Reading Journal 2025

I've never done this before, I will likely never do it again, and I'm not sure why I did it this time, but last weekend I spent several hours writing about every book I read this year. I started on a whim, but once I reached April or so I had enough momentum that I figured I may as well go all the way. And now, since I've written it, it would be a waste not to post it on my website in some form or another, so here it is. Hopefully it is of some value to someone out there.

JANUARY

Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta

A collection of Jatakas, stories about the various reincarnations of the Buddha. I think mostly significant in SE Asia and depicted in a lot of the art that adorns their temples. I don’t think I read every story; I may have skipped one or two near the end.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco

Rounding out my reading of Eco, continuing to avoid his most popular book (Name of the Rose) for no especial reason. The book was funny at the beginning, interesting in the middle, and then meandered its way toward an ending. I don’t think it’s his best work but it gave me some new insights into his world. Discussed more in a video on my Youtube channel.

A Social History of Knowledge Vol. 1, Peter Burke

The source of the title/epitaph of my essay The Geography of Geography. I can’t remember a lot of information from this book, but it did make me think a lot about the development of knowledge during times when the transfer of information took a lot longer than it does now. Not sure if I’ll ever read volume 2.

After Tamerlane: Global History of Empire, John Darwin

One of those history books that completely changes the way you view world history. Particularly interesting were the sections about European colonialism, explaining how and why such a thing was possible in a material sense, i.e. what was happening in those places before/during/after European “discovery” that made such domination possible. The book ties European colonialism into a wider historical view of imperialism that made a lot of things click for me.

MARCH

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Cesares

A fair amount of my reading this year was influenced by the writers and novels that Borges frequently references in his non-fiction. Cesares was a colleague of his. The title alludes to Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau and the premise is not entirely dissimilar, with a man finding himself on a weird island where odd things are happening. Unlike Wells, whose plots generally devolve into violent action, Morel maintains its mystery in a subdued and eerie fashion.

The Maker, Jorge Luis Borges

A later collection of Borges’ stories and poetry; my edition of his Collected Fictions only includes the prose. The works in this collection are mostly short and quite enigmatic, often containing only a fragment of an idea.

A Passage to India, E.M. Forster

This one kept surprising me. Another Borges’ recommendation; his description of the scene at the caves near the beginning struck me in an ominous fashion. The book tries to approach British India from a few different directions, and whether it succeeds or fails is beyond my ability to apprehend. However, whenever I was worried that I knew where it was going, it veered off a little bit.

Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

I kept getting this book confused with the abovementioned Island of Dr. Moreau, so I figured I may as well read it, if only to clear up the confusion.

Not sure why I finished this one; I usually don’t finish books that I’m disliking this much. The novel seems to take place in a Russia consisting of ~10 people who all continuously run into each other no matter where they go, from Moscow to Siberia. Coincidences are vital to fiction, but when every chapter involves an encounter with some insignificant personage who appeared 200 pages ago, to utterly no end whatsoever, it starts to grate. There really were only a few instances where these circumstantial encounters made dramatic sense. Overall, the attempt to be an Epic Russian Novel made the book feel bloated, and all the poetry in the appendix felt incoherent with the novel itself, considering we only actually witness the main character write poetry once or twice.

The American, Henry James

A ridiculously rich & successful American businessman shows up in Europe with the idea of having the “European experience”, by hook or by crook. With a bizarre mix of humility and self-assurance, he barges his way into the Parisian world and attempts to woo an aristocrat from an ancient family. His subsequent adventures include a series of distinctly European novelistic tropes (duels over honour, poisoning plots, a young woman forsaking the world to enter a monastery ) which he reacts to with incredulity, and tries to overcome via good ol’ common sense.
I appreciate that the main character is both ridiculous and sensible. You kind of want to root for him, and you kind of want him to fall flat on his face at the same time.

Coleridge: Darker Reflections, Richard Holmes

Part 2 of Holme’s masterful biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Transformed him from a poet whose works I enjoy into my favourite poet and a personal hero. A sad story of addiction and alienation, combined with a strangely beautiful way of looking at the world.

