January Wrap-Up
January seemed to last an age and also go by in the blink of an eye. I suspect that as I creep closer to 40 I'm going to feel this way more and more often.
This year got off to a pretty good start in terms of reading. I haven't found the time to blog about everything I've read, but that's fine. In February I read 14 books, DNFd one, and started (but still haven't finished) War And Peace. The books that I read were mostly really good, and picking favourites is pretty tough. If I have to narrow it down to a top five (which I don't, but I'm going to) I'd pick:
- Confessions by Catherine Airey
- Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
- We Do Not Part by Han Kang
- Holy Winter 20/21 by Maria Stepanova
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (which was a re-read)
I didn't write about Holy Winter 20/21 because I still haven't really figured out how to talk about poetry, but I really loved it. I think it's a book that I'm going to go back to as I read more poetry to see if I get more out of it on a re-read, and it's the first book of poetry I've read since Spicer's After Lorca that I've really fallen in love with.
I read quite a few ARCs this month. Confessions and We Do Not Part were both ARCs, as were Three Days In June and The Serpent Called Mercy. I have a few more that I've been approved for that I'm really excited to read in the next few weeks, including the new Katy Hays novel The Vipers and Agustina Bazterrica's The Unworthy. I really hope they both live up to my (very high) expectations for them.
Despite this being a really good month for reading I'm already behind on my reading goals for the year, which is annoying. I wanted 50% of the fiction I read to be in translation, and I'm currently sitting at about 17%. I also wanted 25% of my reading to be either non-fiction of poetry, and I've only read one book of poetry so far. I am still partway through Anne Carson's new collection Wrong Norma and I keep forgetting to make time for it, and I'm also about a third of the way through War And Peace, so those numbers aren't entirely representative, but I definitely need to try a little harder to meet those goals.
My other 'goal' was to start making videos about my reading on TikTok. I've been doing that, and enjoying it. If you're on the clock app, you can find me here.
Right now I'm reading The Extinction Of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft, which I'm really enjoying. The loose pitch is that a group of translators gather in a remote Polish forest to work on the latest novel by a Nobel laureate, who then disappears as weird stuff starts to happen. The events are related to us by the Spanish translator, writing in broken Polish, which is then translated into English for us by the English translator, who is also a character in the novel and has added her own commentary to some of the events in the form of footnotes. The actual author, Jennifer Croft, is one of Olga Tokarczuk's regular translators, and so there's a whole metatextual level to it that I'm really, really into. So far I adore it, and I hope it stays good.
It's rare that I sit down at the beginning of a month and pick out books that I want to read over the next 4 weeks, but this month I've picked a handful that I want to get through. I'm currently writing a solo journaling game called Blood In The Margins that's firmly within the 'dark academia'/reverse murder mystery genre, so I'm hoping to do some reading towards that. The books I've picked are:
- If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio (this one is a re-read)
- These Violent Delights by Micah Nemerever
- A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik
- A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine)
- In These Hallowed Halls, an anthology of dark academia short fiction
- Rashomon by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
I'm hoping this will give me a good mixture of stuff to really get the creature juices flowing.
As always, here's what I've been listening to this past month.