On Christmas Day, @bibliopaul.bsky.social and I bring our year-end tradition to a close by counting down our top five books of 2025. Happy Christmas everyone! open.substack.com/pub/mookse/p...

Merry Christmas!🎅🎄

New #bookmail. From the Seagull Books winter sale.

Favourite fiction read in terrible 2025, a tower. If you knowingly or recklessly recommended any of these to me, or cheered me up on here in any way at all then a big festive thumbs up to you! Everybody decent had a hard year but don't give up. Merry Christmas and here's to 2026: Tyrants Destroyed🎄❤️

Time to start dipping into this collection.

She captures the human condition so beautifully. It’s funny, devastating, poignant. Her observations are so clear-eyed.

New #bookmail, more CF Ramuz. BEAUTY ON EARTH, translated by @mbailatj.bsky.social.

Part 1 of my Books of the Year, focusing on titles originally written in English: 1streading.wordpress.com/2025/12/22/b...

Exciting #bookmail. The first two books from my @charcopress.com subscription have arrived.

'Dead. Wounded. How accustomed we had grown to these words. No one felt any particular alarm or distress. No one said, "How awful!" or "What a tragedy!" Our way of life had changed, and, in accord with this new way of life, we just thought, "Remove the dead and bandage the wounded."' #NYRBWomen25

Happy 21st December evening everyone. May the Great Veiled Bear pass over you house tonight and not present you with one of his cursed Christmas cookies.

I discovered some wonderful books from Persephone this year of which these three were particularly great. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/m...

"Of course, supper and a warm room for the night would have been more pleasant than standing on an open platform in the drizzle, but by this time our wants had grown modest. We were confident that nobody was intending to have us shot, and this confidence filled our souls with a happy contentment."

Weekend reading.

READING HIGHLIGHTS OF 2025, a 🧵 1. Elizabeth Taylor, ANGEL “She hated the word ‘gibberish’, however it was pronounced: it bit into her like acid. There were other words, equally hurtful, which reviewers had used and which she would never be able to hear without feeling pain.”

READING HIGHLIGHTS OF 2025, a 🧵 1. Elizabeth Taylor, ANGEL “She hated the word ‘gibberish’, however it was pronounced: it bit into her like acid. There were other words, equally hurtful, which reviewers had used and which she would never be able to hear without feeling pain.”

"Yes," said Olyonushka, as if guessing my thoughts. "He's carting us around as if we were young calves! But then why shouldn't he? We're not much different from calves - all we want is something warm to drink and a place to lie down for the night." #NYRBWomen25

OUTRAGEOUS stack of bangers!! Good *lord*. Honoured to see so many of our titles here - the company they are keeping is quite something. