a post-literate man... the woman without reading ability... the end of reading and the last Trier...

[fwcu]

everytime I say this I really am stealing valour from the subaltern who really can't read and haven't been reading but my god, like, Bruh... uh a very lackluster or normal af reading year for me... 2025 was a year that had a lot going on or maybe not that much going on or maybe I really did become a newer better person or something idk, hard to tell, who knows! who knows! I'm bad at actually making my reading_lists posts and also I've documented my reading and opinions of elsewhere this year... so should I do it again? I don't know... I'm having the reverse of my usual crisis where I don't want to waste time writing because I want to be reading... sorry I have A List to get through... I have a normal sized list....                    and a scary ...         and a real and normal-small amount of books at home... which I bought quite a few books in 2025 [and some within the last week] [and obviously to commemorate nothing, I did a meaning-and-secret-and-impromptu exchange with H where she got me YOUR NAME HERE and I got her the complete cavafy].



anyway my to-reads of the year:

1. my list of 26 women nobel/booker winners/nominees
2. my 1$ copy of crime and punishment, and with this my parents_favourite_books homework will be done and I'll understand everything
3. the vintage edition of the magic mountain my friend kit got me bc i wanted to do a tiny mini xmas book exchange with them [i got them a palachuk short story collection and want to get them vanishing world by murata which is in no bookstores ever?] which is the worse translation unfortunately 
4. pride and prejudice [which i listened to on spotify and found DELIGHTFUL and am going to try and actually read] which was at my uncle's place and is not a knock-off, unlike my copy of anna k, though the edges are in suspect condition
5. 1587 a year of no significance which lowkey actually not what I wanted but whatever man, maybe i'll finish it anyway
6. the Qura'an... which I will be reading out to H on phone call, because we gotta get through that before i finally read the bible and then actually understand wtf all of The_Western_Canon is on...
7. either/or when I finally fucking find it. ohhhhh when I get you kierkegaard when I fucking get youuuu... 

see, I had to make a list of specifically women because my general perusing of the Classical Canon wasn't... it's not... 


anyway. stuff I read last year:

1. the queen's thief series: ...okay technically most of them I read dec29/30/31st 2024 but i do distinctly remembering reading the 3rd book at the new year's party and then also at 3am and overhearing S crying in the living room...  this made me believe in ya/na fantasy again... and I was ready to walk back to the genre with open arms and be so so happy about it, uh gen really was the uke of all time and the romance really was the romance of all time I just am never reading about kamet or the last book where attolia gets pregnant that's none of my business... the moment that still lives in my head is gen on ledge, wobbling in the air and the Hand materialising to set him upright, the slippage of divinity there was soooo.... gods aren't real or serious except they are?
2. the emperor and the endless palace: this is american damnei. and honestly? I would rather read real danmei from the homegrown chinese country of origin source... i don't need american danmei. also the fucking cut-sleeve story refashioning at the end was so fucking cringeeeee i couldn't i couldn't...
3. she who became the sun / he who drowned the world: it was at this point I realised I truly had grown too pretentious for the ya/na fantasy genre... and this was literally straight up historical and well-written and the lesbian fisting scene was so good i just... i don't know i didn't want to give it any flowers... anddd I'm at a point in my life where i can't do chinese fantasy not-from-china anymore... like dawg i'll just read it from the source.... i don't know... the market is oversaturated rn.... part of my lack of enjoyment was also bc it was so depressing and Unfun like            ik it's like, speculative? historical fiction and not fantasy but like omg... and it's not even fun??? WHATEVERRRR... i think i just had the wrong mindset going into this and therefore set myself up for failure.... like i was going to be happy no matter the quality of the product...
4. the god of small things: this was a reread... just to see if arundhati roy and the booker really did have the sauce and yeah. yeah. she had it. there are some beautiful metaphors in this book and the use of language is also just nice... one of the books where i was like 'wow authors and the Classical Cultural Institution are obsessed with sex and incest' 
5. stoner: I read this to further my understanding of The Campus Novel, which is not actually what this is but it does give you a vague onto the other sides of the life [aka, from the POV of a prof] ... doesn't deserve the cult classic niche rave status it has on twitter but JCO has already taken it down better than I have. this book was my last intentional american novel because it truly did make me realise nothing anyone has to write about america is anything I am interested in
6. strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde: this was definitely for school, and now everytime I see RL Stevenson in the 'classics' section i really am like     that's a made up and arbitrary category that has no real meaning bc everything he was 100% writing POPULAR FICTION ... like this guy is very much a james patterson type... like his writing is Symptomatic of the culture he is in and does not really go beyond it or transcend time but what do i know... this was also the only school book i actually finished so it's also the only one making this list...
7. dracula: this power of friendship aaahh book... 'you have a man's mind in a woman's body' yep yep yep... I have read dracula and I have watched nosferatu 2024. I reccomend watching nosferatu 2024. this was really The Mixed Media Epistolary novel of it's time... except it's about going to people's houses and it's shit at being Mixed Media but it is basically the original genesis of whatever daisy jones and the six is about ... at one point he's like 'this a transcription of the recording of this guy's gramophone' and I was like icb they had audio recording technology back then.... which maybe they didn't, it had a silly af name... But maybe they did...! 
8. the zero and the one: prolific tweeter and really good reviewer of 1 sally rooney novel, ryan ruby wrote this book. and so I read it... just to see if y'know, people you respect as Good Readers and Literary Critics are Good Writers... and he did have some great stylish moments and good prose overall, but that doesn't make for a good novel. though I wish. it was just such a boring cliche novel. and classic dark academia, not even elevated, literally just another The Secret History, so if you enjoyed that! like i'm not kidding, there is no distinguishable difference between the two in conceit or quality.... 
9. the odyssey, emily wilson translation: this fucking slapped. like, wait, the 3000 year old poem that's survived Everything and people have been listening and reading to since the beginning of Time is actually Really Good? ... well... Yes. athena, every 5 seconds: Odysseus Let Me Give You A Makeover... great poem. great poem. no wine-dark seas but i am always thinking of my wine-dark seas dw dw...
10. never let me go: I enjoyed this more than I thought I would, but not as much as everyone else does. i might be translating it into bangla so that might be interesting... i also watched the movie, and the book is way better than the movie, but idk... two girls having to sublimate their special fucked up bond via some random guy is a classic dynamic i have to nod about always though. and I like books about driving. IM OSRRY. I JUST GET IT I REALLY DO...
11. 2666: I dragged this book around and to and fro for like two months. I tried my hardest I did my best I really did. I never actually really finished the section on archimobaldi but despite everything, and despite not even being the book i enjoyed most this year, it was my best read. this is a book about dreams to me, and is dream like in the transmission of reading imo...  ik everyone is like 'this is a  book where women get murdered and raped for like 300 pages straight' and i do not know how to tell you: That's the Point. and also bolano maybe does this in the most respectful way possible where not only is it endlessly continuous as if to become Banal, but the Banality of their deaths and that nothing ever happens to stop them is the point to how we normalise femcide and minimize violence against women and their deaths... like at one point i was like 'why is every single woman in this book a sex worker' and then I Realised. 
12. Gilgamesh: so gilgamesh famously, not a super legible piece of work that you can read. but gilgamesh and enkidu are gay it's True To Me... 
13. women without men: read this for middle eastern lit class [along side matar's the return which was a basic af memoir just like one would expect] ... less better or about the same as celestial bodies, which i reviewed(?) years ago... once again shoutout to satire/sarcasm as a mode and the only way for subcontinental(+) writers to be able to cope with the sorrows and terror of their world... BUT ALSO... realised that the iranian revolution has left the same sort of scar as the partition in terms of the national/literary psyche... so that's also really interesting...
14. ordinary affects: teeks recommendation... um... i didn't like it as much as teeks does or teeks wanted me to... like sorry I was already thinking about all this stuff... 
15. Anna Karenina: successfully HAVE gotten everyone else to want to read, or think about reading, or begin to read Anna K... so shoutout to me and my tireless promoting ... not that that made anyone actually finish it or bookclub it with me, but we're still working on that front. and obviously I was going through a period of my life where I just couldn't sit still and I had to distract myself by reading the last 300 pages of anna k ... it's extremely entertaining, tolstoy's extremely good but also self-obsessed and caught up in his own preoccuptions/notions/righteousness ....       incredible to read a book and be like 'wow this is so relevant to my mom and my dad and the stage/point of life they're in rn' like it's not for the 15 year old elif batuman or for the 25 year old me, though we both enjoyed it immensely, but it was in fact for 15 year old elif batuman's divorced mother. as she has said and reiterated multiple times. sorry I have so much to say about this book, understandably, it's 800 pages. but rip to no one bookclubbing it with me. might as well kill myself!
16. an attempt at exhausting a place in paris: THIS WAS SO COOL. EVERYONE GO READ IT RIGHT NOWWW. one thing about me is that you know that I fucking love the #City in literature and also being a Flanneur... idk it was so exciting for me realising that my parents were the first generation of their families to grow up in a city and even then, the cities i grew up in were so different to what they had experienced... but now we think of the city as so ubiquitous and not at all a divergence from a far more historical mode of life... idk idk... idk,... i love CITY!
17. the trial: just before I started, when I was reading the introduction and i learnt that this novel was litr like a recovered draft and incomplete, i was like 'omg bruh we gotta let this cultural obsession with kafka go!!!'      so I changed my mind obviously. like i read this and I was like   oh Fuck Wait No    No I get it Im sorry I take it back.... genuinely such a short witty totally absurd novel... i would really really recommend reading this alongside the city and the city, I think they're in really good conversation with one another... i also have been paying so much attention to the use/depiction of space/architecture in novels and this one really really goes out of it's way to utilise that as integral to understanding it's core conceit... like tolstoy also does it in anna k, though the only reason I noticed or was thinking about it was bc of this equator article wherein the historian describes the spaces that these workers live in over the years and idk... SPACE IS SO POLITICAL GUYS...

