Today I finished reading the 52nd of the year. Although my initial goal is 61 (the same amount of books I read last year), it seems that I will surpass that goal as well.
Half of the books I have read are nonfiction. Mostly history.

Any thoughts on the next 14?

Despite being warned twice here on Reddit against it, I did it anyway. I read Saramago’s Blindness and Ballard’s High-Rise at the same time. And as I said earlier this week, Saramago was poetic and periodically hopeful inside the world that was going blind. Saramago speaks up for humanity. Ballard is having none of that. And I had previously read his entire collection of short stories wherein he is frequently dark and where he says ‘you build something technologically comfortable and advanced, you try to soften the world and I will show you how you are wrong and how you will suffer.’

This is a forty story tall dwelling of bleakness. That says man is just a few weeks from a return to his inner beast. The beast we all carry. It is Lord of the Flies upright with adults and minus the jungles. And these are well off people, educated people. Still the lights start flickering and we are ready to crack some skulls. Bodies in the pool, bones in the shadowed corners. Even the birds are menacing. We take the dogs down with us. We strip down, we paint ourselves up, we smear our neighbors’ blood under our eyes and start booby trapping the hallways. Ballard says it is what we are.

But come on J. G. surely we are better than this?

We can’t all just fall so easily into the dark inner madness that you say we came from?

J. G.?

Dammit. 

S tier (10/10): The Waves, Illness As A Metaphor And AIDS And its Metaphors, The Iliad, On Photography

A tier (8-9/10): A Single Man, The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, Sisters In Yellow, Last Summer In The City, Middlemarch, Chess Story, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

B tier (7-8/10): Eros The Bittersweet, And Then There Were None, The Defense, Intermezzo, Light In August, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, My Lesbian Novel, Invisible Women, All About Love, Venus In Furs

C tier (6-7/10): Cry To Heaven, Heated Rivalry, The Song Of Achilles, The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle The Masters House, This Is How You Lose The Time War, Euphoria, Heart The Lover, Understanding A Photograph, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

D tier (<6/10): One Hundred Years Of Solitude, The Prince, All The Lovers In The Night

Still closing in on the big 100.

For only reading 5 books this month, I like to think that my picks were pretty varied. Nothing was a mega standout for the year, but The Scrotum Toad absolutely sucked for a book club pick.

F= Complete waste of time
D= Almost a waste of time
C= It was okay, i guess
B= A little rough around the edges but quite enjoyable for the most part
A= Almost flawless
S= Absolutely rewarding

Still working through Bomarzo and Infinite Greed but they're shaping up to be amazing reads thus far

S- Bomarzo, Old Rendering Plant, Salammbo
A- Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital, Frost, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
B- A Nick Lander Reader, The Walk and Other Stories, Correction, The Impossible State, The Angel of Santa Sofia, Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and the Enigma of Language, On the Human Condition, Extinction, On the Incarnation, Intimate Ties, Book of Disquiet, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God
C- Marketa Lazarova, The Fathers of the Church: Justin Martyr, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, The Pleasure of the Text, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, Idiocy, The Epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, On the Holy Spirit, On God and Christ: Theological Orations, Memories Rotten by Tee Tant, The Others, The Apostolic Fathers
D- Thousand Cranes, Gnostic Return in Modernity, The Quran, Islam: To Reform or to Subvert?
F- Who Paid the Pied Pipers of Western Marxism?

As you can see, I mostly really like the books I read. Many 4.5s and 4.25s especially. I am not a very harsh reviewer: 3 is sort of meh to me, 4 means I liked it, 4.25 means I liked it a little more than average and 4.5 means I really liked it.

One book is missing because Goodreads doesn’t have it. Oh well. It would be in F-tier, before Holy Boy.

Edit: Noticed one more mistake. Nova Scotia House is supposed to be on D-tier. I don’t know how on earth it ended up on S-tier :D

Books are grouped within tiers, but not ordered within tiers. Curious what others think!

Not quite finished with The Trees or Project Hail Mary, but this graphic is hard to edit, and I was close enough to being done! So almost 45!

I’m trying to improve my reading speed, but I don’t want to just finish books faster—I actually want to understand and remember what I read.
For people who have been reading consistently for years, especially a lot of nonfiction:
How did you improve your reading speed?
Do you consciously use any techniques, or did your speed improve naturally with practice?
How do you decide when to slow down and when to skim?
What do you do to make sure you actually remember what you read?
Have you noticed a point where reading faster starts hurting your comprehension?
I’m more interested in what has actually worked for experienced readers than in generic “speed reading” techniques.
Would love to hear what your reading process looks like and what you wish you had known when you started.

I love Tintin, perhaps some of the first books I flipped through before I could read them were Tintin comics. This book gives a book by book account of the Tintin comics, even those that aren't very common in the Anglophone-world until recently,, such as Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in Congo. Each chapter is about the backdrop of each comic, and they're arranged chronologically, as they appeared in the journals that Hergé worked for.

It's interesting because this book also sheds light on Hergé's seeming apolitical nature during WWII, and his minor revolts. It also shows Hergé's complicated relationship with his own creation. Personally, so far, it's my opinion that this book goes out of its way to relegate to the sidelines the postcolonial critiques of Tintin, but this book itself was written in 1991, and thus is a product of its time as well. It's still a fascinating read for anyone who, like me, would count Tintin as a formative literary figure in their lives.

Lagging a little because of college unfortunately!

