Books - 2025
I feel like I never talk about books on here
I'm currently reading A Memory Called Empire
I continually forget its title and think of it in my head at this point as Memory of an Empire which tbh is just as good and catchy a title
I've read a couple of books this year. I'm also reading 'A Queer Case' which is, as you might imagine, an anachronistic 20s-style murder mystery story with gay characters, set in a world (maybe our real one) where this isn't just accepted, it is just illegal etc. but people still do it. Honestly given the state of things today it's almost refreshing given queer utopia/escapism is feeling increasingly out of reach and blatantly unrealistic.
What else have I read this year? Two or three Agatha Christies. The Hollow was a masterpiece, I wrote a short review of that after I finished it. Sad Cypress was a strange one. I wonder if it was a short story at first. It was oddly mean-spirited and depressing. One of the clearest stories in which the characters are very obviously from the upper-upper class and have morals that make that very apparent - as such are harder to relate to or root for for most people in the 21st c.
I read Evil Under the Sun too. One of my most well-remembered movies, although in my mind maybe I misremembered parts of the book bound up into it because apparently in adaptation they get rid of the goth daughter (yes, Agatha Christie wrote a goth daughter who liked amateur witchcraft and hated her sexy stepmother and wanted her father to instead remarry a sensible businesswoman - in 1941!) and replaced her with an edgy 17 year old son, groundbreaking (/s). That one was maybe a little worse than I remembered. The book was better than the adaptation, but I think there's still time for a better adaptation in there. It falls apart at the end a bit.
I've reread a bunch of Nana - I'm taking a break for a bit after speedrunning everything up to the pregnancy storyline, which I'd forgotten comes as early as it does. It's funny remembering how I used to identify so strongly with Nana Osaki when mentally, in so many ways, I'm a Hachi. As an adult I can recognise that. I've posted this before but also the translation I'm reading is much more um, maybe explicit and time-period focused than the translation I originally read, I suspect before it was licensed. It almost makes me curious to reread some other mangas I read from back then, if I could even find them mind in this age of everything fan created for free being blasted by the corps and/or paywalled to hell.
There's probably some other stuff I read too but I'm a bit forgetful right now with the whole pills, post operation stuff. I hate sitting still so much of the time. That's the ADHD. I went out today but I overestimated how much I could do and had to come home after about 3 hours at which point I needed a sit down (even though I spent about half the time I was out sitting and drinking teas and coffees) and a nap! I'm in my grandparent era 40 years early I guess.
I should write more about books though! Maybe after I read some more Memory of an Empire.
One more thing before I finish. I love the podcast All About Agatha, about Agatha Christies. But now that I've re-read some more of them myself, I'm not sure I agree with all of their points! It's probably just taste but I really enjoy some of Agatha's one-book-only characters. I need to read some more stuff from that era. Ngaio Marsh is on the list! (if only for having such a striking name)