we're 1 week into 2026 and here's what I've read so far

• notes from the blockade: lydia ginzberg is a soviet-era writer lesbian who studied alongside  the russian formalists and is from ODESSA [famous literary city TO ME] ...and I randomly picked this book up because I was looking for natalia ginzberg. whose husband is also from ODESSA... anyway no regrets im going to back to it. she's really really good, a story of cruelty and pity was an insane read... though i had read most of notes from a blockade on the 31st in an attempt to distract myself from the Impeding events obviously... but it was also really good...  but most importantly, one of the greatest openings of any piece of writing of all time ever. TO ME:
• "During the war years, people used to read War and Peace avidly, comparing their own behaviour with it (not the other way round - no one doubted the adequacy of Tolstoy's response to life). Readers would say to themselves: right, I've got the proper feeling about this. So then, this is how it should be. Whoever had energy enough to read, used to read War and Peace avidly in besieged Leningrad."
• If on a winter's night a traveler: bruh the way I've been trying to read this book since SEPTEMBER!!!! whatever man... whatever.... it was like a beautiful clear soup and I think I will have to read it again to make of it anything other than what I already know re:author-reader-character-narrator metafictionality and post-truth isms... such beautiful prose... but ultimately so soup to your mind!!!
• sign and symbols, read by mary gatskill for the new yorker fiction podcast: this doesn't count. BUT. litr such a beautiful reading and so so so haunting as a story like nabakov has the sauce you fucking know he has the sauce..... 

obviously I read an insurmountable amount of academic articles and the like for this year, sometimes out of fun, sometimes notttt, but the one I'll specifically highlight is Lata Mani's "Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India" [can be found here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1354153], I just think it's a really beautifully argued rhetorical analysis that feels crazy to read as you read it... she's basically doing a dramaturgic analysis, if you know what that is, she doesn't outright say it, but that's what it is... idk it's just a really good read that genuinely did start affecting how I thought about rhetoric and the way we utilise it.

ok thanks bye. 

Comments

[permutative]

just wanted to say, I love these posts, keep them up, also i always see discourse about people hating on the emily wilson translation of the odyssey and i never know why... did u have thoughts

i agree that never let me go kinda overhyped (cb it's on nytimes top10 fiction of 21st century or wtvr)... i love remains of the day tho. If u like ishiguro vibes. Or not

adding anna karenina to my to-read list. but also i'm scared cuz it looks long as hell

[permutative]

also what is your list of 26 women nobel/booker winners/nominees ??????????

