Month: December 2025

Stu the readers 10 for 2025

~ winstonsdad ~ 12 Comments

I have picked ten books that have stuck with me as we near the end of the year. I won’t be doing another review, a mix of old and new titles in no particular order.

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki

A look at the darker side of Japanese life through the crystal of a mother-daughter relationship was part of my Japanese reading in January, and I felt this would been on the Booker international list. I like the autofiction feel mof it and to get a female perspectibve of the same streets Murakami used to write about.

2 Solenoid Mircea Cǎrtǎescu

This Labyrinth of a novel, with its twists and turns, the grim reality of communist-era Romania, and often surreal side stories, is a book I put off reviewing, not feeling worthy of it, and still don’t. But I like a challenging book, this is one I look forward to reading, Blinding at some point. if you are a fan of Pynchon or Nadas, you should try this

3. Celebration by Damir Karakaš

Now, there were two books I read from the Balkans that hit me hard, this interlocking collection of stories from Croatia from the 1920s through to the end of World War II, following one man’s Journey into Fascism. This is one for fans of short fiction that hit the reader like a tequila shot

4. The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

The oldest book on this list reminds me I need to read more Books from around the various countries in Africa. This classic mix of tribal myths with a man’s hunt for a new person to make his palm wine. This appeals to people wanting to read one of the first writers to be published from Nigeria, and people who like slightly surreal stories

5. In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

I said two books from the Balkans had hit me hard this year. This Bosnian book follows a little girl from her peaceful Valley and a rural existence, to the horror of war, and memories of the summer mix with the violence that unfolds. I remember the Balkan war and working alongside a Couple of people who had escaped the violence. If you like a story that mixes rural beauty and the horror of war, this is for you

6. The river by  Laura Vinogradova

Open letter did a tryptich of books from Latvia; all of them could have been on this list, but it was this tale of a daughter finding out about a father she didn’t know, who had stuck with me. If you are a fan of books that slowly unfurl as the daughter learns more about her father, whom she never knew, then you will love this.

7. Attila by Javier Serena

Another from Open Letter Books: this is a pair of books released under the same title. This book is called Attilia and is about the man who wrote the other book of the same title, Alioscha Coll, that captures this man’s life as he quits being a doctor to write and descends into his own world of books and literature in Paris. This is the sort of Anti of Human Bondage, another write, ar century apart, but both struggling to write and on the edge of madness one falls down the hole the other doesn’t |!

8. Just a little dinner by CécileTlili

I haven’t put any of the Booker International books on this list. But for me, this book is betterthan one of the longlist books. Perfection, for me, captures the ins and outs of the modern world and life so well in a dinner party and in its fallout. An Abigails party of the 21st century in Paris

9. The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

I think I have had an Antunes in my end-of-year list when I have read a book by him. This one, like his other books, deals with the dark colonial past of his Homeland in Africa, and, more than the others I have read by him, it also looks at the wider conflicts of the era in southern Africa through the prism of one family. If you like Faulkner, you will like Atunes.

10. Sad tiger by Neige Sinno

This brutal piece of auto fiction covers the years she spent with her stepfather, who sexually abused her, but the man himsellf remind me of my stepfather, a brooding man like this man that casts a shadow over a family. For fans of Annie Ernaux or Édouard Louis

Bonus book: The Ship by Hans Henny Jahn

A difficult book about a couple who are on the girlfriend’s father’s ships as they sail with a mysterious cargo, and the boat is almost a living thing in this quirky, unusual piece of German fiction of a vessel that seems to grow over time and a constant feeling of unease as you read the book. Fans of weird fantasy that should be better known

 

 

Loooking forward a state of the blog and 2026 Plans

~ winstonsdad ~ 20 Comments

I have decided to draw a line under the reviews for this year. I just ran out of steam the last month. Part of me is thinking I am actually so excited about next year on the blog and just wanting to say fuck off to 2025, as the queen once said it has been my Annus Horribilis with Amandas heartattack and the changes that have brought to our lives. But I have also felt lost as a reader over the last six months. I think there is so much noise these days that I have felt like I have been doomscrolling for the last while, and my concentration is a lot less than it used to be, and this has impacted my love of reading, I feel. Simon Savidge talks a lot about what he reads. I never used to get it, but now I do. The noise of the book world is louder, but also, for me, feels like a massive cave now where I interact very little with folks. One-to-many pointing out grammatical errors makes me question every tweet these days, so I end up making more errors. (I SPOT my own mistakes so often, but i am used to them, so just forget them )I do wonder how these folks who, over the years, would cope with grammar in my brain, which is full of noise and constant overthinking, and just a lack of self-belief. This has even started to impact me, as I think about why this noise is constantly in my head. So this last month I have turned to Chat gpt to firstly try and work out a few thiunbgs like a weekly routine to blog too which from the new year i will be doing I used to do my weekly planner religously as I need to know how my week looks or it ends up being me just sat watch old crimefilms and you tube and ragin at the state of the country Mr Trump and just so many other things.The impact of what happened to my beloved has had a ripple effect and made me want to kick-start the blog and celebrate my love of reading

