The New Years concert is on, and I follow my pattern, especially as this seems to be the only blog post I manage to produce in a given year.

I was about to say that inside me are two wolves, but I do not know whether wolves read to escape and to understand. I assume they would if they could. Suffice to say, there has been the usual range of Goddard and Sayers, with occasional dabs of other old favourites, like Pratchett, Austen, DeWitt, and others. A new avenue of escape this year were Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club books, the first four of which made me long for retirement. But in my non-fiction reading I have been dipping more into the structures of all that is wrong in the world. And once again, Roh and her Books in the Time of Chaos' Big Fat Anti-Oppression Reading Challenge had me reading books I would otherwise not have found, though a few I will admit had been on my list for a while. I have also made an effort to try to finish some of those books that I have been skipping in and out of over several years -- if nothing else to get them off my "currently reading" shelf. There are still about 20 left, some of which (looking at Heidegger, and a history of MI6) have been around for well over a decade. But I did finish 105 books this year, and without going into detail of them all, there were some highlights:

Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad had already been recommended to me by a handful of people by the time I picked it up as my book about artistic practice for Roh's challenge, and they were right. It tells the story of a staging of Hamlet in the West Bank, and I love how it portrays the process of constructing the play, an the echoes of Hamlet in the character and setting, both in terms of what I see in the main character and others, but also what the audience (and the actors as audience) see. I also really like how the text goes beyond Palestinian identity as a homogenous whole, yet shows the strategic necessity of maintaining the unity.

We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance, by Kellie Carter Jackson showed up on my radar thanks to In Bed with the Right, whose interview with the author can be recommended. I come from and struggle with a pacifist tradition that I have seen misapplied in cases of oppression, and it was refreshing to read such a lucid analysis of the different forms of resistance, categorised by Jackson as revolution, protection, force, flight, and joy, though they bleed together. Joy is, perhaps unsurprisingly, my favourite, and I am glad it is included, as it seems to often be forgotten and sometimes considered suspect.

Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad, with its portrayal of the experience of being a child in Kashmir of the 90s shows another side to violence. It uses the graphic format very well, and remind me a little of Joe Sacco, who it also references -- but with an insider view.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang was a strong early entry for most disturbing book of the year, though as we will see it lost out to some late contenders. I am reminded of some French feminist theory which contended that the sane response to insane gender expectations is insanity. I am not sure whether I am getting an accurate idea of South Korean gender politics from the books I am reading, but wanting to be a tree at the moment seems fair enough.

Abolqasem Ferdowsi's Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, in Dick Davis' translation (which is presented in a combination of prose and verse), was one of those I should have read for years, but finally got the incentive to pick up due to Roh's challenge. It is interesting both as a kind of history of Iran, before, during, and at the end of the Zoroastrian period (I am reminded to read up on that), to be compared to other histories (and maps: I spent so much time with maps trying to understand this book). But it is also a collection of stories worth passing on for themselves. I loved (LOVED) the account of the coming of chess and invention of nard (later backgammon).

Being an occasional embroiderer, I have been interested in the Palestinian practice of tatreez for a while, and I picked up Tatreez & Tea: Embroidery and Storytelling in the Palestinian Diaspora by Wafa Ghnaim as my cultural nonfiction book of the year. It was very interesting as an account of how traditional craft works in a diaspora setting, and to see not only how much overlap there is in the kind of crafting I learnt at home (even in the less figurative patterns, though I suppose there is a limited number of geometric star/flower shapes). I really liked how it integrated the social practice and tea recipes with patterns and the stories behind them.

Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed has been on my list for years, and having finally read it I am very interested in how it imagines the nature of evil, magical or political in its fantasy setting. But it is perhaps at its best in how it interrogates compromise, and the when and how of it: compromise from the get-go does not work, as all hinges on duty and dedication in the face of exhaustion. But in the end the world is not black and white, or good and evil, and we are human with all that entails, and that should be honoured, too.

I picked up Amal El-Mohtar's The River Has Roots as soon as it became available, having read This is How You Lose the Time War, and this did not disappoint. It is a love story, though counterconventional, and I really liked its resolution and ending. The opening lyrical play on language, magic, and translation is pure, delightful word magic. "Grammar is always tense", indeed.