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann’s attack on the popular current of German literature in the early 20th century, often seen as an antiquated and reactionary nationalist sort of document. The truth is much more nuanced: Mann is a traditionalist and an aesthete, and his contempt of democratic politics has much more to do with the type of literature it produces than the type of society it creates. Divorced from the political world he wanted to distance himself from, the book is an exploration of art and literature and its relationship with The World, as it were.

The most invective parts seem to be directed specifically at his brother — denoted using the wonderful epithet civilization’s literary man — with whom he was feuding at the time. Mann would later disavow the book, but I can’t help but feel that this is sort of like Rivers Cuomo disavowing Pinkerton, where its more about being embarrassed of one’s youthful bombast than anything else. I don’t care what anyone says; I think this book is great.

APRIL

The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo

Read this one on my wife’s insistence, and it only served to further my antipathy toward Victor Hugo, which was previously based exclusively on the somewhat forgettable novel 1793. Anyone who compares the architectural digressions in this to the cetological digressions in Moby-Dick simply does not know what they’re talking about. Hugo’s conceit of starting a chapter without telling us who we’re following, only to say “but of course, this man was young Pierre!” as if we didn’t already know that the whole time is annoying, as are 90% of his little theatrical tricks. I can’t help it; I just don’t like the guy!

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship & Wilhelm Meister's Travels, Goethe

A great mystery of my life is why I’ve now read so much Goethe despite not liking most of it. Sorrows of Young Werther is his best work, and the rest do nothing for me. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship & Travels are two meandering and basically unfinished novels that lack any sense of cohesion. I would find all this greatly intriguing if I was a big fan of Goethe in the way I was a fan of Melville or Natsume Soseki, but I’m simply not.

Singapore Dream & Other Adventures, Hermann Hesse

A collection of Hesse’s accounts of his travels in the East. Interesting to me as a fan of Hesse’s fiction but probably doesn’t provide much for the general reader.

MAY

Silas Marner, George Eliot

A charming provincial novel about an isolated old man and the young orphan he adopts.

Local Anaesthetic, Gunter Grass

A modernist sort of thing where a guy goes to the dentist and their conversations blend with his internal reminiscences and what he’s seeing on TV, leading to a strange kaleidoscopic sort of thing. I only picked it up because the local used bookstore had like seven books by Grass for some reason. I did read another of his books a few months later so there must have been something to this one, although I can’t quite remember what it was.

Tun-huang, Inoue Yasushi

The most interesting aspect of the history being told isn’t even in the book itself. Based on the excavation of a bunch of Buddhist scrolls hidden away in caves near the city now known as Dunhuang, the novel is an account of the life of the guy who put them there. However, most of the book is about him roving around the desert and joining armies for no particular reason. I couldn’t find anything in it.

Alexander Mackenzie and the North West, Roy Daniells

Part of my ongoing attempt to discover Canadian history, which was more of a 2024 venture and fell off this year. Learned a lot about fur trade and exploring rivers; I like the parts where his indigenous guides are like, “You don’t even want to know about the guys who live past these mountains” and then run off.

The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-Chi

Discussed in Being Hit With A Stick. Mostly notable for monks yelling at each other; trying to make sense of the exchanges recorded here proved beyond me.

JUNE

The Devil’s Pool, George Sand

Another provincial, pastoral sort of thing. This time it’s a love story where the young innocent shepherdess wins out over the haughty landowner’s daughter — “wins out” is maybe not the best word because she doesn’t even know it’s a competition. Generally, a fairly forgettable work. I wanted to read more of George Sand because I loved her Verne-esque story Laura, a Journey into Crystal, but I fear that it might be a black sheep, not representative of her work at all.

Thousand Cranes, Kawabata Yasunari

The summer saw me try to get back into Japanese fiction after a long absence. Not included in this list is Tanizaki’s Naomi, which I didn’t finish because I felt I got the idea fairly early on and then was just watching it play out in slow motion. Kawabata has a few novels I like quite a bit — The Master of Go and The Old Capital — but this one didn’t strike me at all. Felt like 200 pages of people cryptically circling around the things they actually wanted to talk about. That sounds interesting when put like that, but in practice it felt like a light premise stretched way too thin.

