My objective for this year was to read 20 books: not much compared to how I used to read but a good step up from the measly handful I read in 2024. I ended the year with 25 books completed. Additionally, I wanted to and did make an entry in my book log for every book, causing me to finish filling up my first book log which I had started in 2017 and had been making only occasional entries into.
I joined a book club this year, which both kept me on pace and took up a lot of my reading. It’s been fun, and we ended up reading a bunch of books which I’d previously read but not developed a real understanding of. In fact, eight of the books I read this year were rereads.
My goals for this year are to read at least as many books again, and I’d like to dabble with waking up early to read for an hour, which I’ve done at different times in my life. Makes it easier to take notes compared to my usual reading in bed or on the subway.
Below are my book log entries for the year. Mostly just scribbles.
- Difficult Loves
- District and Circle
- The Crying of Lot 49
- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
- Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Way of the Clans
- Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Bloodname
- Kalki
- Invisible Cities
- The Golden Apple
- Duino Elegies
- Night Palace
- Continuous Creation: Last Poems
- Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction
- Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005
- UBIK
- Hour of the Wolf
- Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Falcon Guard
- Patternmaster
- Vasko Popa: Selected Poems
- Fidelity
- The Dispossessed
- Redemption Rites
- Salvage the Bones
- The Master and Margarita
- Moby Dick
Difficult Loves
by Italo Calvino, finished 2025-01-19
This was a book of my mother’s mother’s. It has her name written on the inside of the front cover. I thought she might not have read it because of how pristine the book is but I found a page from a magazine in it and one page had a damaged corner.
I felt, for a lot of this book, like I couldn’t predict what would happen in each story. But then, in the second to last story - The Adventure of a Near-Sighted Man - it kind of clicked and I knew what would happen. It was the same sort of ironic logic as Invisible Cities. Looking back, the surprise of each story was such a pleasure.
District and Circle
by Seamus Heaney, finished 2025-01-22
I liked reading these poems aloud to myself, the words felt great to speak. None of them is my favorite of Heaney’s but there were some real gems, especially toward the beginning of the book. I do feel like, since I’ve started reading Heaney, I’m more attentive to the coincidences of sound in my own speech and writing.
One thing I appreciate about the early poems in this book, like the one about the aerodrome, is how surprising are Heaney’s descriptions of physical objects. There’s the one about the helmet, the one about the harrow-pin. I hope to write some poems like them this year.
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon, finished 2025-02-18
This is my third of fourth time reading this book and I feel, finally, like I kind of get it. I found this passage underlined at the end of the book:
For there either was some Tristero beyond the appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America and if there was just America then it seemed the only way she could continue, and manage to be at all relevant to it, was as an alien, unfurrowed, assumed full circle into some paranoia.
This terminates a passage on meaning - either there is meaning beyond the veil of the mundane or not. The answer, as we all know, is that there is none. Pynchon tells us as much through Randolph Driblette early in the book:
You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth. Wharfinger supplied words, and a yarn. I gave them life. That’s it.
All of our interpretation comes to nothing. All the attempt to understand symmetries comes to nothing. There is only the appearance of meaning.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
by Yukio Mishima, finished 2025-03-06
Another book club book. This was my second time reading it - back in high school or early college this was my first Mishima, and in the rereading there’s a memory of what it meant to me back then. When I had a deeper and more complex emptional life this book made a lot of sense to me, and Mishima’s commitment to beauty made a lot of sense. Now it’s hard not to see it all as foolish. Of course, of the two perspectives, I’d rather reclaim the former.
I should probably be drugged and murdered like Ryuji. Happiness and pills have dulled what was once a fine attunement to beauty. It’s hard to know what the point of all this is if I’ll never again be moved to delusion by the mattering of things as used to happen all the time.
Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Way of the Clans
by Robert Thurston, finished 2025-03-06
This took me forever to finish cause it was long-winded and boring. Not really what you expect from this kind of thing. At the end of the day, I’m glad I finished it and might read the rest of the trilogy; it’s nice to gave something to read on my phone.
Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Bloodname
by Robert Thurston, finished 2025-04-14
This one was a lot more engaging than the last. More action, more interesting character development. Not the best book ever, but I’m likely to read the next and final book.
It’s funny, I don’t remember much of anything of these books. I’m pretty sure I had a big anthologized edition of the trilogy that got beat to hell.
Kalki
by Gore Vidal, finished 2025-05-02
Another book club book. It reminded me of a bunch of books: The Crying of Lot 49, Love in the Ruins, a passage probably from Hindu scripture reminded me of the bit before the last chapter of UBIK.
After te end of the world the book continues for a good 40 pages at least. U was confused - there wasn’t much left the plot could do - but I ended up enjoying it. Fun to see the world wind down.
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino, finished 2025-05-09
This is what? My fourth time reading this book? I think the first time I read this was with Coleman back in 2013. More than ten years ago. And never enough to read, even then.
