Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/year-in-reading-2025/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18891

I posted my last entry in this series exactly a year ago; now it’s time to survey my haphazard 2025 reading. I started off the year with Simenon’s Maigret and the Old Lady, because we’d seen a television adaptation; it was as enjoyable as you expect Simenon to be. My Russian reading began with Alexander Veltman’s Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию [Virginie, or a journey to Russia] (LH) and left off there for quite a while (I’ve been finding it hard to choose novels that hold my attention). Because I was watching Jacques Rivette’s (very long) Joan the Maid (Jeanne la pucelle), I found myself reading Helen Castor’s excellent Joan of Arc: A History, which starts with Agincourt and presents Joan in the context of the Hundred Years’ War and the complex politics of her time rather than just tramp over the well-trodden ground of her vision, rise, and fall, and I finally got a decent sense of that stuff. (As it happens, my wife and I are now watching Rivette’s four-hour La Belle Noiseuse, which I last saw when it came out in the early ’90s, so I’ll probably be reading the Balzac story it’s based on.) I read Paul Werth’s 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution, which didn’t rock my world but was enjoyable and informative. My wife and I chose Olivia Manning’s School for Love for our nighttime reading and enjoyed it (LH). Because I loved Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea (I strongly recommend his autobiographical films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, which are even better), I read its source material, Terence Rattigan’s play of the same name, which I liked (we talked about Rattigan here). I started Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes and greatly enjoyed it (LH), but for whatever reason set it aside — I hope to get back to it someday.

I liked Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States so much I gave a copy to my history-minded grandson for his birthday; it’s a great help in figuring out how we got where we are today. For Russian reading, I turned to a couple of stories by Leonid Andreev (LH), then Gorky’s The Lower Depths (LH). My wife and I read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and liked it a lot (I wrote about the title here but for some reason never reported on the book). I started Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here but gave up on it — Lewis just isn’t a good enough writer to hold my attention. I read Zamyatin’s На куличках [The back of beyond] (LH), and as always when I read something of his I think “I really have to read more Zamyatin.” I read Maria Rybakova’s Анна Гром и ее призрак [Anna Grom and her specter], about a Russian émigré and suicide in Berlin who writes letters from her ghostly postmortem existence to the man she loved; I started out liking it but became disillusioned — as I wrote Lizok:

But the device that at first seemed interestingly original, having the book be a series of posthumous letters sent by the protagonist to Wilamowitz, the man she loved, is really just a device, with no consistent principle other than the endless repetition of how much she loved him. For a while there’s a series of letters about a boat that comes to pick her up (with only the boatsman, Sempronius, aboard to chat with her), then she drops that and starts recounting in detail how she met Wilamowitz and how their relationship progressed, which he presumably already knows. And Wilamowitz is not an interesting guy: he’s your standard-issue Pechorin type, coldly intellectual and uninterested in closeness (but very blond and handsome!). I can only take so much blathering about how he’s so perfect and how could she ever hope that he (etc. ad nauseam). I mean, it’s Rybakova’s first book and she was in her early twenties when she wrote it, so it’s not surprising that it’s jejune, but I look forward to moving on.

I read Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip, which struck me as forcibly as it had half a century earlier; Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel, which I reported on in this thread; and Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria (LH). Then I turned to Jon Fosse’s Septology, which was highly recommended to me in this thread; I liked the first part very much and am looking forward to reading more. I loved David Daiches’ Two Worlds (LH). I started Aksyonov’s Остров Крым [The Island of Crimea] but it wasn’t what I had hoped for and I let it slide. My wife and I read Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of Love (LH) and enjoyed it, following it with Tessa Hadley’s Free Love (LH) and Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love (I swear the love triplet was a coincidence!). I was bowled over by Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (LH). I read Benjamin Paloff’s Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning (LH) and Gary Thurston’s The Popular Theatre Movement in Russia: 1862-1919 (LH), both from the estimable Northwestern University Press. Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник [The Light and the Dark] was a disappointment. Happily, I was able to end the year on a high note with Stephen Bruce’s brilliant translation of Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The Wanderer], which you should all run out and read!

https://languagehat.com/year-in-reading-2025/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18891