2025 Readings - Summing Up

 Unless I decide to make a mad rush through Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, I've finished my Year of Reading. I finished at 118, although I have this sinking suspicion that I forgot something (which would make me happy, that would take me to 119, and a prime number). Seriously, I know I reread The Plague recently, although maybe that was at the very end of last year (?). Anyway, you get the point.

1) Stephanie LaCava, I Fear My Pain Interests You; 2) Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl; 3) Robert Garland, God Against the Gods (Great Course); 4) Daniel Mason, North Woods; 5) Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb; 6) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; 7) D'J Pancake, The Short Stories of D'J Pancake; 8) Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth; 9) Rachel Quinney, Cryptids, Creatures & Critters; 10) Charles Dickens, Ghost Stories; 11) Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle; 12) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; 13) Olga Takarczuk, The Books of Jacob; 14) Saul Friedlander, Proustian Uncertainties; 15) Farid ud-din Attar, The Conference of the Birds; 16) Marcel Proust, Days of Reading; 17) Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; 18) Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death; 19) Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simple Weil: A Life in Five Ideas; 20) Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood; 21) Mother of Books; 22) Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium; 23) Martyn Oliver, Introduction to the Qur'an (Great Course); 24) Mark Muesse, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad (Great Course); 25) James Kaplan, 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool; 26) Craig Koester, The Apocalypse: Controversies and Meaning in West Civilization (Great Course); 27) Qur'an; 28) Tana French, The Searcher; 29) Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be; 30) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; 31) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; 32) Elizabeth Vandiver, The Iliad of Homer (Great Course); 33) Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch; 34) Homer, The Iliad; 35) Vida Scudder, On Journey; 36) Yukio Mishima, Voices of the Fallen Heroes; 37) Sarah Kendzior, The Last American Road Trip; 38) Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America; 39) Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls; 40) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain; 41) Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet; 42) Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World; 43) Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography; 44) Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop; 45) Lawrence Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It; 46) Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado; 47) Antonio De Benedetto, The Suicides; 48) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; 49) Dino Buzzati, The Singularity; 50) Natalia Ginzburg, Valentino and Sagittarius; 51) Luis Vaz de Camoes, The Lusiads; 52) Natsume Soseki, Kokoro; 53) Sheila Liming, F., Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Great Course); 54) Yangsze Choo, The Fox Wife; 55) Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; 56) Elizabeth Vandiver, The Aeneid of Virgil (Great Course); 57) Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works; 58) Olga Ravn, The Employees; 59) Ian McGuire, The North Water; 60) Genki Kawamura, If Cats Disappeared from the World; 61) Fine Grabol, What Kingdom; 62) Rose McCauley, They Went to Portugal; 63) Virgil, The Aeneid; 64) Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim; 65) Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump; 66) Miranda July, All Fours; 67) Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection; 68) Weston Cate, Forever Calais; 69) Anne Michaels, Held; 70) Kim Ho-Yeon, The Second Chance Convenience Store; 71) Charles Matthewes, Why Evil Exists (Great Course); 72) Mark Bushnell, Hidden History of Vermont; 73) Roger Shattuck, Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time; 74) Dino Buzzati, The Stronghold; 75) Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics; 76) Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince; 77) Brian Mulligan, The 1940 Cincinnati Reds: A World Championship and Baseball's Only In-Season Suicide; 78) Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore; 79) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; 80) George B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War; 81) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; 82) The Avengers, Marvel Masterworks 1; 83) Albert Camus; The Stranger; 84) Erik Esckilsen, The Last Mall Rat; 85) Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot; 86) Albert Camus, The Fall; 87) John Treherne, The Galapagos Affair; 88) Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; 89) Yevgeny Zamaytin, We; 90) Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters; 91) Augustine, Confessions; 92) Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Graphic Edition); 93) Budi Darma, People from Bloomington; 94) Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist; 94) Olga Ravn, The Wax Child; 95) Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy; 96) Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World; 97) Martin Amis, London Fields; 98) Baek Sehee, I Want to Die but I wan to Eat Tteovokki; 99) Craig Johnson, First Frost; 100) Martin Amis, Night Train;101) Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future; 102) Frank Herbert, Dune; 103) Craig Johnson, Return to Sender; 104) James Cain, Mildred Pierce; 105) Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia; 106) Sigizmund Krzhihanosvsky, Autobiography of a Corpse; 107) Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah; 108) Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich; 109) Edith Wharton, Ghosts; 110) Beowulf; 111) Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine; 112) Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; 113) Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote; 114) Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden; 115) Ignazio Silone, Fontamara; 116) Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol; 117) Dino Buzzati, The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories; and 118) Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

