Books of 2025 Part 2: 20-11

 20) Wyrd Sisters - Terry Pratchett

I'm still following that Discworld reading order suggested on a Reddit thread that I always go back to, which says it's Small Gods, then any two of Guards Guards/Mort/Wyrd Sisters, so after Small Gods then Guards Guards last year, I arrived at this mainly because it was in my local library. So I guess I'll get to Mort at some point? But I loved Guards Guards last year, so this one had some big shoes to fill. For the most part I did very much enjoy this. I didn't find it quite as consistently hilarious as Guards Guards, although I was laughing frequently throughout it. I think I found the plot of this one less consistently amusing so I was more laughing at Pratchett's ironical tone and frequent wry jokes throughout. Mainly I did find that sometimes Pratchett can get a bit ahead of himself, so I feel like he had a lot of the plot points laid out for this book, and a lot of the time it's less clear in reading it how we got there or where we were going to go next, and the book therefore seemed to jump a bit erratically from some plot points. Or alternatively, the opposite happens, where the book almost felt like it got stagnated so a plot contrivance occurs to jump fifteen years into the future (without just saying "oh now it's fifteen years into the future") which felt like a step too far for me to really get caught up in the story and its machinations. Truth is I was caught up far more in the intertextual references - obviously to Macbeth, with a touch of Hamlet thrown in particularly with the plot device of 'the play' getting the truth out of the usurper to the throne in the end - than I was in the plot itself. But the characters of the Wyrd sisters and the coven that they create are amusing with their repartee and frequent little arguments, and through them I could enjoy the world-building here. But it just didn't quite land with the satirical points Pratchett was making simply because I wasn't able to follow the plot points in the way that he had them planned out and executed; but as part of getting someone (i.e. me) into the Discworld series which this reading order is meant to do, I think this was a successful enough stepping stone to draw me further into the world.

19) Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead

I'm not sure what point I am with Colson Whitehead now. I enjoyed The Underground Railroad in no small part just because of the high concept of it, then I loved The Nickel Boys way more than I was expecting but I'm still not convinced I loved it, or if again it just had a good conceit. And then Zone One that I read last year I really didn't care for much at all and felt like Whitehead was out of his depth in that kind of genre. So this book could be read as almost an exact analogue to Zone One in that again he's playing very much in genre fiction space here, but instead of post-apocalyptic horror this time he's doing a pretty typical hard-boiled crime fiction. But like Zone One, the city of New York is the ever-present protagonist of the story, and Harlem Shuffle acts as a kind of underground tour of Harlem across a span of many years. Our ostensible protagonist is Ray Carney, the proprietor of a high-class (at least relatively speaking) furniture showroom in Harlem; father to two kids and - as we learn soon enough - son of an organised crime figure who he's determined to differentiate himself from by keeping to the straight and narrow and running a legitimate business. The thorn in his side is his cousin Freddie who, ever since they were kids, has always been a bit of a troublemaker but as the events of this story play out, Freddie's petty larceny starts to escalate and he inevitably gets Ray caught up in his spiral into the underworld of organised crime and ever-grander larceny. On its surface this book has the hallmarks of what little modern crime fiction I've read, and Elmore Leonard tends to be my go-to comparison for things like this. As far as the crime fiction elements go, the tension, the thrills and the moral ambivalence goes, this is fairly pedestrian - and for that reason I start to compare it to Zone One as I just don't think Colson Whitehead has a distinctive enough voice to put a personal stamp on genre work like this. What does make this a bit more interesting though is how it functions as a tribute to Harlem the district and New York the larger city. It's a seedy kind of tour, as a lot of the premise of the story hinges on everybody having a grimey underbelly, where innocent-seeming shops are always a front for some numbers or drug-running business, where every person on the street could be a hired goon for some high-up crime boss, and naturally, of course, ACAB. But Carney is our main conduit to this world, and the story is as much about the situations he finds himself caught up in as much as it is about his own conscience and will being torn between wanting to do the right thing and remain a law-abiding citizen to protect his family, and the temptation to go for the big score and try to cash in and move to easy street. What I think Whitehead is ultimately doing with the two sides of the story is showing that, in this time and place, it has always been necessary to have a certain aspect of crookedness in order to get ahead in the world, and it's impossible to escape that underbelly without losing some friends, or some property or standing, along the way. I'm not sure the book is fully successful simply because I didn't find myself caught up enough in the thrill of the chase or the crime, and nor did I find the tone of the narrative gritty enough to really sell the inevitable oppressiveness of Ray's lifestyle. But as incomplete as the story might be, it remains an enjoyable read because of the mutable likeability of Ray himself and how much Whitehead is able to sell his frequent calculation and wavering decision-making.

18) Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit - P G Wodehouse

The more Wodehouse I read, the more I relate to that unnamed character in the first episode of Black Books who says "hang on. I've read this one. That's the trouble with Wodehouse, isn't it?" and the repetitions are so palpable that I in fact completely forgot that this was the second Wodehouse book I’d read this year, and I’d written it up with the same beginning and making many of the same points that I’m about to make. That’s the trouble with Fletcher, isn’t it? At a few points in reading this book I actually had to double-check myself whether I'd actually read this one or not, even though this one has a distinctive enough title from "[Common everyday expression], Jeeves" that I knew I hadn't. The fact is that Wooster as narrator often tends to refer to the same series of events in all of these books, and all of the hijinks tend to stem from the same kind of conflict and end up developing and resolving in much the same way, so there is certainly a similarity between Wodehouse books that tends towards formulaic. It does of course lend itself to much entertainment and a lot of laughs; I read this one frequently in the presence of Dylan and he kept questioning why I was laughing because to his 9yo mind, this doesn't appear to be a funny book from the outside. But really this doesn't have quite the joke ratio nor the sheer absurdism as other Wodehouse I've read that had me fairly cackling. The intertextual references mount in this book to make it feel like this is one of the later works (I wish, in retrospect, I'd consulted some kind of Wodehouse reading order to try and adhere to) and it doesn't feel quite as fresh and vibrant as I've found in other books. Really there's nothing seemingly original in this book, and the plot machinations fall much in the same way as they have in other books: Bertie is a reluctant guest among disagreeable company, his wellbeing or livelihood is threatened by some menace either matrimonial or physical, there are misfortunes and pratfalls and all delivered with a deadpan humour and flair for language. Ultimately there's only a middling place for something like this in my year-end rankings because of course it was entertaining while I was reading it, but there's no great impact for this to create unless it has a particularly high or low level of humour, and really this just delivered what I expected in terms of plot, jokes, and character development (nil, naturally, in the latter case).

17) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling

I feel like a huge weight is off my shoulders, not just to have finished reading the biggest literary phenomenon of the twenty-first century, but just more importantly and immediately: I know how the story finishes now. As I mentioned last year when I wrote up The Half-Blood Prince, I stopped watching the films at Order of the Phoenix so the last two books and their plots were largely unknown to me. As it turns out, if you spend any time on the interwebs, people will spoil these for you even if you don't quite register that they've been spoiled for you. In particular here, I knew one of the prominent deaths in the Battle of Hogwarts because of an off-hand joke someone made on Reddit, and I also knew what the last horcrux was that remains a mystery for most of the book, from various sources I've come across that just lists the horcruxes. But anyway, this was a largely very enjoyable read. I did find it had the negative qualities that I've found throughout this series though, largely through some narratorial tics and habits that Rowling simply can't avoid. Some of it I think of as hallmarks of young adult literature though: for instance when Harry and his friends are captured by Greyback and taken to Malfoy manor, it was all very tense and quite riveting, but I kind of had this unconscious feeling that whatever happened next, the following chapter would be some breathing space to reflect and, sure enough, when the deus ex machina happens, they then transport themselves to a place of peace and quiet to patiently plan out their next move. I remember thinking that I could use that breathing space myself, so it felt like something the author would introduce to help it be an accessible and continually enjoyable book rather than feeling like the reader is in a vice grip the whole time. But the issue I've had with most of the books - especially Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix - is that inevitable moment in the penultimate chapter or at the very moment of climax where the narrative takes a side-track to catch everybody up with one of the characters giving a monologue to explain everything that's happened so far, and fill in all the gaps. Or indeed, in this case, two of the characters having a dialogue. It's all part of the 'tell don't show' mentality that Rowling has - again which may be part of what YA audiences want, but it does just feel a bit weak and self-conscious to me when it happens. Regardless, I've come to expect things like that as the series has gone on and while some of this book, especially at the beginning, felt a little tedious as I was waiting for 'action' to happen, it becomes a very intriguing mystery and chase, and much better than the Hunger Games series, ties up all the narrative threads in a satisfying way (well apart from the fact that time travel is introduced in the third book and never mentioned again) to draw the series into a cathartic ending.

16) Ripeness - Sarah Moss

This was a book group choice, and I started reading it on holiday in Queensland and then my progress slowed a bit once I got back to the humdrum. Still, I enjoyed this read well enough, but I'd say I liked it less than the other book of Moss' that I've finished (Ghost Wall). The main reason for it is that I found myself a little bit - frustrated isn't the right word, but it'll do for want of anything better - by the parallel narratives here. It tells the story of Edith, at two different times of her life: in third person when she is retired, divorced and living in rural Ireland in the present day; and a first person account of how she travelled to rural Italy to keep her sister company during the latter stages of an unwanted pregnancy. I don't think it's spoiling too much to say that her sister Lydia, a professional ballerina, is not just not wanting the baby for career reasons but because it was unexpected, and part of Edith's role in keeping her company is to make the arrangements to have the baby adopted by a charitable organisation based nearby in Italy. What did lead to my dissatisfaction (maybe that's a better word) with the present-day narrative is that it - and the very fact of having parallel timelines and stories - felt a little bit self-conscious and even contrived at times, but more importantly the present-day narrative I felt didn't add a whole lot to the first-person confession-style narrative. In fact, what it did add was largely just in terms of metaphors and themes: for example there is a lot of reflection in the present day about what it means to be a 'local' where Edith's friend Maebh is against the idea of refugees fleeing their homeland to settle in their local community, while Edith herself wonders if she'll ever feel like a local herself. But that concept of 'unwanted' outsiders is clearly meant to be a mirror to the 'unwanted' baby that Edith's sister had in the 60s, where Lydia's refusal to hold or look at the baby is supposed to be a reflection of anti-immigration sentiment being about turning a blind eye to others' suffering and only looking at your own circumstances and how it might affect you. But really my displeasure (another word) with the present-day narrative was minor; I think I was kind of hoping for the two stories to have more obvious links, or for them to dovetail more neatly, while at the same time it was just slightly jolting to switch between first and third-person with no real reason when the present-day narrative could have very easily also been in first person (or vice-versa). Nevertheless, the characters we meet throughout are well-drawn and there is a very detailed sense of the characters - such as Lydia and Edith's mother, 'Maman' - who are conspicuously absent; it does make a lot of the narrative come to life even while I found parts of it self-conscious. Moss writes with a really nice sense of perspective throughout, and a lot of the passages of Edith's first-person 'confession' of sorts are quite heartbreaking and tender, while at the same time the whole book offers a sense of cautious optimism for the future at least while - and as a condition of - offering an argument for living one's life with empathy and humanity.

15) Something to Answer For - P.H. Newby

For those who haven't scrutinized the historical list of Booker Prize winners and shortlists like I have in looking for books to read, this title may be unfamiliar to you, but it's noteworthy for being the first ever book awarded the Booker Prize, in 1969. It tells the story of Townrow (whose name I found oddly disconcerting as I frequently eye-skipped it as "tomorrow" and this created many a garden path sentence), a former British army officer who returns to the Egyptian town of Port Said at the request of a friend's widow who believes her husband was murdered. The setting, the character, situation and the writing all reminded me at first of Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter and I thought that I was in for a kind of post-colonial Africa-set thriller-romance of some description. That impression was completely mistaken as I soon ascertained in reading some of the dialogue and exchanges that Townrow has on his way to Port Said and in his early days there. What this book starts to feel like after that is like a Graham Greene novel if Greene was fucked out of his brain on acid while writing. But as an overall effect, it reminded me more of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano in the sense that there's this constantly shifting feeling of reality vs unreality, while our central character seems to be under constant threat of death and often due to his own actions. What's different though is that, unlike Lowry's (a novel I appreciated more than liking), Newby doesn't write in an incomprehensible stream of consciousness style, but instead the writing is quite mannered and measured, which makes the shifts - between fever dream and drunken stupor that Townrow experiences with frequent blackouts of memory and a twisted sense of his own consciousness - all the more arresting and confronting. It's perhaps more keenly felt as well because Townrow is an unpleasant yet extremely self-righteous and self-assured person while also being a kind of 'unreliable protagonist'; he's not a first-person narrator but everything is told with him at the centre, so as his own reality starts to bend, we're not exactly sure what is happening and what is real. Townrow frequently asserts that he is an Irish citizen and therefore 'neutral' in the impending conflict between English and Egyptian forces (while also having a sympathy with the colonized nations), he flits between investigating his friend's murder and wholeheartedly believing his friend is still alive and faked his own death for some unknown reason, while also carrying on a sometimes-requited love affair with the beautiful daughter of his late friend's lawyer in Port Said. I will say that the whole concept here ends up sounding a bit more fascinating than the reading experience is, largely because the intransigence of Townrow was grating as he suffers from these lapses in memory as well as personality, and it felt frustrating that I didn't have instead a protagonist with whom I could both sympathise and also relate to. While it's clear that he is somewhat conscious of his slipping reality, he never seems to act in a way that a normal person would, forever barrelling through life determined to see things through to their improbable ends as if the whole of British civilisation depended on it. It's definitely a darkly comic read though, but the main issue I had overall is that the fragmented nature of the narrative would have been more effective if the story overall were shorter, because it does end up feeling quite aimless as one misadventure leads to another and yet another, and there's not quite enough coherence to link the passages together and get a grander vision or theme from the action. Interesting mostly for its historical significance, but certainly worth a read if you like a bit of articulate discombobulation.

14) Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie

A strange part of my experience in reading this book is that when I sat down to write it up, I was reminded of the first part of this story and realised that the first part seems completely separated from the rest of it once you've experienced the whole thing. The thing about this is that its ostensible purpose as a book is to be a modern retelling of the story of Antigone, which I'm only vaguely familiar with both from hours spent being an absurdly (to me, now - I don't think I ever got anything in return for this) obsequious little brother helping Jez learn his lines for Creon back in high school and also from reading the speculative fiction retelling Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth, a book I had to search high and wide for the title because somehow I managed to completely miss it in posting the books I read last year (I did write it up but somehow I didn't post it to my blog, so my searching my blog for "Antigone" showed up nothing). Anyway, the point of this preamble is that part one of this book tells the story of Isha (a stand-in for the character of Ismene), a Pakistani-British woman who is studying abroad in the USA when she meets Eamonn (AKA Haemon in the original story), the son of a prominent Pakistan-born Tory politician back home, and they form a friendship. The reason why this part of the story seems so separate from the rest to me is because I'm not that familiar with the background and setting of the original story and only know the parts specifically about Antigone wanting to bury Polynices, which Shamsie concerns herself with reimagining in the subsequent parts. In her modern reimagining, Polynices is Parvais, twin brother to Aneeka (obviously Antigone) both nine years younger than Isha, and Parvais' "betrayal" is manifested in him leaving Britain to fight with ISIS. During the course of this 'betrayal' he expresses to Aneeka a desire to return home to Britain but this is naturally blocked by Eamonn's father - now Home Secretary - as part of his crackdown on traitors to Britain (which is all part of posturing and rhetoric to help him earn credence and respect in the Conservative party and nationalistic Britain as their token Pakistani MP). Anyway, I don't believe that I'm spoiling the story egregiously since "this book is a retelling of Antigone" which is all over the blurb and cover is as much of a spoiler to people who know the basics of the plot. I felt that the reimagining of the plot and its update into the modern day nightmare of - well, I want to say post-Brexit Britain but really post-911 and 7/7 Britain more generally - was affecting and quite poignant, but I think the key shortcoming of this story lies in either a lack of narrative skill, a lack of empathy or a lack of courage on Shamsie's part. To be clear: I'm not claiming she is any of these generally, but where I felt the story was lacking was specifically regarding Parvais' motivation in leaving Britain to join ISIS. I simply didn't relate at all to his anguish, his feelings of inadequacy at never having met his father, and therefore his desire to meet with fellow Jihadis who would have known his father. I felt that Shamsie introduced his character and his perspective too late in the piece due to a fair bit of jumping around in the timeline, and his conflict and dilemma were introduced in a fairly glib manner. It stands as a bit of a contrast to something like my #1 book of 2016, Elnathan John's Born on a Tuesday which provided such an empathetic lens on those who get caught up in extremism, and more specifically why. As I mentioned, I'm not sure why Shamsie's perspective here feels so lacking - whether she couldn't find herself empathising enough with 'terrorists' to be able to provide their perspective, or whether she didn't dare to, but her writing elsewhere is skilful and evocative enough for me to feel she is a good enough writer to provide this perspective and give it reality and depth if not for whatever held her back. It's a key shortcoming of this otherwise very fine novel, full of pointed satire and dramatic upheaval, when I simply couldn't sympathise or care at all about Parvais and what happened to him. Since the other characters are far more nuanced and interesting (especially the more minor characters of the drama, Isha and Eamonn, as well as Eamonn's father - the Creon standin) but the crux of the drama hinges on Parvais' reasons for betrayal being relatable and Aneeka's heartbreak feeling keen and immediate. Otherwise except from a universal justice perspective, his story just seems like an idiot boy doing stupid things and ultimately bringing his own destruction on himself. And I feel in the original play we're meant to feel that exact pathos towards Creon, not Polynices.