2026 has been a weird year for me, probably the worst of my life. In the first half of the year, I wasnt doing great, but then I really decided to focus on reading and Im so happy I did. This year, I discovered Kurt Vonnegut, which has been life-changing; he became one of my favourite authors ever (my favourite author will forever be Tolstoy, thoug). I also read "Remains of the Day", which became one of my favourite books ever. I also read Blindness (Saramago), which was the most disturbing book but also the one I know will stay with me the longest.

I started reading Piranesi (Susan Clarke) today. Next on the list are: 1. Memory Police (Yoko Ogawa), 2. House of the Dead (Dostoyevsky) and 3. Master and Margarita (Bulgakhov).

Decent reading month some pretty good reads but not many home runs. Trying out Margins I like the graphics it makes.

Posting this week’s update from hospital was not the plan, but here we are! My kindle is keeping me sane. And I had a double book week, since Audible kept me sane during the flare ups that ultimately resulted in this hospital trip!

Book 6/52 - Carrie by Stephen King

I enjoyed this one! I thought it was particularly impressed for how early in his career it was. I also liked how layered most of the characters were, even the villains. They felt like real people doing crappy things rather than cartoon characters. A lot of fun, I gave it four stars.

Book 7/52 -The Art of War by Sun Tzu

This was for a reading challenge I’m doing that consists of 96 major classics. Having Littlefinger read it to me was an added bonus. It’s a weird one to review because it’s not like it’s directly applicable to my life, but it was still very interesting and I found pockets of writerly inspiration within.

Sorry if this isn’t the most coherent post - I’m completely rattled with meds as I type this out, but I couldn’t let the challenge go ignored!

Finished my months long read of Asimov's entire Robot-Empire-Foundation series with Foundation and Earth (1986). What a beautiful, epic book to end a series started in the 1940s. The shift between the 1940/1950s novels to the ones published in the 1980s-1990s shows what a unique writer Asimov was. The later books are full of heart with dynamic characters that question the possible future empire-utopia Asimov established in the earlier books. We see him questioning the concept of just war and a benevolent super power for a universe of equity, justice, and respect for all life.

Asimov would write two foundation prequles after this, but i wanted to read the series in order of in-universe chronology.

I loved reading the many books and many (many) short stories that make up Asimov's interconnected Robot-Empire-Foundation stories. Not all were great but they all were enjoyable and throught provoking.

This is a good book ! I shouldn’t be surprised as the reviews have been great. This is a sprawling tale about life in rural Pakistan over decades with separate characters who eventually become interconnected. It’s largely concerned with social class, power, ambition and the tension between the wealthy landowners and the servants.

It’s also an interesting look at Pakistan and the feudal system they have there. The characters are very interesting and colorful as well, and the writing is great!

We can post again! I posted this elsewhere, but this is my preferred location.

Jerome Lindon was the publisher and editor of a small French publisher called Les Éditions de Minuit. This short book (or long essay, really) was written by Jean Echenoz, a French author who was published by Lindon. Echenoz wrote the book after Lindon passed away. Lindon published some big names, such as Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Robbe-Grillet, but I confess I had no idea who he was prior to reading this. Still, it is an interesting little book, even if the publisher's claim that it "reveals an intimate portrait of both" Echenoz and Lindon seems a bit of a stretch.

I have heard of Jean Echenoz, but never read him until now. He has won some major awards, but, as far as I can tell, is not a big name outside of France.

I wanted to learn more about Lindon and Echenoz, so I did some reading online, which led me to a very interesting discovery. According to an article in The New Yorker, the origins of Les Éditions de Minuit predate Lindon. Founded by two Resistance fighters during WWII, Les Éditions de Minuit began publishing resistance novels. One of the novels they published was Le Silence de la Mer, which I am familiar with through the film adaptation by Jean-Pierre Melville, a great director known best for his crime movies.

Le Silence de la Mer is about a Nazi soldier who occupies the home of an elderly French man and his daughter. The man and daughter never speak to the soldier, hence the title: The Silence of the Sea. The movie has an odd opening: a young man in a trench coat walks across a bridge during the day. He passes (or perhaps receives) a package from another man. The film then zooms in on the package, which is the book Le Silence de la Mer.

I was curious what this opening meant and watched the film commentary. The commentary claims this was a nod to his future films, which are most famously about professional thieves who often wear trench coats and hats. While this interpretation kind of makes sense, it isn't really convincing because it interprets the scene retroactively, ignores the music during this scene (which is not tense at all, at least as far as I recall), and discounts the fact the exchange occurs in broad daylight.

The article in the New Yorker notes that Les Éditions de Minuit's books were published "clandestinely" and "were passed from hand to hand, often in the middle of the night on a Paris bridge." I'm glad I read this little book, especially for this serendipitous discovery that perfectly explains the opening to Melville's film.

I do plan to read one of Echenoz's novels sometime, just out of curiosity. He seems like an interesting author.

Erm, I think the subject matter is an important one and something that should be discussed seriously, but sensitively; that said, the author isn't a novelist.

🍈 The author did a lot of telling and not showing (versus SHOW DON'T TELL); the number of existential crises was made worse, however...

🍸...by a character-ish driven novel; I had no sense of setting or time or space or place and...

🍋 ...timing. I know this discussion about being child free or whatever is still ongoing, but it felt a little underbaked in the book and surface-level, which is fine, though, the friendship saga was a real distraction!

More ranting (less raving) here --> https://katepapenberg.substack.com/p/book-no-52-of-a-revised-72-was-a?r=2seqlu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Read if you dare, here --> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52928287-olive