The history of cities is the history of civilization. So what do these stories reveal? A logic of human consciousness and narrative? Something about how we make complex systems comprehensible. Something about what meaning is.
Kublai keeps Polo around to entertain him, first of all, but also because something about Polo’s cities teaches him about his unknowable empire, allowing him to possess it in a new way. “If we can describe the space of possible symbols, every member can be understood.”
The Golden Apple
by Vasko Popa, finished 2025-05-13
I don’t think there are many relevant books for me to find left related to Popa. I’ve still got that second of criticism to read, and I’m sure there are more Simic translations to find.
The fairy tales, perhaps predictably, were my favorite part of this book. Strange and frightening. In general, the tone and language of the book matched Popa’s poetry - to whom is this attributable? I wonder more and more how much of the poetry I love is Anne Pennington’s work.
Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Edward Snow, finished 2025-05-22
I guess I never actually finished this before. It’s certainly hard to follow. I read the preface? Introduction? and it predisposed me against it - Rilke comes off as too caught up in the importance of his feelings. And i guess that’s true of his writing as well, it’s very flowery and attentive to his internal life, but disconnected from the world. I guess I ought to ask what the difference is to other poets I like more. Just how interesting is one person’s internal life?
Night Palace
by Phil Elverum, finished 2025-05-23
I enjoyed this more than I thought I would - turns out it’s just lyrics to some songs off the album of the same name. There was some political commentary that wasn’t as cringey as it might have been. There were some nice moments of peace amid nature. Elverum does a good job of expressing the experience of such things as breeze or the smell of woodfire.
Continuous Creation: Last Poems
by Les Murray, finished 2025-06-05
I’d read about this poem in Coetzee last year. An Australian. Maybe my first Australian? These were, as the the title implies, the poet’s last poems, selected by his editor. There are some bangers in here, and I’ll need to return to it - lots of confusing stuff too though. Poems I flatly did not understand or bounced off stylistically.
Kew Gardens and Other Short Fiction
by Virginia Woolf, finished 2025-06-17
Really great stuff. Woolf is becoming one of my favorites. There are so many memorable moments in these stories: the bug in the title story, the two older, single ladies in the final two stories. Woolf’s prose makes me feel like I’m losing my mind, but it’s so beautiful. Her sensual descriptions so evocative. It works well in these short formats.
Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000-2005
by J.M. Coetzee, finished 2025-07-03
A third collection of these essays. I really enjoyed it, of course, but don’t really think I was so seduced to read the works discussed as I was with the other collections. The introduction was informative - Coetzee’s interest in the first half of the book is in authors who lived through both world wars and saw the end of Habsburg rule. Many of these authors describe characters who cannot move on from the loss of their home and cling to the values or memory of the collapsed empire. How does it relate to Coetzee? Someone who also left behind - in history as well as practically - the country of his birth? I don’t think Coetzee longs for the days of apartheid, but it would be hard to believe he doesn’t experience some melancholy thinking back to a world which no longer exists.
The last essay is a review of a novel by Naipaul: Half a Life. It’s hard to tell here if the harsh attitude toward Indian culture belongs to Naipaul or Coetzee. Unusual for these essays, that confusion of perspective. Coetzee criticized the Indian tendency toward self-denial as related to complacency, a lack of ambition.
In the person of Chandran Senior, Naipaul has diagnosed self-denial as the road of weakness taken by loveless spirits, and essentially magic way of winning victories in the natural dialectic between a desiring self and a resistant world by suppressing desire itself.
Coetzee also shows an interest in the blending of real history with fiction: autofiction, memoir, and so on. I’m generally ignorant of these genres and haven’t really been interested in them. I think I don’t really understand what’s going on there and these essays have prompted some more interest at least in e.g. the blending of real experience with fiction as in Naipaul’s writing.
UBIK
by Philip Dick, finished 2025-07-17
I’ll try to get what feels like a coherent interpretation out. Both the group of intertials AND Runciter are dead. This isn’t fully necessary to explain the coin with Joe Chip’s face - there’s something about life-strength being able to affect reality that maybe bears on “true” reality in the novel, but it makes even more sense if they’re all in half-life.
The ads for UBIK are merely artifacts of different time-concepual iterations of the product: it was created just like Ella described and takes the form of a commercial product because in the “true” reality Ella and her colleagues come from there is a high degree of commercialization.
It is telling or at least interesting that 1939, the start of the war, and the involvement of the U.S. in the war, are inflection points in both UBIK (where time cannot revert further than 1939) and The Man in the High Castle, where U.S. involvement, besides the assassination of FDR, is what determines the split in realities.