13) Fresh Complaint - Jeffrey Eugenides

I think I've found this at the library before but have forgone it mainly because I don't love Jeffrey Eugenides that much, and short stories tend to be a bit of a hurdle with the best writers. But nevertheless, having read this I am now a Jeffrey Eugenides completist, and I honestly do probably reference him more than I reference anyone else simply because The Virgin Suicides has the most inventive use of narrative voice I've ever read, so whenever any other author employs an unusual narratorial voice, I compare it to The Virgin Suicides. And I bring that up here because one of the stories here does exactly that, as if to reinforce to me that Eugenides is an author keenly aware of how narrative voice - especially when employed askew - can impact the reading of a story. In the case of this story, it's told from a very conventional third person perspective, until partway through the story the narrator suddenly introduces themselves in the first person, and it's specifically someone who has been part of the story up to that point but it's a very unusual perspective to then gain, given the treatment of that character up to that point. Apart from that one instance, there are some clever stories in here; it doesn't really feel like it has much of a thematic flow, and really the thing I enjoyed about this the most was simply that each story stands on its own merits; as much as I enjoyed Murakami's short story collection last year, I felt that each story needed each other story to gain its power and value, whereas these all follow their own twists and turns, and in this form it helps that Eugenides is a more conventional story-teller (hence why I'm not overly warm on him otherwise) because they all tend to have a straightforward structure with a clearly delineated ending. There are certainly some themes that are particular bailiwicks for him, and they cross over into his novels that I've read, in particular communication issues in relationships; there's one story that deals with the biological implications of intersex organs in what is obviously a precursor to Middlesex (dated three years prior to Middlesex's publication), and generally his focus seems to be on everyday conflict between people as they try to get on in life. I feel like my tone through this writeup has been fairly lukewarm but the truth is, while these stories aren't masterpieces, they're very entertaining and some are quite thought-provoking as well. There's three particular favourites I had: the title story Fresh Complaint that concludes this book and provides an ambivalent sense of modern cultural cringe, and two great examples of interpersonal relationships going awry: Baster and in particular Capricious Gardens which follows a kind of sex farce plotline (it reminds me a lot of the Frasier episode The Ski Lodge) with a kind of compelling heightened drama as the character misunderstandings and misleadings escalate. So on the whole, I'm very glad I picked this up if only just to call myself a Eugenides completist but more because this had some really good reads in it.

12) Eclipse - Stephenie Meyer

It's as much of a surprise to me that this book is where it is as it will be to anyone else. But the big surprise for me has already happened, which is that I honestly, and unironically, enjoyed reading this book a lot. Possibly it has something to do with how blown away by some of the idiotic inanities of the previous book (New Moon, my bottom book of last year) but related to that and in sharp contrast to that, this book really felt like Meyer had dealt with the prosaic details of her world-building through the previous books and moreover this book feels like she's hit her stride as a storyteller. The main reason I say that is because there's less need for her here to convince us that werewolves and vampires exist since we're willingly reading the third book, and there's also less need for her to emphasise how beautiful Edward Cullen is nor about how desirable Bella Swan is despite her clumsiness and the fact that bad luck seems to follow her around. There are certainly still some awkward elements of both of these in the book, and Bella remains a slightly blank slate character onto whom teenage girls are meant to imprint their own wants and needs and fantasies, but by this book I'm willing to suspend disbelief a bit and as such I found this a really entertaining page-turning experience. For the main part, it's worth remembering that this is a romance series, not a horror series, and I think the dread of the vampire world ended up being a little bit shoehorned into the previous two books, and while the horror elements here still feel a bit tacked on (as a foundation of this story, Bella is willing to become a vampire herself, so any thought about 'ooh what if the vampires bite her and turn her into one of them?' seems no longer resonant) the dread of this story is far more centred around Bella's indecision between Edward and Jacob. And as much as I found myself staunchly, firmly, on team Jacob at the end of the second book in spite of my own incredulous feelings about the whole thing, this book fleshes out Edward's and Jacob's characters far better through their actions in relation to Bella and in relation to each other. The downside of that is that this book introduces some negative sides of Jacob's character, but I found them more real than just "Jacob is clearly a better match but oh my god Edward is just so beautiful". And ultimately the stakes of the story are about that romance and where Bella's own feelings will manifest and what it will ultimately cost her. There is an external threat to physical safety that Meyer uses as a central plot-framing device as well, but that's also more sophisticated than in previous stories largely by using it as a kind of central mystery throughout the story - there are mysterious happenings going on and the Cullen family and various others are wondering who or what could be behind it - and that adds to the page-turning ability of this book. I do think it drags on a little more than it needs to largely because it's geared to a young-adult audience and my general criticism of such books tends to be around how much they need to explain everything rather than letting the audience fill in the gaps themselves. So it's not as thrilling and tight a narrative as it maybe could have been (and yes I really mean that, it could have been a really exciting book), but I do feel that rather than being an empty vessel narrative for unimaginative readers to fulfill their fantasies, Eclipse as the third book showcases Stephenie Meyer as a storyteller who can weave some engaging events and plot twists into a well-established fantasy world.

 11) My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

This was another pick for book group that was paired with Ripeness by Sarah Moss and it seems to be an accidentally well-made pairing just because both books centre around the relationship between two sisters, one of whom is sensual and beautiful and tactile and the other of whom is practical and sensible (and, in this case at least, tragically plain). But this one is far more of a ride and less of a meditation. As a sidenote I should mention that I think I ended up liking this one more than others in the book group, including Bec – while I was more dissatisfied with parts of Ripeness which seemed to hit the mark for everybody else. Obviously the title here kind of reveals the plot in a lot of ways but what surprised me about this was that the book is far less comical than the upfrontness of the title suggests. The narrator Korede tells us from the first page that her sister Ayoola has killed a man in the opening pages, and reveals that this is not the first time. But Ayoola is not an indiscriminate murderer, and as the book goes on it becomes apparent that the deaths at her hands are ambiguously motivated, and could well be all in self-defence at the hands of the men in Ayoola's life. I thought that I had a good sense for where this book was going based on Korede's no-nonsense practicalities as a nurse and Ayoola's wayward, carefree hedonism. As such I found the middle section of the book quite stressful, as Ayoola unknowingly invades Korede's work life where she is besotted with the handsome young doctor at her work, while at the same time a police investigation is underway relating to Ayoola's most recent killing. But Braithwaite is less concerned with making this an adrenaline rush or a suspense thriller; rather it takes a turn where its focus draws more sharply on that sibling relationship, on Korede being the responsible older sister and needing to rein in Ayoola's impulsive and unpredictable behaviour, while it raises the question of how far Korede should feel responsible for her sister, and what is ultimately the responsible thing to do? Parallel to the story of this relationship Braithwaite paints a fascinating portrayal of modern power dynamics between men and women - as far as I can tell, probably accurate to its Nigerian setting - and raises the question on whether Ayoola is a radical iconoclast standing up for herself, or an impulsive brat who creates dangerous situations and can find only one way out of them. Or, alternatively, is she a calculating sociopath? As seen through the eyes of her older, more sensible sister, it's an interesting question that Braithwaite explores with a good sense of dark humour but also an effective amount of pathos.

Books of 2025 Part 1: 30-21

 Well another year has come and gone, so it's time for my annual dusting off of this blog. I will post my music list here just for posterity's sake at some point, but because I haven't really the time or inclination for writing them up properly, I'm going to prioritise this since I have these written up.

