It Was Just an Accident, Silent Friend, possibly Marty Supreme if it comes out in Germany by the end of the month, as well as a documentary about a Korean rock band I really like The Rose.

But first: today is the first public transport strike I’m experiencing in Berlin, which means I can’t go to my hip-hop class (it would involve 1 1/2 hours of walking each way on icy pavements). Boo!

Building a Library

This feels like a #FridayFun post, but, for a change, it’s not about escapism and ideal libraries. It’s about a hard-earned library, after 50 years of collecting (I include some books I had as a child) and moving around between countries, with accommodation ranging from tiny rooms to four-bedroom houses – at last count, probably at least 28-29 moves that involved books (so not counting any short-term stays of just a couple of months). After a massive purge before I left the UK (donating to charity and friends, leaving some of my sons’ books with their father), and without counting the books that are still at my parents’ house (and will remain there forevermore), I estimate that I have around 3500 books here, so I was very worried whether they’d all fit into just two walls full of shelves. It turns out they do… and I even have a couple of small shelves left over for any future… ahem, plans!

I had already earmarked this room as the study/library/guestroom. But when my boxes arrived, I started having doubts as to whether I would ever see the light at the end of the tunnel (or have a clear balcony again).

Living like this for a couple of months while I investigated the most suitable (and affordable) shelving options was a bit hellish.

I finally cracked and hurriedly bought some Ikea bookshelves for at least one of the walls, so that I could unpack some of the boxes, under Kasper’s wise supervision.

I managed to get one set of bookcases completed just in time before my first guest arrived at the end of November, although they had to put up with the mess elsewhere in the room.

The wall opposite was a bit trickier and required custom-made shelving, including drawers and cupboards with doors to hide a multitude of folders and other sins. This finally arrived last Thursday and took five hours of an experienced craftsman’s time to assemble.

Once all the shelves and books had been unpacked, a clear balcony now seems like an impossible dream…

It then took three days of shelving, climbing on ladders, readjusting…

I can finally see my printer again (and hopefully use it, too!), but those shelves filled up pretty fast. Some double shelving could not be avoided, but that’s why these are the deeper bookshelves.

The depth also allows for my elephant collection (and a cat) to be displayed. As always, my books are arranged by geography or themes. In the example above: my Berlin books and two of my favourite writers side by side: Virginia Woolf and Shirley Jackson.

Meanwhile, the Ikea shelves are no longer double-shelved and I have a comfy chaiselongue for reading… and please notice the small amounts of space just begging to be filled.

This might look a bit narrow, but there’s actually almost two metres between the sofa and the bookshelves opposite, so even when it opens up as a guestbed, guests should still be able to move through. Kasper is stretching as if to prove it.

So this is the ‘after’ version of the first picture in this post. Aside from the mess on the balcony, I now finally have the room that I dreamt of. It might not be quite as impossibly perfect as the ones I show on Friday Fun, but I’m still pleased with it. And exhausted!

In conclusion, I never want to move again… Maybe I’ll just build a new library at my parents’ house instead!

#6Degrees January 2026

It’s been quite a start to the New Year. I experienced the noisiest fireworks in the world (which seemed to go on all night) – Berlin is not the most pet-friendly city on New Year’s Eve. I had guests (my older son and his girlfriend, we had a great time time together), but it is decidedly harder to have guests in a small flat with just one toilet and only sporadic access to my computer, which is in the guest room. But the main problem has been that my phone stopped working a couple of days before Christmas, or rather it was restarting constantly and locking me out. After multiple attempts to repair it, I had to buy a new one… which has not arrived yet, so I’ve been cut off from friends, family and work over the holiday season.

Still, regardless of technological and other woes, and regardless of my previous post complaining of blogging fatigue, I have to take part in my favourite monthly literary meme, namely the #6DegreesofSeparation, as hosted by Kate.

It’s a tricky one this month, since I’m supposed to start with the last book from my December chain, which was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. So that’s going to be a bit of a headscratcher, since it’s too easy to link it to Boccaccio’s Decameron. I decided to go for a modern adaptation of one of the most famous of the Canterbury Tales, namely the Wife of Bath. I haven’t read the book, but I’m told that The Wife’s Tale by Lori Lansens is a retelling of that story set in modern times, a woman who is shocked out of complacency by the disappearance of her husband on the eve of their silver wedding anniversary.