[fwcu]

hiiii dearest shakti omg i also enjoyed seeing your post and can totally relate to how fucking awful it is to be back home after being independent/growing out of all this bullshit.... :,) one of the hardest parts about being an adult is having to reckon with how your parents are fellow adults that you do not like/don't approve of the ways of/wish would be mature differently...

I really liked the emily wilson odyssey, i think she did everything she set out to do and provided strong arguments about what she was doing/why but most of all i think it's like a version of the odyssey very much aimed to get contemporary [and young!!!] audiences interested and enraptured by it...! i heard her translation of the illiad is better than the odyssey, and this article had a very fair review i think: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/11/a-fresh-and-tragic-iliad/
i think it covers like a lot of the pros/cons of her translation goals/style

trusttt me anna k is literally so good and it is long but doesn't actually feel punishingly so, like basically you can chunk through the 8 parts one at a time, and it's really enrapturing... was reading up on nabokov's lectures on tolstoy, and he describes the experience of reading the man really aptly: "When you read Turgenev, you know you are reading Turgenev. When you read Tolstoy, you read just because you cannot stop."

idkkk if i'll get around to remains of the day, but i will keep this rec in mind!!! i've also heard it's the better of the novels, but ishiguro's style didn't really captivate me...

anyway the list:

1. anita desai ‘in custody’
2. love in a fallen city - eileen chang
3. posession, a s byatt [on my shelf]
4. alice munro
5. han kang
6. voices from chernobyl - svetlana alexievich [on shelf, borrowred from S]
7. doris lessing
8. nadine gordimner
9. sigrid undset
10. selma lagerlof
11. helene cixous
12. muriel spark
13. isabel allende
14. nawal el saadawi
15. annie ernaux
16. luisa valenzuela
17. dacia maraini
18. Scholastique Mukasonga
19. jenny erpenbeck - kairos
20. nancy mitford
21. Dương Thu Hương

- elena poniatowska
- Edwidge Danticat

- magda szabo, any [interlibrary loan]
- natalia ginzberg [interlibrary loan]
- wislawa wzymborska [interlibrary loan]
- adelia prado [interlibrary loan]
- hanna krall [interlibrary loan]
- heta muler [interlibrary loan]
- elfriede jelinek [rein gold available online]
- grazia deledda [some available online, interlibrary loan]
- mahasweta devi [available online]
- Cristina Rivera Garza [some stuff online]
- Ida Vitale [some stuff available online]
- assia djebar [books about her available, but otherwise interlibarary loan…?]
- leyls erbil - ‘a strange woman’ OR ‘the remaining’ [no one knows her]
- anna nerkagi [no one knows her]
- Maria Tedeschi [no one knows her]
1. eeva kilpi [no one even knows who this is]

sorry I didn't c+p into my post bc i didn't want to deal with getting rid of all my notes of where in the library to get them... so enjoy that!

local ozick reader clocking in

[soobin]

okay based on this list...have you read cynthia ozick...i'm curious as to your thoughts on her? her role in jewish diasporic fiction is interesting to me but also...deeply and tediously american irrespective of how good a writer she is. also thank you for being one of 3 people alive to have walked away from 2666 understanding the role of femicide within it...lital levy could literally never...many hopes and wishes for a very productive year of reading in 2026!

p.s. i have a copy of either/or. if u want.

Re: local ozick reader clocking in

[fwcu]

PLEEEEEK... bending laws of spacetime in order to receive ur copy of either/or rn.... also quite serendipitously i ended up reading cynthia ozick's article about kafka in the new yorker on jan 4th exactly 27 years after it was published! i haven't read any of her fiction or otherwise, but I found her writing on kafka to be very strong if a little grating because of the way she constructs jewish identity, esp w her current opinions on re israel/palestine...

Re: local ozick reader clocking in

[chestnut_pod]

We don't know each other, but please just know that "Envy" is the most tediously American response to Yiddish letters ever. I don't care if that makes me uncultured. I am not on Cynthia Ozick's side on that one!