And as a preamble, I got through more books this year than I had anticipated even heading to the end of the year and reflecting back on it: a total of 38. As such, you will get a proper sequence of writeups this year, starting here in the low-middle where I'll count down in two posts to number 11, then tease you by jumping back to count up my bottom 8 books and then finish things off with my top ten countdown.

Without further ado then let's get into the countdown with...

30) Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

This is the third Toni Morrison I've read now, and after reading this I have to admit to myself that I have a quite ambivalent relationship with her. I didn't feel like I really 'got' Beloved when I read it many years ago (I think as part of my TIME  reading challenge) and there were times in the reading of this book that I felt I should do the unthinkable and actually reread something, namely Beloved, to see what I'd missed the first time. But the truth is that by the conclusion of this book I'm again not sure what I'm missing but I don't really understand the story arc or the emotional stakes. It starts out as a kind of meandering coming-of-age story, telling of the early days of our protagonist Macon 'Milkman' Dead III but it uses some 'moment in time' narratives to jump ahead in time fairly erratically to the point where he's in his 40s and well established in life by the time the bulk of the story takes place. Part of the ambivalence comes from him as a character and a protagonist in particular: I don't believe he's ever meant to be a sympathetic figure, but my sympathies not lying with him did mean that I didn't have an overwhelming interest in what happens to him. He's a detached figure, a selfish figure, and although all of these shortcomings in him come full circle in the end where he finds an opportunity for self-reflection and potentially self-improvement, these are the qualities he exhibits through most of the story. But the final 100 pages or so of this story honestly felt like a bit of a fever dream. It starts (as a lot of the episodic tales in this book do) with a recollection of the past being told by one of the characters and this triggers a mission of sorts to recover something of value from the past. The narrative at this point - which has always been a bit jerky and erratic in its pacing and chronology - accelerates at frankly a disconcerting speed, and what felt like a coming-of-age story or a story about a small town and the people who inhabit it suddenly becomes a life-and-death saga that touches on (in fact explores in some detail) class consciousness, modern black identity and more broadly and philosophically on the concept of universal justice. All of these themes feel very big and I fear that the narrative Morrison has built to accommodate them actually felt too small throughout to accommodate them. I think there's definitely some interesting observations made, and some interesting questions raised, but the way the book ends, far too many of the story threads are unsatisfactorily resolved so they remain big, unanswered questions rather than interesting themes explored to their fullest potential. There's far too many twists and turns even just in the last few passages, and I feel that the 'expected' conclusions of Milkman's self-reflection and vision of bettering himself, of Milkman's father and best friend opening up further opportunities for themselves, for redemption and reconciliation between the fractured families at the core of this story - none of these expected outcomes occurred. Which again, just leads to my feelings of ambivalence and confusion, in that I don't know if a broader point or observation (about life being unpredictable, about black identity still being questioned and forged, etc.) is being made by changing up the story so suddenly and finishing it so inconclusively. Or, alternatively, if Morrison tells stories that I don't especially relate to in a way that I don't particularly get drawn up in. While I liked The Bluest Eye a lot, I had a big issue with the divergence in the middle of the story, so with this third book under my belt, it's hard to conclude anything other than that I just don't care that much for the way she structures her books – or I just don’t get it.

29) The Double Tongue - William Golding

I'm curious enough about William Golding to pick up any fragments I see on the library shelf - mainly because I think it gets forgotten to a lot of people (myself included) that he's a Nobel laureate, Booker prize winner and has written a good many books besides the one book that everyone associates with him. So having enjoyed Rites of Passage (his Booker winner) this was a no-brainer. I did learn after opening it though that this was the book Golding was working on when he died, and as a result this is a bit of a fragmentary piece, to its detriment. For one thing, there's a big chunk in the middle of the manuscript missing it seems which is appended by an editor's note in this edition, and I found that the jump ahead suddenly covered a whole lot of years in the narrative that then felt like a big gap in my understanding and the pathos of the story. It's not like The Mystery of Edwin Drood where Dickens had evidently formulated a good story plan and crafted some deep, realistic characters and then succumbed to all the hemlock poisonings before he could actually unravel the mystery itself; in this case it feels like Golding was still making lots of edits and piecing together the story before he, himself, succumbed to all the hemlock poisonings [citation needed]. This book tells the story of a bit of a misfit girl in ancient Delphi who is salvaged from family shame after abandoning her supposed marriage to the scurrilous boy next door and finds herself put in charge of being the conduit voice for the oracle of the Gods. The narrative that follows largely revolves around the girl's relationship with Ionides, the high priest of Apollo and her guardian/protector, and their travails and travels together. What feels like it's really missing here is the narrative development between her wide-eyed innocence and relief at being extracted from an unhappy family situation and being effectively liberated from her fate as a young woman, to where we find her at the end of the story as a seasoned veteran of the 'scam' of the oracle while still questioning her own belief in and diligence to the Olympian gods. As a result, while there's an interesting observation at the heart of this story about the nature of religion and belief and how willingly people submit to higher powers, any critique of it - or the fallible humans who would take advantage of it - gets lost by the piecemeal story not developing the drama organically or fully. I also felt the opening section of the story felt a lot like "man writes woman woe is me" kind of thing, and I was hoping for Golding to justify it a bit more as he went on and getting into the Pythia's psychology with more depth and insight, but as with the development of the story it sadly felt unfinished and unpolished as a result. In summary, this book in any edition is worthwhile for a Golding completist but I don't feel it has much to offer to those like me who aren't that familiar with the rest of his work.