The second link takes us to disappeared spouses – and other people more generally. In Japan the so-called ‘evaporated’ people (Johatsu) have given rise to a whole industry of ‘organising disappearances’ and ‘acquiring a new identity’. These are people who for reasons of shame or despair have chosen to leave behind their families, friends, jobs and, above all, dangerously high debts. The beautifully produced non-fiction book The Vanished by journalist Léna Mauger and photographer Stéphane Remael uncover the human faces behind the phenomenon.

In other countries such as Argentina, the ‘disappeared’ refers of course to those who did not willingly submit to this, but were kidnapped and killed by the military dictatorship. One of the journalists who wrote extensively and also militated against the authoritarian regime was Rodolfo Walsh, whom I learnt about via the thrilling and very moving fictionalised account of his last few months in Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff.

If you’ll allow me to be a little self-indulgent with the next link, I will go by publisher. My very own Corylus Books published Drucaroff’s novel, so I will link to another short novel published by us that is highly political and possibly one of our most underrated titles: Little Rebel by Jerome Leroy is a frighteningly funny dark gem.

The original French title of the book is La petite Gauloise, so my next link is to a classic figure of French literature who is known for smoking… maybe not Gauloise cigarettes, but certainly his pipe. Yes, it’s Simenon‘s Inspector Maigret, and one of my favourite books in the series is Maigret’s Mistake, perhaps because it is so rare to see the good man intimidated by a suspect.

I’ve exhausted all my creativity for my final link, so will stick to ‘mistakes’, this time in the spelling of the title of the book, even though the mistake is deliberate. I’ve always meant to read Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, because I really appreciate Mary Shelley’s original book. I was not that enthused with the recent film adaptation, so I hope that Winterson’s book is a bit more interesting.

So for our first 6 Degrees of Literary Separation in 2026, we have taken a road trip across the US, gone under the radar in Japan, experienced threats and assassinations in Argentina, spent time in the west of France and in Paris, and finally skipped through time and borders in the search for Frankenstein. Where will your 6 degrees take you?

The Stats for 2025 and December Summary

Happy New Year, everyone! Hope you’ve managed to have some fun or else get some rest, and also get some nice reading or film viewing or other cultural delights during this festive period. I’ve already told you about my best of the year reading in the months January to June, and then July to December, but let me also quickly summarise my reading in December and then share some general blogging and reading stats with you.

December Reading

I tried to read light, amusing or thrilling fare in December, so needless to say it was only the Kafka biography (which I finally finished after about 3-4 months of reading) that really stuck to my mind. Of the remaining eight books, seven were in German (although two were translations, from German and Spanish), mostly borrowed from the library. I’ve only reviewed one of the books, Kesten’s Happy People.

Four of the German language books were crime novels, but I only really enjoyed Transatlantik by Volker Kutscher (although I felt he was stringing it out a bit too much with Rath’s nemesis, would have liked a fresher story). Sadly, the Viennese Brenner novel by Wolf Haas (a series I usually really enjoy) was rather average on this occasion, not quite as humorous and satirical as usual. The book featuring Angela Merkel as a Miss Marple type detective after her retirement was rather too cosy and silly for my taste, while Petra Hammesfahr’s psychological thriller was simply too predictable and long-winded compared to other books I’ve read by her. So, all in all, a bit of a disappointment.

I did not finish Amadeus on a Bike by former tenor Rolando Villazon, although it was set in one of my favourite cities, Salzburg, featured lots of music and Mozart. There were a few interesting insights behind the scenes of a major classical opera festival, but there was excessive names-dropping and a rather silly love story which simply did not capture my imagination. Complete coincidence, but the staging of Die Fledermaus that we went to see on New Year’s Eve was directed by Villazon as well, and his three time frame interpretation (set in 19th century Vienna, 1950s East Berlin and a spaceship in the future) was a bit puzzling – fun but not entirely sure it added that much to the operetta. So perhaps Villazon and I are simply not on the same wavelength.

I quite enjoyed the Japanese book by Tsumura Kikuko, known in English as There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. It’s on the quieter rather than the shocking side of Japanese fiction and I may try to review it for January in Japan. And I was intrigued by the non-fiction book about how AI companions are reshaping our personal relationships, and the words of caution about who is going to be holding such sensitive personal data in the future.

Annual Reading

I still use Goodreads for tracking, because I’m too lazy to start anything new, and it works well enough for me. I’ve read 128 books this year (my target was 120) and I think you can see quite clearly that my reading dropped off in the second half of the year as I started preparing and then making the move abroad. Quite different to 2016, the last time I had a major international move (175 books read, but that was the year I was trying to escape from a miserable home life by immersing myself in literature, while this year I was pretty happy overall).