The Sound of the Mountain, Kawabata Yasunari

An old man observing the failing marriages of his two grown children, and wondering if it was all his fault after all (it probably was.) There were some amusing moments with the old man; when talking of the war, he says, “I wonder. If anyone got in the way of a bullet from my machine gun, he probably died. But you might say I wasn’t shooting the machine gun,” which reminded me of the book Zen At War

The Fall of the House of Usher, and other stories, Edgar Allan Poe

It felt inevitable that I would eventually get into Edgar Allan Poe, but it sure took a while. I did read Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket a few years ago but my antipathy toward short stories kept me away from his other work. As usual, it took me finding a classic edition in a used bookstore to spark my interest.

I think the reason Poe was so influential is that he seemed to have a very vague idea of what he was trying to do, and it’s not clear whether he ever actually achieved it. None of his stories feel “perfect,” or like the ideal versions of themselves, but instead an interesting idea executed in a slightly stumbling fashion.

Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte

This book mostly consists of Fichte getting mad at people who didn’t understand his previous account of the Wissenschaftslehre, an endeavour which is carried on in the delightfully titled A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand. For some reason, this book is a lot easier to find than the actual Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge), but it’s really more of a comical work of invective than anything else. Maybe one day I’ll find the real Wissenschaftslehre and then annoy my wife by picking it up every evening and saying, “Well, time for a quick dip into the Wissenschaftslehre.”

The German War: A Nation Under Arms, Nicholas Stargardt

An account of the second world war mostly derived from contemporary letters. A solid overview of how German people generally viewed the war and the Nazi party, and their various reasons for and consequences of participating or not participating.

Coleridge & The Self: Romantic Egotism, Stephen Bygrave

As with most eye-opening works of literary criticism I read, I came away from this one struggling to determine what exactly I had gained from it. I feel like I incorporated its insights so seamlessly into how I view literature that it’s hard, at this remove, to separate them from my own thoughts.

JULY

Grass For My Pillow, Maruya Saiichi

A fascinating recommendation from saddleblasters, after I mentioned to him my disappointing attempts to get back into Japanese fiction the previous month. I recorded an entire Youtube video about the novel, but then became upset with myself midway through editing and gave up on the whole thing.

The novel is about a Japanese draft-dodger during the Second World War, who then reintegrates into society and works at a university. The book flashes back and forth between his current life and his memories during the war. What’s especially interesting about the novel is how it depicts Hamada’s growing paranoia about the way he is perceived, as the popular conception of the war changes over time. While his personal understanding of his actions remains the same, subtle shifts in opinion among his colleagues sends him into spirals of shame.

Rudin, Ivan Turgenev

I will discuss Turgenev in greater detail at some later date! But not now! I just won’t do it now!

AUGUST

King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard

I thought this book would be about precocious children and the mysteries of Solomon, but in fact it was about a bunch of tough guys in Africa discovering a secret African tribe among the mountains and freeing them from their despotic leader. Honestly, it’s not bad for what it is, as evidenced by the fact that I actually finished it, but it’s just a fairly bog-standard adventure story, in the end.

Borges on Writing

A collection of a few talks/interviews gave at Columbia University about his work. There are some interesting tidbits, but Borges has an overwhelming humility when discussing his own work that undercuts a lot of what di Giovanni (the interviewer) was trying to get at. He refuses to recognize value in his own work, and won’t discuss technique beyond saying he had no idea what he was thinking or doing. This is all well and good, personality-wise, but doesn’t make for a great book. Truly, Borges is at his best when describing other writers.

SEPTEMBER

The Meeting at Telgte, Gunter Grass

This is that other Gunter Grass book alluded to earlier. It depicts a meeting between a bunch of German poets during the Thirty Years’ War, who come together despite their religious differences to talk about poetry and art. A lot of it goes over my head since I have absolutely no familiarity with any of these poets, nor the contemporary mid-century German literary world the novel is supposedly mirroring. So, kind of a lost cause on me.

The Gate
Kusamakura
The Heredity of Taste
The 210th Day
The Miner

Discussed in my overview of Natsume Soseki.

The Book of Atrus, Rand Miller

Discussed in a fragment of the Balckwell Round-Up 2025.

The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, Northrop Frye

A great work of literary criticism that actually opened my eyes to the cyclical development of literature throughout history, and where we are at the current moment. One of the main ideas of the book is the interplay between “genre-fiction” (mostly discussed in this book in the form of traditional romances) and new literary developments, and the way that new literary forms (or new popularizations of literary forms) such as epics, romantic poetry, the novel, etc, are grown out of re-contextualizing tropes and forms that have become standard and dull.