28) Our Kind of Traitor - John Le Carré

I feel like with certain kinds of fiction such as this, it's sometimes difficult to get into why one liked or didn't like a book while also avoiding spoilers. In the case of this book I really find it impossible so if you don't want this book spoiled, read no further - just go read it and make up your own mind, like I care. The main reason why I didn't really care for this book is that the ending was so utterly deflating and dispiriting. I could certainly see the argument that that's entirely the point - Le Carré is making the point that in the modern world, no matter how intricately you plan, there is still potential for things to go utterly wrong very quickly - but the fact is that the futility of the ending, to my mind, renders the rest of the book kind of pointless. This story is about a young British couple, Perry and Gail - well to do, up and coming in the world, and extremely attractive and in love with each other, who go on a lovers' retreat in Antigua and there accidentally make the acquaintance of a Russian entrepreneur by the name of Dima. The book transports us then to a basement in a converted house somewhere in London, where Perry and Gail are now telling the story of their Antigua adventure to a pair of government operatives, and it transpires that during their sojourn in Antigua, Dima opened up to them about his nefarious dealings in the Russian underworld and that he is one of the world's leading money launderers. In exchange for safe passage to the UK for Dima and his extended family, Dima is willing to betray all of his business acquaintances and seeks to engage Perry and Gail to help usher him to this safe passage. Then begins a typical Le Carré tale of intrigue as Perry and Gail decide whether they're willing - as civilians - to take part in this undercover operation, to play their parts, and try and protect Dima and his next of kin, but most notably the bereaved adopted daughters of Dima's closest friend to whom Gail shows a particular affinity and sympathy. To cut a long story short, the ending of the book is somewhat bleak as Dima and one of the British agents are killed in transit from their safe house back to London, but this conclusion of the book feels inconclusive to the point of being unsatisfying. While it successfully paints a cynical picture of the world where people in high positions are buried deep in corruption and international crime circles, and ordinary people cannot really affect meaningful change, I felt like Le Carré could have made the same point while also tying up the more intriguing threads of the story in a satisfying way. There are a number of mysteries introduced throughout the story that never get resolved, there is only piecemeal observation of the back-door wheelings and dealings that go on to try and make these sort of operations happen, and the fate of Dima's surviving family members - and Perry and Gail - remains inconclusive at the story's end. So while I appreciate that the point is to make you feel a bit deflated and maybe somewhat heartbroken that all of these efforts to protect 'our kind of traitor' come to nothing in the face of overwhelming forces of organised corruption, the fact is that I found myself mostly just bewildered by the morality of the tale, of which characters I was ultimately meant to be on the side of given that everybody is involved with some kind of shady doings. As much as Le Carré uses the children as a safe kneejerk target for sympathy, the fact can't be denied that the reason the girls are bereaved is that their father was neck-deep in the same kind of corrupt dealings that Dima specialised in. So the fact that it all comes to naught in the end and the world continues revolving as a hive of villainy just renders the intrigue of the adventure to be toothless. At least I've found Le Carré making a very similar conclusion with a more satisfying story in other books of his that I've read.

27) The Cat - Colette

I read this straight after Gigi of course, after discovering that Gigi was only 50-odd pages of this already-short 150 page volume, the rest of which consisted of this story. And I can understand very much why these two were compiled - apart from both being short and Gigi being too short really to warrant the cost of printing an entire book to incorporate it. Really this story feels like a kind of spiritual sequel to Gigi which finishes (spoiler alert) with the titular heroine begrudgingly agreeing to a marriage that she feels will be bad for her personally, but will help her family materially and in terms of their position in society. Conversely, this story tells of the early days of a marriage between two young people who are trying and struggling to figure out their compatibility. More specifically and with reference to the title, it narrates the experience of Alain, who has a very fond attachment to his cat Saha, and the struggles he has to reconcile his attachment to Saha as it binds him to the past and to his old family and old family home with the intrusion of his young beautiful wife Camille onto all of the comforts he has come to rely on for his mental wellbeing. It's an interesting narrative if only because it reminds me a bit of Iris Murdoch in that the perspective of the story is almost entirely that of the male protagonist but it's written from a feminine perspective, and Colette dedicates as much of the emotional heft of the story to the struggle of Camille to find her way into Alain's life and ongoing history-in-progress while Alain comes across like a stubborn stick in the mud who is almost determined to sabotage himself and his marriage by alienating his own affections from Camille. Saha the cat therefore plays both a pivotal role in the action and the playing out of the conflict between them, as well as a metaphorical role in representing Alain's estranged feelings and unwillingness to embrace the changes in his life and circumstances. The story, short though it is, packs a fair bit of emotional punch into it as well as an enjoyable ambivalent feeling whereby it's unclear on whether the marriage will or how it will survive, but more importantly, whether it should be expected to. Colette's rather wry conclusion - ambiguously delivered though it is - seems to be quite modern to my mind, that marriage requires compromise and self-sacrifice and that it shouldn't be a case of easy comfort and complacency for everything to work out. I didn't exactly feel unimpeded sympathy for either of the characters, but as curtly drawn as they are, I felt they had intriguing juxtapositions and conflicts on display and that made this - together with Gigi and the different but thematically related stories they told - a worthwhile reading experience.

26) The Years, Months, Days - Yan Lianke

This is a classic case of a book that I picked up in the library purely to increase my reading rate as it's very short - less than a hundred pages - while also feeling at least moderately interesting. The bemusing side note about this is I actually found this book a bit of a slog and it took me at least a week to get through it despite its shortness. I think life and its stressors contributed to that, however, more than the book's intrinsically being bad, but the quality of the book that contributed to that sluggishness is the fact that its prose is quite dense - as well as being translated in a way that I personally found a little clunky and austere. It's a simple story but also a fairly bleak one: it tells the story of a village of people who abandon their homes and flee the area during a prolonged drought. Or more specifically, it tells of the old man who volunteers to stay behind in order to care for a solitary corn stalk that is the only surviving flora from the previous sowing season. The "elder" as the narrative calls him has as his only companion a blind dog, and most of the story concerns his interactions with the dog, trying to scrounge up food and water to keep them both alive while also tending for the cornstalk in very trying circumstances. As I mentioned at the top, I found the prose a little bit clunky as it went through, and Yan has a tendency to describe things quite objectively and in a detached way, which combined with the bleak circumstances of the story made me just not enjoy the process of reading too much. I found myself not very emotionally invested in it and knowing that the circumstances feel so hopeless, I wasn't necessarily buying the stakes of the story and felt it would have just been preferable to simply die in this case as it seemed to me so fruitless to put the lives of two beings on the line just for one potential hope of future growth and food source. However, to make it clear I'm talking about my own reaction to this and I feel if I'd felt more willing to put in the effort to read this more regularly, I feel like the payoff at the end of the story definitely makes the effort of even slogging through it worthwhile. There's a revelation at the book's very ending which adds just a drop of poignant humanity to the preceding events but that drop amounts to a giant flood in terms of emotional resonance, simply because that revelation is ultimately quite pointless in the end. As in, it's a pointless gesture but it speaks volumes for the character of the 'elder' and what he values in life, hence also providing a great deal of justification for the struggle he put himself through in order to try and redeem his village. So really I feel like I fell into a trap of believing this book would be a breeze to read, whereas in reality it's quite a dense book that's layered with bleak descriptions and patient, deliberate action.