Don’t get me started on book creators and having to pay to join folks’ book clubs. So the first part of next year will be building the routine back up. I have a new hourly planner. Then I have set up a Discord, which, if folks want to join, is a place to chat about books, similar to how we did back in the Twitter days. NBo book club, no paying for this and that. I have a blog that has reviewed over 120 countries. I have a depth of reviews I feel is a real achievement. But as I have heard say, there is no standing still; time moves on constantly. I have flirted with the idea of YouTube for the last couple of years,s but I  can’t see myself ever doing it. The blog is where my passion lies: improving as a writer and reader, constantly moving forward, discovering new countries, and continuously adding depth to the places I have read from, building the ultimate world canon. Still, to do this, I need to try and read a little more, get back to a blogging routine, and figure out how to do that well. One of my all-time favourite books about reading is Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, where Nina Sankovich read a book a day after the death of her sister. I know point blank I can’t read a book a day, just beyond me. I averaged 120 books a year and reviewed between 90 and 100 on average. So my plan is to read between 180 and 200 books next year to get off doomscrolling and kick-start my blogging.I said that before but I think it is a loss of routine and the noise of the world these days I love turn the clock back ten year or so but I can’t

I want to play with review styles over the year, try longer posts, shorter posts, different ways of putting over many voices, which I feel I have not so much held back but lost confidence in. Maybe I thought I met people. I am very overenthusiastic about books. In hindsight, this is my neurodivergent mind, which is also the reason I lack confidence in my voice at times, as I am from a generation where being neurodivergent wasn’t picked up on as much. So if you want the Discord, let me know. Another thing I will be doing is trying to tie the blog in with my Instagram and use both more in sync. I will be doing the Japanese literature challenge, then my Hungarian Lit month in February, which I am really looking forward to. I am also swapping the image of Winston slowly to me well a ai painted image of me on the blog and elsewhere and using the name Stu the reader just in case you have seen me and think it is someone else

I am being ambitious next year, but I just want a routine back to the blog when I post what I read and get them in sync, and also be a better member of the blogging community. A lot, but as I said, I have been using the last few weeks as planning for next year and setting things up with plans and also getting things like books for next month, sort of, the new planner, a new guide for how I want to review, sorting a Discord. The latest image on the avitars all building for 2026 and project 200. What are your plans for 2026 ?

The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

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The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

Uruguayan fiction

Original title –El astillero

Translator – Nick Caistor

Source – Personal copy

I haven’t focused this year much on Latin American fiction as I have in other years. But I had read this book a few months ago. I have wanted to read Onetti for a while, a high school dropout who worked for a newspaper after he published his first novel. He was a friend of the Argentine writer Robert Arlt, a writer I need to get to next year. Onetti was also imprisoned for six months, but a campaign was held by a number of the leading Latin American writers of the day, Marquez, Lhosa and Benedetti. After this, he relocated and spent the rest of his life in Spain.

Larsen again gauged the hostility and mockery on the immobile faces of the two waiting men. To challenge and repay hatred might give his life a meaning, a habit, some pleasure; almost anything would be better than this roof with its leaky sheet iron, these dusty, lopsided desks, the heaps of files and folders stacked against the walls, the thorny vines winding themselves round the iron bars of the gaping window, the exasperating, hysterical farce of work, enterprise, and prosperity that the furniture spoke of (though now it was vanquished by use and moths, rushing towards its destiny as firewood); the documents made filthy by rain, sun and footprints, the rolls of blueprints stacked in pyramids all torn and tattered on the walls.