The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global by the ever excellent Adrian Daub took me a while, mainly because it resonated too much with the world around me. I am grateful to Daub for taking the time to wade through this, and to trace the structure of the anecdotal argumentation at the heart of this panic (and the unimpressive history of the central anecdotes). It is interesting how banale it all looks set out like this, while authoritarians simultaneously rely on its rallying cry to dismantle institutions and jail people for speaking out across the country. It does the soul good to see such a lucid literary analysis according to basic principles to clarify what feels like an avalanche of nonsense.

I keep turning to Rebecca Solnit, and picked up A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster because it promised a more hopeful perspectives on catastrophe. It is an antidote to the creeping misanthropy that the news inspires, and the apathy which that generates in turn. It was interesting to read about the historical disasters (I did not know that Norwegians were responsible, if only in part. for the Halifax explosion), but the heart of the book are the chapters on Katrina and New Orleans: how much our lack of faith in humanity is the real killer. And how much the media can stir panic at the wrong time. I am not always at one with Solnit, but her strong argument that some systems are at best slow to respond and at worst keep us from our best human impulses are hard to argue against.

I found Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng for Roh's challenge to read a dystopia published in the last five years. Reading its description of a US descended into a nativist autocracy, and its nightmare vision of how to maintain totalitarian control, was of course disturbing, but I loved the structure of the book, the stories it tells and the assumptions they imply. And the latent question of violence, and how that is resolved. I love its vision of artistic practice as resistance.

I picked up Jason Stanley's How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them for obvious reasons. I really appreciate his lucid mind, which allows him to distinguish categories and differences, not to speak of consequences in a way I often fail to. When I read his How Propaganda Works I wished for an equally lucid buy more readable book, and this may be it. While written in the context of 2016-18, the warnings of the book are very much justified by later events.

I picked up Salvage the Bones in part because that NYT list went so very overboard for Jesmyn Ward, and I felt I should know what that was all about. I can see where the enthusiasm comes from. As a story it is raw and depressing. But she builds characters as people in a way that stays with you, while managing to show the effects of unequal opportunities in a glaring light -- yet without becoming didactic. It is not a book I will read again, but I am glad to have done so. Katrina has been rather abstract to me -- figuring more as a Bush policy failure and a statistical horror, but it is less so now.

Scholastique Mukasonga and her Our Lady of the Nile feels like one of my great discoveries of the year. I had already bought the book, but I seemed to get enough genocide in the world around me, and could not quite manage to pick it up until prompted to read a book with teenagers. Mukasonga's prose flows so beautifully. And while the early rumblings of 94 are a throughline of the book and it functions as a miniature version of the madness and violence, I loved the sketch of cultures and characters. And I appreciate precisely how it develops the patterns that are recognisable from what was the first genocide of my conscious memory (though far from the last, unfortunately).

It seemed time to read not just about the many iterations of fascist politics, but also about what had been the tried and tested methods of opposing it, not abstractly, but in its specific historical context. Jonas Bals' Våre kamper mot rasisme og fascisme 1865-1940 (Our struggles against racism and fascism 1865-1940) is in some ways a depressing read, as it inexorably hurtles towards the Second World War, and in a sense ends in a nadir, but already at this point it is clear how much the resistance to the coming wave had been prepared through the patient work and setbacks of decades past. And the importance of a united opposition.

I picked up A History of Burning by Janika Oza as my book on generation gaps and intergenerational trauma, to which it is eminently suitable, though I will say that as a label that does not give an accurate idea of the book. I knew in a general sort of way about the expulsion of Indian Ugandans under Idi Amin, though more as echoes of the event than specific details. This book clarified a lot, and it is one of the best books I have read on how trauma travels in time. But this is first of all a story full of characters whose lives matter, who are not just stand-ins for some abstract principle. I liked how it refuses oversimplification: the complicity in colonisation, then in turn becoming victims of the same, but without turning that into a simple kind of justice.