I'm exhausted just looking at this list. As I proposed earlier, this was the first time - and I suspect the last time - that I ever record the number of books that I read in a year, although it was an interesting experiment. Next year I'm taking it easier on the reading front. I just started another reread of Proust, although the first read of a newer translation - so I'm definitely looking forward to that). 

I am going to take a similar approach with movies in 2026, which will be less of a dedication in regards to time, although I'll doubtless end up with more than 118 movies watched.

2025 Readings 118

 There should be (probably is) a literary category for authors that you passionately love/hate. My champion would be Thomas Mann. I've read Death in Venice three times, during dramatically different periods of my life, and, although loving little snippets, never warmed to it. I've read Magic Mountain twice, and am definitely looking forward to reading it a third (and hopefully fourth and fifth time), but there are sections of it which I don't like. I love Magic Mountain, and my farewell email to Champlain (which I write and edit when I'm awake at 3:00 in the morning) references it, but there are sections when I find myself thinking (sometimes saying): "Will you please shut up!?" So, I'm not talking about those sections of your favorite author which should glide through, but a much stronger antipathy. With Mann it's mainly where he's just showing off, where he's going beyond just showing us that one of his characters is painfully full of himself or arrogant or remarkably oblivious - and instead he's just trumpeting his own impressive education/intelligence or just talking to himself. In Magic Mountain the scenes that I love far exceed the scenes that make me wish that he had employed a more forceful editor. I can't say that about Doctor Faustus, his last major novel, which I finished this morning. There were scenes in it which were breathtaking, but also scenes that took the patience of a saint (no pun intended) to get through. Unless you're a true, devout Mann fan I don't think I would recommend it. It's the story, mainly, of Adrian Leverkuhn, a brilliant German composer who, as you might expect from the title, might or might not have sold his soul to the devil. When it works it's a wonderful metaphor for the Germany that sold its soul to Hitler and Fascism. The problem is that it often strays very far afield from that theme, and unless you have that metaphor in your mind it's easy to completely lose track of any sort of central theme. It's not as if there aren't a thousand things and characters in Magic Mountain, but it simply holds together much cleaner. Is it possible that I'll read Doctor Faustus again? Sure, because there were a lot of great moments, especially when the storyteller, Leverkuhn's lifelong friend, steps back to reflect upon the situation in Germany during World War II (the story is a reflection covering a couple decades).

On a somewhat related note, I just found out that there's a Thomas Mann Museum in Nida, Lithuania (Mann had a summer house there for a couple years before his exile), and that's now bum-rushed its way to the top of my travel wishlist. 

2025 Readings 117

 As I'm drawing to a close in this Year of Reading - or Year of Recording What I Read - or Year of Reading New Things - or Year of Reading Weird Shit - I've been reflecting on some of the new authors that I've experienced. One of my new discoveries is Dino Buzzati. Previously I had written about his short novels, The Singularity and The Stronghold, both of which I loved. It's amazing to me that a person who has read a hell of a lot for decades can discover new folks, not simply getting around to reading books that I've neglected, but coming across people that I had never heard of previously (again, I blame my wretchedly poor Hoosier education). Buzzati may be my most cherished new discovery from this year. This afternoon I finished a short story collection from across his long career: The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories. Some of the short stories reminded me of The Singularity while others reminded me of The Stronghold, but they deny equal categorization. There often is a quiet, vague sense of dread, which is routinely counter-balanced by an odd humor, and he was clearly quite content to leave the reader mystified. I think my favorites were "Seven Floors," "Personal Escort," "The Bewitched Bourgeois," "Appointment with Einstein," "The Saucer Has Landed," and "The Writer's Secret," although even listing these few doesn't do justice to how much I enjoyed the entire collection, which stretched from the 1930s to the 1980s. Highly recommended.