Further on the despaier is there a little more

The book is set in the fictional town of Santa Maria, a setting where Onetti set much of his fiction. The book follows a man returning to the city after five years in Exile, brought back to try and get the failing shipyard back into action. The man, Larsen, heads into the yard full of ideas. Still, as he works through the yard and the blueprints of old ships and past glories, there is a deep sense of how this is a place that has gone beyond the point of no return. The decay of an industrial place can be as fast as the lack of work and bleakness is caught in the various other people we glimpse in the book.As we see how this all hits Larsen

So Larsen was already under the spell, his fate decided, when he went into Belgrano’s the next day to have lunch with Galvez and Kunz. It was never entirely clear whether he chose to head the monthly wages list with five or six thousand pesos. In fact, his choice of one or the other figure could only have mattered to Galvez, who typed out several copies on the 25th of each month, stopping every now and then to furiously rub his bald patch. Every 25th of the month, he once again discovered, was forced to recognise, the repeated, permanent absurdity he was in the grip of. This realisation made him break off, stand up, and pace about the huge deserted office, hands behind his back, his brown scarf wrapped round his neck, pausing at the drawing board where Kunz was always ready with his hollow, silent, exasperated laugh.

I loved the style of this book. I was reminded of the Hilbig books. Similar to his book, there is a sense of a place on the edge of decay, a man with a hopeless task, which brought back memories of the main character in Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe. On a personal front, I was reminded of a friend of my father who was in charge of a shipyard in the Tyne, which, like here, was in steep decline. How hard ot can be to turn back an operation like a shipyard when the decay is already there. What remains all these weeks after is how futile Larsen’s job is and the despair that it can bring to one man. Have you read this book or any others by Onetti? If so, which one to try next?

For Fans of –

Wolfgang Hilbig, I have reviewed two books by him

Also, The Tartar Steppes by Dino Buzzati

 

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno

French Memoir

Original title –Triste Tigre

Translator – Natasha Lehrer

Source – Personal copy

I’m not sure why I hadn’t got to this book sooner. I usually keep an eye out for books that have won the major book prizes across Europe as a guide to those that, at some point, we may see in English. Winning one of the various prizes associated with the Prix Goncourt usually means the book will reach us in English, so this book has won not just the Goncourt for books read by high school pupils; it still amazes me what great books have won that prize, and it also won a woman’s book prize in France. The book uses the writer’s own experiences from the age of 7 to 14, when she was repeatedly raped by her stepfather.

You like that? Yes, yes you do, you really like it.

The title is Lolita but Lolita herself is almost entirely absent. You see her through the filter of her predator’s gaze, and she almost never exists as herself; she is the perfect fantasy figure, the nymphet incarnate. At last, at the end of the book, Humbert the dreamer recognizes this. As he sits in the car he has deliberately driven off the road, waiting for the police to pick him up, he has a final epiphany. He recalls the morning when he was driving around the country trying to find the teenage runaway. Lost on a mountain road, he stopped the car. Looking down from the hill to a small town below, sounds floated up toward him like a choir: I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolitas absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

Lolita and her own life shows the darker side of that book

But in writing this book, she wanted it to be more than a book about the rapes. That’s when she was just seven and carried on until her mid-teens, all in a cottage that the family were doing up in the Basque Country.  But what we get is a book that shows the impact of these events on her from her youth through her life. The abuse suffered over those years from her stepfather, a man who loved the music of French rock star  Hailday and played it loudly. I could picture this hippy rocker it brought chills of my own stepfather a man that still had a fifties style rocker hair and would even as I write this sends a shiver down my spine not that I was sexually abused but over the years after my mum has died, I see the sheer mental and trauma he has caused both me my brother and in a lot of ways my mother by his personality and ability to gaskight us all anyway. I was connected to her life and to those men who slowly or violently tear apart lives . How lives get put back together and how books connect us to both our past and to think about how it is a prism to view the past, and here we see the rapes as a child and the impact on her. The book is part literary criticism, part cleansing, part sheer horror.

I remember places. The first place, a bedroom in dark-ness. I am woken by hands on me. Then his voice, when I open my eyes he is speaking in a low voice, he doesn’t stop talking. I don’t want to wake my sister asleep in bed beside me. I was seven when we lived in that apartment. I didn’t understand what was happening, but from the first moment, I sensed it was something serious and terrible. He was talking like a tamer speaks to a gentle but wild horse, one that needs to be held to keep it from getting away. He was talking as if nothing in all this should scare me, and if I was scared it was fine, he was there, he would help me get over my fear. But he, too, was afraid, and the fear enveloped us like a layer of night.

Virginia Woolf, who was abused by her two half-brothers, describes the bizarre experience of those first pawing caresses in an autobiographical piece in which she is trying to find a relationship between her old memories and the way her still-developing personality was being formed: … as I sat there, he began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand touched my private parts.