I’m quite stingy about giving out five star reviews, although I did have quite a few four star reviews this year. But here are the ones that I scored highest this past year – and of course, made my favourites list in my previous blog posts. Three Koreans! Who’d have thought? Maybe that’s the reason why I’ve started learning the language, although I’m not a very diligent student.

Annual Blogging

I’ve posted the lowest number of posts since I started blogging: 126 posts, and majority of those were in the first half of the year as well. I haven’t reviewed much in the past few months. My most-read post of the year was a review though: Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat, which I read for the International Booker Shadow Panel.

I believe that quite a few of my online bookish friends are also experiencing a bit of a blogging fatigue, and have either reduced the number of postings, or the format (doing a monthly set of mini-reviews or thematic shorter reviews and the like). I am not quite sure what I will do next. There is a temptation to go back to my early blogging days, in which I simply share my interests and bits of writing rather than stick to predominantly reviewing. I might take a bit of a break or switch to reviewing only the most impressive/memorable books and then merely mentioning the others in a monthly summary.

Whatever happens next, thank you so much for reading and commenting throughout 2025. I appreciate all my visitors, the many from the US (nearly double the number of visits than the UK, which is the second largest group), as well as the single (possibly in error) visit from Norfolk Island, Tajikistan and Samoa. Wishing you all a healthy, happy and successful 2026, however you wish to define success!

Give me the quiet representation of fireworks in Hiroshige’s woodblock print over the noisy and smoky real things any time!

Favourite Books in Second Half of 2025

My reading slowed down in the second half of this year, as I got busy with selling and buying houses, clearing out clutter and then planning and executing an actual move abroad. My brain often felt tired from all the project management, so I found myself reaching for books that promised to be entertaining or relaxing (spoilers: they didn’t always deliver on that promise), as well as books that had been lurking forever on my Kindle, since for 3 months or so I had no access to my physical books.

In July I managed to read the graphic novel Pyongyang by Guy Delisle before I packed it away in boxes for storage, and although his mockery of the North Korean regime was perfectly justified (surreal and ridiculous as it was and still is at times), call me over-sensitive but I also detected a bit of an insensitive, patronising tone to it. Nevertheless, an interesting insight into a place few people have access to.

In August I returned to two authors who are sure bets for me. Claudia Pineiro’s Betty Boo had been on my TBR pile forever, and she does her usual great job of using a murder mystery as a pretext to examine Argentine society and politics. China Mieville always has fascinating premises for his story and his The City and the City is full of mind-bending trickery but also great social commentary, I find.

September reunited me with Javier Marias. Thus Bad Begins has a relatively straightforward plot that could have been dispensed with in a novella, but in Marias’ hands, it takes flight and I simply cannot get enough of following his acrobatic train of thought.

October was a month of contrasts: the reasonably light-hearted yet fascinating peek at China during a critical time period in Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking by Frances Wood, and a reread of the cynical, world-weary Jean Rhys and her Good Morning, Midnight. Equally hard to forget were two books about the immigrant experience: Canzone di Guerra by Daša Drndić and So Distant from My Life by Monique Ilboudo. Funnily enough, all of those books were about strangers in a strange land… just as I was settling into my new home, luckily with more joy and satisfaction than any of the above.

November meant novellas and German literature, and I tried to combine both wherever possible. I was particularly struck by The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider, Golden Years by Arno Camenisch and Erich Kästner’s Fabian.

In December I finally finished the biography of Franz Kafka by Reiner Stach, and although I had read so many of Kafka’s letters and notebooks, although I knew so many things about him already, I was amazed not only at the detailed and thorough research (unearthing some new things about Kafka), but how moving I found the final year or so of his life, the description of his few months in Berlin and then his final weeks and death. This was probably the most memorable read of this latter half of the year, if not the entire year, for me.

I have also just started reading Chevengur by Andrei Platonov and Love Machines: How Artifical Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships by James Muldoon, and they both look likely to be in the ‘best of/most memorable’ category for 2025, although I might not finish them before the start of the New Year.

I can’t say I was smitten by any of the covers of the past six months, although perhaps that is reflective of the fact that I read most of the books on Kindle. I’ll do one more wrap-up for December before New Year’s Eve, and then say goodbye to a year that has been full of (exciting) changes – but also a lot of loss and heartache.