My International Booker predictions were a bust, again! Not that I committed them to paper (or blog,) but I was very much expecting to see My Heavenly Favourite by previous winner Lucas Rijneveld, and was hoping to see some Japanese lit after a shut out last year. No such luck.  2024’s longlist is South America and Europe heavy, with a single Korean novel representing Asia. Africa and the Caribbean are shut out entirely. There are no French language novels,  a first since I’ve been tracking.  I’m not sure what I expected from this jury, headed up by one of my favourite radio pe ..read more

The trick is to have your house burn down. Instant TBR zero.  Of course you also lose all your other TB piles: To Be Worn, To Be Eaten, To Be Slept on, To Be Cooked with, To Be Remembered By… My house caught on fire on December 18. It started in the kitchen (cause still being determined) and was contained and put out quickly. I’d only been out of the house for about 45 minutes when I started getting calls from neighbours. It’s a mindfuck, because my house didn’t actually burn down, and my books, along with most of our belongings, weren’t actually reduced to ash. The smoke, soot, water, an ..read more

Good news, everyone: my status as a Franzen completist is secure. After finally achieving this status in late 2021, I unknowingly let it lapse for several months, after Franzen’s latest German translation was published in April of this year. For reasons I cannot fathom, the Franzen tier ranking I published right at the end of 2021 has been my highest-performing blog post ever since. The stats page (like much else) on WordPress is pretty useless, no longer displaying many search terms or links or anything that would help me. Does anyone else know how to find out? Is a Franzen tier ranking real ..read more

The title “Extremely Online” gave me the wrong idea about this book from the start. To be “extremely online” means not only to be online all the time, but to be steeped in the deep lore, to know who the “main character” is on any given day, to know a “bean dad” from a “wife guy”. After thirty years on the net, I would count myself as part of that group. I’ve posted on plain-text message boards in the 1990s, had a TikTok comment go mildly viral in the 2020s, and posted (or at least lurked) on many platforms in between.  But this book is not about posters or lurkers. Extremely Online is ab ..read more

November brings a variety of great book blogging events, and I’m lucky if I properly participate in just one. This year I’m going to attempt to join two of my favourites: Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy and Rebecca, and Nonfiction November, with a new slate of hosts, including Liz and this week’s host Heather. Both events are organized by weekly themes, the first of which is: celebrate your year in nonfiction/novellas. Forgive me for grouping the weekly posts, but this is the only way I have a hope in hell!  My Year in Nonfiction I’ve read nine nonfiction books this year, or about ..read more

I’ve learned a lot about crypto over the past few years, from various articles, tweets, and podcasts, but this is the first book I’ve read on the subject (no, Bitcoin Widow doesn’t count.) Ben McKenzie (yes, that Ben McKenzie) proves a pretty apt narrator. He’s skeptical by nature, educated in finance, at loose ends due to the pandemic, and just enough of a “name” that he can randomly reach out to an established tech reporter (Jacob Silverman) and convince him to embark on a years-long project. Easy Money is full of insider access (notably, an interview with a pre-indictment Sam Bankman-Fried ..read more

Thank goodness we get a couple months off in between 20 Books of Summer and Novellas in November. I must have needed it, seeing as I’ve only posted once in the interim (so far). One year I’ll have the stamina to do Victober in between, but this year is not that year. Here are my plans: The recent additions: These books are newly borrowed or acquired, and just happen to be under 200 pages. They also happen to all be in translation. Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches. A straggler on my 2023 International Booker Prize reading list. The Nun by Denis Diderot, translated by Leona ..read more

The fact that Letterboxd still bills itself as “GoodReads for movies” on their about page is hilarious to me, and not just because they’ve inexplicably styled “Goodreads” with a capital “R”. Letterboxd surpasses Goodreads in almost every way: user experience, functionality, aesthetics, not being owned by Amazon… and while Goodreads members outnumber Letterboxd users ten-to-one, surely the potential is there – how many people do you know who watched a movie in the last month? How many who read a book? And which do people talk about more?  Goodreads has a stranglehold on the book-tracking m ..read more

We’ve reached the end of 20 Books of Summer 2023, and with this, I have read and reviewed eight books, which I count as a huge win! Three of those were 1001 Books, two were by women in translation, and at least one had been on my shelf for more than ten years. Huge thanks to Cathy and all the participants for the motivation. I just about died recently, when I heard someone on Booktube refer to The Idiot (Batumen, not Dostoyevsky) as “dark academia”. In what world? I’m not saying an adult, literary novel can’t be classified this way but like… The Idiot just isn’t it. It’s missing the gothic se ..read more

Howards End is #754 on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list. See the whole list and my progress here. This summer, I’m reading from the list for my 20 Books of Summer challenge, and instead of straight reviews, I’m going to compare the 1001 Books write ups with my own impressions. If you’re my age (an ageing Millennial or a youthful GenXer, depending who you ask) you might have seen that genre of TikTok that points out that the way we thought about the 1960s as teenagers is the way teenagers today think about the 1990s (i.e. as ancient history.) This made me think about the classi ..read more