THE first time he touched her  and how similar events effect Virginia Woolf

I read this book in nearly one sitting. The book has an almost-thriller feel and a non-linear way of describing her life, but it is so compelling that you hang on. Every word on the way she talks about the events but also the way she wants this book to be more than just that, as i say it is about the books she loves the title is a nod to the poem of William Blake elsewhere, Lolita is mention her mothers grief for a lost boyfriend that in some way blind her to the events that happened. THE book has other little events though her life, like how she got her name and how unusual it was at the time when most names had tpo be from an approved list of names in France. The book will appeal to fans of the autofiction of Ernaux and Louis. Still, for me, it has something more in common with writers like Kluge and Ester Kinsky, especially in its non-linear, polyphonic narrative style at times. Plus, it is a book I guarantee you won’t want to put down, which sounds so wrong given the subject matter, but it is so well written !!

Have you had a book that has hit you for six, so to speak ?

Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

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Advent by Gunnar Gunnarsson

Icelandic fiction

Original title – Advent

Translator – Philip Roughton

Source – Personal copy

I saw this on a YouTube video a while ago. It was mentioned it was a novella, and with the Christmas theme, it seemed great as it is Advent time. The book is by an Icelandic writer who wrote more in Danish than Icelandic. Back then, when he was writing, this meant his writing had spread to the Nordic countries and Germany. He was up for the Nobel Prize many times. In fact, when Haldor Laxness won, there was a brief time it was considered that Gunnarsson could have shared the prize with him. So it is great to see a new translation of a book that was first published in English in the 40s.It also had an afterword by the great Jon Kalman Stefansson, one of my favourite all-time writers.

Benedikt sniffed the hay, lifted the sack: You thought more about Eitill’s belly than my old back when you filled this!

The farmer chuckled, and as they went in, he pinched the candle’s wick between two fingers. It’s most merciful to a candle not to allow it to languish uselessly, but rather, to revive it on occasion to a life of service – and this, of course, is most thrifty as well.

They went to the family room and there met the housewife and group of children, and the Benedikt who was a guest in the house had food set for him on a table leaf under the gable window: smoked meat straight out of the pot with potatoes in white sauce – good food for cold days, real Christmas food.

As he sets off getting ready

Advent takes us to the dark, cold winters of Iceland and a yearly activity that is done by a shepherd, Benedikt, for the last 27 years, he has headed up to the distant fields with the sheep. Had fed on during the summer to fetch back the last few that have got stranded and cut off there. He does this with his trust dog Leo and a ram called Etill (which made me smile, it brought back memories of a story of a family friend in Ireland that adopted a lamb that grew and thought it was a house pet, like a dog). This was how I imagined the ram part of the sheepdog. What we follow is this journey he has done many a year with his backpack supplies as they head from bothy to bothy in search of those last sheep. That is it, but the beauty is in the atmosphere.

Now the stray sheep in the mountains would surely be buried in snow, covered over by a snowy winter blanket before he could find them and bring them home. Because you really couldn’t hope that they would have the sense to seek the heights – the heights, where the wind blew hardest, but which were their only salvation when earth and sky stand as one. When wildness rages, you hardly dare hope.

And if they had indeed headed to the heights, they may just as well have frozen to death! But now he wanted to sleep. Or just lie there alone. A person shouldn’t share his anxieties with others. Everyone has enough of their own.

And now they slept in the farmhouse’s small family room, where heath and mountains met.

And outside, the storm raged, raged and razed; many a storm raged around the world, many things happened. For this was just a small recess of the world. Here, practically only the sky raged;

winter is hitting hard will he find the sheep !

I don’t have an adult Christmas book. One of the reasons I picked this is to add to the few things I like this time of year. I love the box of delights, I will flick through and every. A few years ago, I read through this Christmas kids’ book. Another go to is Conna Doyles tale The Blue Carbuncle A holmes story. Now I will be adding this to my winter reads, a tale that brings you to this yearly Advent adventure of fetching the lost sheep. It isn’t the journey so much as the way Gunnarsson builds the atmosphere; the three face the biting winds, snow, and the depths of the Icelandic winter. The country and weather is almost the fourth character in the book.  The snow almost falls off the page; you nearly need mittens to hold the pages as you read !! It is about existence and nature and so ,uch more as we see in Steffansson after word.If you have read him, you’ll like this short novella, and if you haven’t read him yet, what great writers have you yet to discover! Do you have a favourite Christmas tale?