Another idea he discusses is that works of individual “genre fiction” are best analyzed in terms of what they tell us about the genre, and that any more expansive analysis will then come from what the genre as a whole tells us about the people/culture writing and reading it. Frye mainly focuses on classical “romances” (i.e. fantastical stories) but notes the applicability to current (to him) genres such as detective stories.

Honestly, each chapter is an entire books-worth of ideas, as I just remembered how fascinated I was with the initial discussion of the difference between myth and folktales. Heartily recommended.

Zhuangzi: Complete Writings

Discussed in three or four essays written throughout the summer.

OCTOBER

15 Plays by Shakespeare and a bunch of other knuckleheads

Discussed in great detail in my Shakespeare series.

Schoolgirl, Dazai Osamu

Short but effective work about adolescence.

Seven Types of Ambiguity, William Empson

A hopelessly tedious account of various types of ambiguity in poetry. It was so over-encumbered with examples that I forgot what exactly I was being shown examples of. I’ll admit to skimming through large chunks. At least at the end he admits to writing “so many niggling pages.”

NOVEMBER

The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence

Conflicting feelings about this one. On a broad level, the characters are great, the scope is interesting, and there are plenty of memorable moments. But the style is so insufferable at times, with so much sensuous sensuality and essentially nonsensical paragraphs about how much lust the characters are feeling (possibly rendered nonsensical by (failed) attempts to avoid censorship.). There is a lot of over-explaining the character’s emotional states with frankly bizarre analogies and sentences that literally do not make sense. I’m sure the effect works great for some people, but I was tired by the end.

The Light That Failed, Rudyard Kipling

Kipling is another Borges favourite, and since I got a bit of a kick out of Kim, I decided to give him another go. The Light That Failed was another used bookstore special, and I was surprised by how good it was. The main character is a bitter artist who becomes popular for his war-front paintings composed while travelling with the British army in Egypt and Sudan. The novel is essentially a long journey of emasculation, as he gets played around with by the love of his life, and then loses his independence by going blind. Kipling continues to reveal to me the deficiency of his simplified reputation.

Ten Nights’ Dreams
Sanshiro

Discussed in my overview of Natsume Soseki.

Franny and Zooey; Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour, an Introduction, JD Salinger

Two collections, each containing two long stories about different members of the Glass family, who recur frequently within Salinger’s short fiction. I think it’s an interesting concept to have this large family whose stories all revolve around a central trauma that can never be approached directly. The characters are all somewhat neurotic, self-analytic and self-doubting in a very American, 20th-century, and intellectual sort of way.
I enjoyed Franny and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters the most. Zooey dragged a bit, and I found the conversational style somewhat annoying, and Seymour, an Introduction dragged a lot, mostly on purpose but still enough to frustrate me.

Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Edgar Wind

Totally outside of my wheelhouse, this book is about depictions of Neoplatonic philosophical ideas in Italian renaissance art. I had a bit of a background in Renaissance symbology from reading Yates’ Art of Memory and a few works by Giordano Bruno, but was/am a total neophyte when it comes to fine art. I learned a great deal about how to interpret the allegorical intent of a bunch of paintings I had barely ever seen — to what end, who knows!

Man and Nature in the Renaissance, Allen G Debus

An entirely unrelated book that happens to share the “in the Renaissance” suffix, this one is concerned with the development of natural sciences during the Renaissance period. As a man with a profound interest in the “prehistory” of modern science, in terms of what was considered “knowledge” and what were considered the best ways to go about acquiring it, this book was of great value.

DECEMBER

To the Spring Equinox and Beyond

Discussed in my overview of Natsume Soseki.

Jules Verne and His Works, I.O. Evans

The author is clearly quite passionate about Verne and has a great deal of hard-earned information (he was involved in an effort to translate all Verne’s works into English, which included spending hours in dusky French archives and bookstores) but didn’t have a lot of insight into the works themselves. It’s true that Verne’s works often elude literary analysis (I found this to be the case when I tried my hand at it) but I was still a little disappointed. It was interesting to learn, however, that Verne hated to travel.