Hour of the Wolf
by Blaine Lee Pardoe, finished 2025-07-29
I basically enjoyed this book, definitely more than the first two Jade Phoenix books I read earlier this year. It has a lot of the same problems, namely being pretty boring - boring characterization, boring prose, often repetitive content. I think I kind of need to make my peace with that. I’m not going to get into this stuff like I did when I was a kid, but they’re a nice way to dive into the BattleTech universe and get a sense of how things work. And I think they’re a good way to be more invested in e.g. the historical dimension of the game.
The most complex character in the book is Devlin Stone, even if his behavior doesn’t quite make sense a lot of the time. I wanted more there in terms of his psychology, rather than so much being reduced to his ego. The revelations he gives at the the end of the book, particularly with regard to his own past, point the way to what might have been an opportunity to make him more complex. Missed opportunity I guess.
Also there were a few typos which happens but there were more than there should have been.
Legend of the Jade Phoenix: Falcon Guard
by Robert Thurston, finished 2025-08-06
Much more fun than the first two books. More action, more character development, more interesting relationships. The ending felt a little rushed, where Aiden was defending the Falcon Guard retreat. Thurston started jumping forward for some reason? Really took some of the wind out of the sails of a scene that should have been dramatic.
I’ll read more of these books. I’d like to know more about Kael Pershaw and Marthe. There are so many of these novels, it’s a great source of easy reading.
Patternmaster
by Octavia Butler, finished 2025-08-12
Another book club book, this one selected by Carlos cause he wanted to read something other than a book by an “old white man.” Pretty bad book. Read like young adult fiction - explaining to the reader how they ought to interpret the event described. Poor characterization, incoherent events. What can you do?
Vasko Popa: Selected Poems
by Vasko Popa, trans. Charles Simic, finished 2025-09-01
Nice to have more Popa to read. Got this book on sale from the NYRB. Sad that Simic is dead, not least because he’ll never translate all of Popa’s writing. I do prefer the Pennington though. Oddly, Simic’s introduction does not mention her work. The book is dedicated to Morton Marcus, whose translation of Popa I realize I own.
Fidelity
by Mary Oliver, finished 2025-09-06
On the one hand, I greatly admire these poems for their simplicity. On the other, they often feel like poems for children or worse, Instagram. They’re a little corny and a little touching. Not bad on the whole.
The Dispossessed
by Ursula Le Guin, finished 2025-09-19
I read The Left Hand of Darkness twice, the second time to see if it would be as borking as I remembered. Nevertheless I loved this book. It waas a little boring, without much action for the majority. But the characters were great - Shevek and Takver’s relationship in particular - and Le Guin’s descriptions were immersive and pleasurable. The desert planet of Anarres particularly, was made to seem a place worth visiting.
As for the politics, the author takes some shortcuts. While there is a lot of discussion of ideology, there isn’t much in the way of actual politics. Things simply happen, as though spontaneously. A real shortcoming for a book that takes as its interest, at least in part, the impact of the political on the individual.
Redemption Rites
by Jason Schmetzer, finished 2025-10-14
Another BattleTech book, set just after Hour of the Wolf and following Wolf’s Dragoons in the aftermath of the ilClan trial. A little boring like all these BattleTech books I’ve been reading. It felt perfunctory, like they had to write it, despite the characters being mostly uninteresting and written with what feels like a lack of enthusiasm.
I do wish Star Colonel Othar was explored more. Disappointment and failure are interesting themes in the context of war and leadership. He seems a good leader - sometimes being good is not enough. This lesson was hardly explired but is ripe for development.
Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward, finished 2025-10-30
Another book club book. Really disliked this one. As I’ve been joking, it averages more than one simile a page, but it’s no joke: that’s probably an underestimation. The metaphorical language doesn’t really contribute to the book, and interferes with some descriptions that otherwise be interesting.
Generally, the book is more than forgiving of the abysmal behavior of its characters. They embody some terrible stereotypes of poor black people. And their behavior, particularly Skeet’s, seems inhuman at times. Rather than exploring evil acts with compassion, this book doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with dogfighting and theft.
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov, finished 2025-12-16
I read this for the book club: my second time reading it. What a special book it is! There are so many themes to pull together, it’s a hard book to understand. How do we understand, for example, how the book thinks about truth? At the end, the “true” story of the devil’s visit to Moscow is replaced with the police’s version. At the same tie, “manuscripts don’t burn.” So what are we to make of truth? Likewise, what is the truth of the master’s account of Pontius Pilate? It is more believable than the Gospels, and more human. A really hard book to understand.
Moby Dick
by Herman Melville, finished 2025-12-29
This book took me all year to read. I really enjoyed it, especially for the prose, but I got in the habit of only reading a chapter here or there with breaks in between. This past week or so, I read the final 100 pages. Without the distraction of other reading obligations it went quick.
I thought the ending was quite sudden. Three shortish chapters. Each making it increasingly obvious where things are going. Brief epilogue. The end reminds me of how I felt at the end of V. Maybe it even alludes to Moby Dick, hard to remember enough detail to figure it out.
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