25) Terms of Endearment - Larry McMurtry

I picked this up of course after loving Lonesome Dove a couple of years ago, and knowing that McMurtry was also responsible for the book forming the basis of the 1983 Best Picture winning film which I've seen many years ago. So naturally I can't help but compare the two books by him that I've read, and the parallels of his writing and storytelling are really quite obvious. Firstly: this book is very plot-light, as is Lonesome Dove. The difference though is that Lonesome Dove is mainly plot-light because lots of little individual plot points happen, and the overall journey of the book is far longer and greater in scope, whereas this is predominantly set in suburban Houston among a small group of people and revolves around the everyday soap operatic struggles and conflicts that make up love and life (at one point I remember a character explicitly says something like "it's all a bit like a soap opera around here, isn't it?"). There's also a constant undertone of comedy and character-based irony that can be quite amusing at times (as in Lonesome Dove) only for the story to take some quick shifts into tragedy, sometimes irretrievably so. One thing I found in reading this is honestly that I wasn't brought back to recalling many of the film's plot points by reading this, somewhat because it isn't very heavy on the plot points but also because reading the film's synopsis on Wikipedia it seems that the focus is shifted quite dramatically from where the book's focus lies. Mainly the book focuses for 80% of its time on Aurora, the mother, and her time entertaining her many suitors, keeping them on a close leash while also resisting their overtures to make something more permanent about her. Through Aurora, McMurtry creates the life and soul of this story and honestly the only memorable or noteworthy character. But I feel the vision of this book being so small, while also being scattered among its many characters, I don't feel like he really gets much depth on the themes that emerge as they go through. Those themes themselves are fairly generic to any kind of family-based drama - promise-breaking, forgiveness, what constitutes a loving relationship and what compromises do we make for them - but the capriciousness of a lot of the characters - some of them merely sidelined characters who each get their moment in the spotlight - renders any commentary on those themes a little flimsy, since those excessive caprices remove the characters from sympathy and understanding for me. Some of the actions that take place as well feel tonally really off but maybe just dated - such as when a character drives through the wall of a crowded club with his truck and sets about trying to run down two specific people, and the whole scene is played off like a farcical slapstick comedy but these days just feels horrifying - and that also set me at odds with this, because the story that McMurtry is trying to tell is so scattered and piecemeal anyway, so while the themes didn't have great depth to them, neither did the tone really resonate with me. The one redeeming feature is the character of Aurora, who is a bit of an enigmatic figure throughout but her dialogue always sparkles with a distorted and selfish sense of commonsensical propriety and courtesy, but the lightweight plot makes this really just a character study. Which could have been strong except for the focus shift in the second part of the book (occupying about 20 per cent of the book's length) to be about Aurora's daughter Emma and her own home life - something which James L Brooks in adapting this to the screen shifted to be the primary focus of the film, to emphasise the more schmaltzy sentimental elements of the story as is his wont - and that just felt like a weird afterthought to a story that never reaches its completion by never really reaching any kind of crisis. My takeout from this book, being the second McMurtry that I've read, is that McMurtry writes characters and conflicts well, but his meandering prose style is best suited when the setting and stakes of the story are higher, and they feel confused and whimsical when confined to a small everyday drama such as this.

24) Ministry of Time - Kaliane Bradley

This was a book group read but our book group at this point started getting irritatingly democratic, where everybody throws a bunch of book suggestions in and we all equivocate on not being particularly bothered about one or the other until some decisive person finally just chooses one out of three or four different options that nobody has strongly objected to. Which means that nobody in particular can be blamed for anyone not liking a particular book. Anyway, this was chosen by [the group as a whole all hail group] although it was one of the few that I didn't vote for, namely because the premise sounded too similar to The Time Traveller's Wife which I read last year or the year before and didn't care for. The good news is that the romance elements of this book worked for me better or at least felt more organic to the story, while on the other hand the sci-fi elements didn't work anywhere near as well for me. Mainly this book feels tonally all over the place, and I feel like Bradley didn't fully plot out the story's milestones in advance, so the ending felt like a hasty rush to the finish line after vacillating for way too long on the rest of the story. The 'ministry' of the title is both the framing of the story but also potentially the story's main villain, as our protagonist (who is never properly named, something I didn't realise until a long way in and my realisation of that coincided with the revelation of a major plot twist where her lack of name plays a significant role) is employed by this ministry as one of many 'bridges' to help some people who have been 'rescued' from various periods of the past to adjust to modern day living and society. Her charge is commander Graham Gore, an arctic explorer from the nineteenth century (who did actually exist), and the vast majority of the book consists of her conversations and interactions with Gore. And the 'vast majority' in the previous sentence is doing a lot of my critical heavy-lifting because despite the sci-fi framework and the enigma of the 'ministry' and its workings, way too much of this book reads like a comedy of manners and culture clash as Gore is in turns amused, bemused, intrigued and shellshocked adjusting to life in modern London (e.g. “an ‘iPod’ you say, how jejune”). The funny thing though is that this comedy of manners - which evolves quite sluggishly in my view into a romance between Gore and the narrator - is the more enjoyable part of the narrative, and Bradley seems to enjoy this part of her book more. When the plot does take on a darker tone, it frankly feels like an unwelcome intrusion of sci-fi into this delightful rom-com story, but more to the point it feels like a rushed afterthought. Bradley seems self-conscious about this in many ways as she peppers the narrative with prolepses outlining how "things would soon change" or "when everything went wrong" etc. but these are just scattered thinly throughout the preceding narrative and, inevitably, the next chapter will go straight back to everyday life of adjusting to modern society for this eccentric anachronism and his pals. So it felt somewhat frustrating as I thought Bradley should have either done a better job of integrating the future noir and sci-fi elements of the story throughout rather than using them as a framing and bookending device, or she should have just copped to the fact that the romance and friendship narrative was more compelling so thinned out the front and end of the book and the character list. It felt like the wrong ending was shoehorned into this book, or if this ending was going to be inevitable then the tone throughout the book should have been far more darker and menacing than the frothy comedic tone it took for huge swathes of it. Essentially parts of this book were enjoyable but taken as a whole it felt uncomfortably jarring to me.