I will, in a couple days, post a summary of the books I read this year.

Missing An Entire Country

 As is apparent, I'm always creating new challenges for myself to fuel my posts on this long-suffering blog (Proust, Pessoa, Marcus Aurelius, Faith, 2025 Books Read, next year's 2026 Films Watched). Consequently, and especially since I dropped off of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (a couple years ago), I've been devoting more time to the blog (and even if I'm the only one who reads the silly thing it's still time well-spent). However, it dawned on me that there doesn't seem to be anything here relating to the Netherlands (which used to be tagged as Holland for some reason). Seriously, there was only one post, from fifteen years ago, relating to an even older trip. I mean, I haven't spent much time in Amsterdam, but I have passed through there. So why don't I have anything? On Janet and my first trip to Portugal together we passed through Amsterdam on the way back, and I know I sent pictures to people, but I couldn't fine any on my phone. I popped back onto Facebook on the sly (partially for reasons relating to this summer's move), thinking that I must have posted something there, but there was nothing. Bizarre. Maybe it's locked away in a file somewhere - or on my camera, maybe? Weird. It's like an entire country disappeared. One of my goals is to try and sort out where those pictures are hiding.

By way of recompense to the Dutch here's a picture that I snapped during our crazy trip back from Portugal (matched only by the nightmare of getting to Portugal) as we passed through Amsterdam. It was a 100 degrees, and, allegedly, it was the only time it had ever reached triple digits in the country's history (which I don't necessarily believe, although I remember people talking about it at the time).

2025 Readings 116

 On Christmas Day we drove down to Pittsfield, Massachusetts to visit Janet's mom in her assisted living center, have a holiday meal, and then hang around the next day to take her on an extended Walmart shopping extravaganza. (maybe more on on that later). On the way day and back we listened to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. This is hardly the first time I've read or listened to that classic, but I've been deliberate and consistent in recording all of my readings for the year, so it was essential to include this one. Every year we tend to pick out a different performance, and this year I downloaded Tim Curry's rendition. It's a very well-thought of version, although I would argue a bit too highly praised - some of the voices were a bit too similar to each other, and often Scrooge's voice was pretty whiney. I'm actually completely OK with having someone read it without giving voice to the different characters, but if you're going to do it then I suppose you should be judged for it. It's still really solid, and, well, it's Dickens, so you really can't go wrong. As I've often opined, you could make a very compelling argument that A Christmas Carol might be the most influential book written over the last couple centuries. Obviously, highly recommended, and I can't imagine a holiday season that would not include another reading of one of my all-time favorite pieces.

Holiday Breakfast of Excellence

 Going an tire month (that is, our Christmas break in the unreal world of academia) without seeing my friends is, of course, impossible (what happens next year is anybody's guess). Consequently, it was necessary to schedule a Holiday Breakfast of Excellence at the TASTee Grill. As usual, the topics of conversation were varied and excellent, including an inspired discussion of what makes a great biography.

Sanford, appearing as either an Old Testament prophet or a Marxist theorist.

Erik and Kevin, two regular members of the BofE, enjoying the holiday festivities.

A rare appearance from the excellent Steve.

Afterward I had to make a quick run by Santa's for some homemade Christmas cookies and frozen scrapple (appropriate for a Philadelphia-born elf).

Layering Up

 This series of pictures came together rather organically, as Janet and I had to laugh at the layers of CFL swag that I was naturally putting on to prepare myself to go dig out the cars after yesterday's snow storm. Seriously, why doesn't Canada just go ahead and give me citizenship already?

Winnipeg Blue Bombers t-shirt: check.

Edmonton Elks long sleeve t-shirt: check.

Toronto Argonauts sweatshirt and Hamilton Tiger-Cats toque: check.