Susan Abulhawa's Against the Loveless World has also been on my list since it came out, and it is interesting to see how much it prefigures the inhumanity and reprisals that are now becoming visible to all. She has a gift for characters, and a way of showing humanity where we are so often shown only numbers. Despite preceding October 7th by more than three years, it seems like a conscious commentary. Which only shows how the patterns have been there, all along, un/undermediated.

I love Ann Leckie's universes, and in Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction she manages to sketch wholly new ones in a few short pages, so culturally developed that it is a delight. The great revelation of this collection, however, has been the expansion of the Raven Tower world, where the implications of interacting with the gods spin into wonderful stories. There is even a lovely little Wodehouse-tribute.

Tan Twan Eng has become one of those authors whose books I will always read, and The House of Doors had the same lovely prose and delightful characters. As ever, it is a story of betrayals, but presented in such a way that it manages to produce lovable characters while not disguising their foibles, their complications.

I have been reading The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu on and off since about 2015, possibly earlier. I picked it up after having read The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon (which I now feel I should revisit). I kept putting it aside, however, because the treatment of women was so offhandedly horrible at times. Consent does not really seem to figure, much as there is an element of it in the poems. I do really enjoy this glimpse of a bygone period (a thousand years ago) and specific social setting (the Japanese court), however, and how much it goes into what is or is not appropriate at any given time. So may rules, and yet it does not seem to reduce the social anxiety of the individual. I absolutely adore the poetry convention of cryptic puns and allusions to more or less obscure classics. It was also very interesting to get a grounding in the imperial court and its convention, and the Shinto-Buddhist tensions within the individual characters throughout their lives. But Genji himself is deeply creepy. Do not adopt a daughter and then marry her. Or have sex with women just because you glimpsed their hand outside a screen.

I think "weird and wonderful" best describes Bishakh Som's graphic novel Apsara Engine. Occasionally very weird. Downright spooky and wallowing deep in social discomfort in others (unless that is just me reading about accurately rendered social situations). I really loved the trans architecture story, with the idea of creative city planning and daring to imagine a world without its limitations. There is something lovely there.

Sameproblemet by Kathrine Nedrejord is one of the best portrayals of the long-term effects of the Norwegian treatment of Sami people. The book is excellent. It flows wonderfully, and while I find myself ticking off the talking points, they are wonderfully supported and well represented, and I love the characters that slowly emerge. The diagnosis is spot on as regards the wider cultural ability to compartmentalise, and how being able to "pass" comes with a cost precisely in terms of cultural amnesia (both in the wider majority Norwegian culture and as an individual).

I picked up Red Famine by Anne Applebaum in 2022, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and while I knew more or less what the Holodomor entailed, and felt I was prepared for the suffering, I was unprepared for scale of STUPID that caused it. I had to leave the book aside time and again because I just could not handle it. Again and again it shows that when people choose to do wrong because they believe it will serve a future good, that leads nowhere good. Picking it back up in the context of the destruction of USAID and the genocide through starvation in Gaza, and reading about the effects of starvation on the human mind and body was not easy, particularly as the same talking points were used to deny it. A very good book, but a dreadful read. Especially as the book, written in 2017, ends on a hopeful note that we know does not currently apply

Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook & what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People by Darren Rix & Craig Cormick has the best title of the year, I think. The book itself is very interesting, though a little repetitive. I like the set-up of tracing the cultures along that "first" journey, however, and how it highlights the variety both in how they perceived and thought about, and interacted with, Cook and his people. The colonial exploitation is depressingly unvarying and horrifying. The book also comes with a healthy dollop of snark, particularly as regards Cook and his (re)naming practices.

If I did not know R. F. Kuang was in the middle of a PhD, I think I could have guessed by reading Katabasis. There is a layer of fear and frustration that gives me flashbacks, especially when mingled with the idealisation of a particular form of academia. The Hell of power abuse and the jarring disconnect between the image of the successful academic and the hollow, corrupt reality was not as stark in my experience, thankfully, but it is recognisable anyhow.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is one of those books I should have read many, many years ago -- but my disappointment in Neuromancer kept me back. People kept telling me to, and in the end it was the promise of a Sumerian side that made me pick it up. In retrospect, that is both the strength and weakness of the book: its forays into myth gives the central promise (and, reading it in 2025, a certain je ne sais quoi in its reading of a certain combination of religious populism and media control), but it sometimes goes too far and stumbles into von Däniken territory. I do like the worldbuilding. I mean, it sounds like Hell, and I am all too conscious that certain billionaires think this would be cool. But Uncle Enzo and the Aleutian betrayal are stellar. And in the end it was my realisation that I could do with half the action and half again the mythology which finally made me go out an buy all the books on Sumer that I really wanted.

Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, was lent to me by someone whose taste I trust, and I was not disappointed. I do not pretend to great knowledge of art, but this lyrical (without being boring) interweaving of story, history, and art description, without falling into the trap of aligning these too much, worked well for me. I looked up every painting, and was startled by how much they deviated from my imagination based on the description. Am delighted to learn about Toulouse-Lautrec's obsession with horses, which had so far passed me by.

I knew The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character by Samuel Noah Kramer was a fairly early introduction to its topic, but I am glad to have read it. It was fascinating to see how new the field still was in the 60s. It is full of "and then my friend and I happened upon [important new discovery]". My favourite bit is the revelation of Sumerian punning as a foundation for world religions (apologies to all the people who have had to sit to my recounting the bit about the rib). I knew in a general way the Akkadian versions of the myths, but it is all clearer to me now, and I loved tracing the stories along the List of Kings. I am now full of questions about how much you can actually say about a people based on what their scribes left in writing, but as a whole this was a fascinating read. All my love to Inanna and Urukagina (pending further reading), and I am now very curious about whether the suggestions of possible trade connections with the Indus Valley civilisation and Ethiopia have held up in newer research.

I ordered Dolly Jørgensen's Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums as soon as I learnt of its existence, waited patiently for its arrival, and then promptly read it. I am myself one of those who seek out extinction in museums, and it was very interesting to read this meditation on the practice and the implications of the different treatments of the remains. What is said, or not, seen, or not, and what story is told (the species, the individual, culpability, exoneration, learning from the past, or hoping for some not-quite resurrection). I really enjoyed this book, both as holding up a mirror to my own reception of extinction (a fondness for the dodo is apparently very in keeping with what museums have chosen to foreground), and as a way of learning about some species I was less familiar with.

I bought and started Ida Börjel's Ringe hjem: avlyttede samtaler fra russiske soldater i Ukraina as soon as it came out, but quickly had to put it aside because it was too brutal for my frame of mind (fingers should not become roses). I had decided to try to read a poem a day, when someone borrowed it for a while, but I made a concerted effort to get through it now at the tail end of the year. It is harrowing, but I admire the selection and emphasis created by Börjel, and the recurring hare imagery, which she also emphasises in the epilogue. There is one counter-poem based on a video from a Ukrainian soldier which offers a counter-point to the misery, though the setting is as bad, if not worse. I really like Börjel's discussion of the victim-perpetrator dynamic, and how the very visible victimhood of some Russian soldiers does not excempt them from responsibility for their actions.

Rabih Alameddine is always a delight, and I had long been planning to pick up his The Hakawati. The nested stories within stories are wild and wonderful, and while they should be disorienting in how the layers of storytelling get more complex, they are not. I also love how the stories weave thematically through the war and the family origins. Such a sad story, in many ways, on war and death and human fallibility; but it is delightfully joyful with the finest range of characters. You should read this book.

Oversatt litteratur i middelalderens Norge by Stefka G. Eriksen did not quite live up to my very high hopes, but it was a very interesting read about both the people who travelled to places like Paris and Bologna (which must have been pretty wild) from 12th century Norway, and the range of material that was translated in Norway (with tantalising references to the good stuff that was translated on Iceland), and some notes on the road it took to get here and the international connections that allowed it (Baarlam's saga, with its Buddha material is notable!). An interesting overview, and I loved how it challenged the ideas I had formed of Norwegian literary culture at the time!

I am going to stop there. I have finally made the step of joining StoryGraph, so will try to keep that updated more or less throughout the year.

May all your books live up to expectations, and may you find something you did not expect. And may we all have a better year than we expect in 2026.