23) Hag-Seed - Margaret Atwood

Having gone what seems like a long time since reading any Margaret Atwood, I picked this one up in my local library and was shortly thereafter presented with another as a birthday present (which will be forthcoming in these writeups, at time of writing). This one felt on paper like it was one that I wouldn't very much enjoy, as it is overtly a reimagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest, revolving around a production of the same but containing the same themes of betrayal and revenge with a lot of story parallels woven into the texture. At first I was concerned that not being very familiar with The Tempest would hold me back from appreciating this, but the truth is that if anything this book is likely a bit too didactic and even academic in that regard. The crux of the story revolves around our protagonist Felix (it's a pun, right - Felix=Lucky; Prospero=Lucky) who gets a job directing a Shakespeare literacy program in a prison and eventually uses this to stage his revenge against the man who organised his sacking from his prestigious position as head of a theatre festival. So as part of his staging of The Tempest in this prison through which he will work his revenge, he and the inmates discuss the play - its characters, themes, even symbolism - in quite some detail and in a way that I can imagine getting fairly tiresome to someone who's not geared to literary criticism. However, while the story itself is well laid-out, I did find myself getting more and more detached emotionally from the stakes as it went on. The initial betrayal I feel strikes the right notes emotionally, but once the revenge starts to come into it I started to feel Atwood was drawing quite a lot on the imagery from the Tempest and those particular redemptions and reprieves, so I found myself, as a neophyte to the play, not feeling it as strongly. I found far more resonance - as a point of comparison - with Ian McEwan's Nutshell, being more well-versed and immersed in the world and themes of Hamlet and I do feel like either a familiarity or a strong relationship with the characters and situations of The Tempest would greatly help this particular book with its emotional resonance. Having neither familiarity nor a strong understanding of it going in, I feel I relied heavily on the book itself to do all of the emotional heavy-lifting as well as the story-telling, theme-explaining and the humour in terms of the parallels, which is a lot of reliance on one narrative. I did pick up some of the jokes (like Felix, as mentioned earlier, or the pseudonym he uses when applying for the prison position - "Mr Duke" as Prospero was Duke of Milan before being deposed) but I wasn't heavily invested in Felix and what happened to him for the bulk of the story, even though Atwood sets up the dramatic stakes well and resolves them very satisfactorily. I think maybe the book was trying a bit too hard on the 'explaining' and making sure the audience was keeping up when it could have had a looser connection to the original story and instead invested more time in making me care deeply about these characters in the here and now.

22) The Pearl - John Steinbeck

This was an enjoyable find in my local library, being a Steinbeck I hadn't read (he's that sort of writer that I don't consciously seek to become a completist, but I'm still surprised when I find books I haven't read in the library) but also being very short, so I ended up finishing this one very easily in 24 hours. It's a fairly simple story - a parable, even - about a Mexican pearl diver called Kino who finds an extremely valuable pearl at a time when his infant son has been poisoned by a scorpion's sting. The narrative follows a fairly familiar folk-tale trajectory when the pearl proves to be at turns both an immense blessing and then an unbearable curse as Kino struggles to safeguard the pearl or redeem its value in a way that is practicable. What makes Steinbeck's telling of a fairly predictable story more interesting though is both his vivid descriptive writing, which is evident in all of his books that I can recall but The Grapes of Wrath in particular, as well as the way the 'neighbors' of Kino are made to be a collective diegetic presence, furthering the narrative and the moral and philosophical observations while also just being unnamed side characters to Kino's story. Those were interesting effects and the writing is florid and engaging for that reason, but at the same time I can't say I really loved this novella. There's obviously very little in this book that's joyful or humorous; it's short and brutal in its cynicism about wealth and the corruptibility of humankind, but Steinbeck's conclusion very much seems to be that the very act of rising above your station in life is essentially to put your head on the gallows and I feel that this parable is at odds with the initial passages of the narrative where Kino seeks treatment for his son's sting only to be rebuffed for being too poor to afford treatment. Essentially it continues the theme of The Grapes of Wrath (in fact there's a passage where he writes that "The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the town swelled and puffed with the pressure of it" which is effectively identical to the metaphor in the very title The Grapes of Wrath) in viewing the pursuit or acquisition of wealth as inherently evil, and for poor people the collective good of the people is the only way to survive, but it seems at odds to view good fortune as an inescapable curse when there's no real sense that Kino's pursuit of wealth is motivated by anything other than the survival and ideally betterment of his family - that just doesn't seem evil to me.

21) [and] Other Christmas Writings - Charles Dickens

Obviously I took a bit of a cheat route this year for my annual Dickens. It wasn't a conscious cheat, but I found myself at the back end of the year without a Dickens under my belt and found nothing that I hadn't read before at my local library. Knowing that Dickens can also take me quite a while to get through, I grabbed instead  a volume called A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings and decided that, having read A Christmas Carol a couple of years ago as my annual Dickens, I would read the rest of these 'Christmas writings' and call it done but I promise I will plan better next year and the four years that follow so I can finish off his oeuvre. Anyway, as for these Christmas writings, I actually enjoyed them a surprising amount, but what's more I think they're really valuable in providing more substance to the Christmas mythology that Dickens supposedly helped popularise as part of the zeitgeist. If I had a disappointment with A Christmas Carol it's that it was ultimately kind of glib and short, and while these writings are a shadow of A Christmas Carol in terms of storylines, they instead provide a myriad of other musings along similar lines. There's a simple musing to kick things off with Christmas Festivities, which consists mainly of observations about a typical Christmas family lunch gathering. We then follow with a longer story called The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton which introduces one of the key idiosyncrasies that I found in these 'other' Christmas writings, which is that Dickens really had a fixation on hauntings at Christmastime, and I think that helps add some context to the more relatable and universal parable that A Christmas Carol and its famous hauntings entail. The sexton story is a bit of mischievous fun, while the longer-form The Haunted Man takes on a very similar kind of tone to A Christmas Carol in portraying a man who is cursed to bring misery to everybody he encounters and for him to repent and bring about the redemption and joyful good cheer for everybody in time for Christmas. But ol' Chuckie doesn't stop there: a musing on Christmas trees - "that great German Christmas import" or something along those lines as he calls it - turns into a sequence of anecdotes about famous ghostly encounters, often occasioning death. And finally The Seven Poor Travellers which had a kind of haunted, Christmas-themed Canterbury Tales vibe to it. As usual Dickens' prose is a little bit thick to comprehend instantly, and in his more journalistic pieces here he drops a lot of contemporary cultural references which the footnotes can only go so far as to elucidate in the moment, but I would say this provides some very worthwhile context to Dickens' mythology, and in particular A Christmas Carol as maybe his most lasting and recognisable story.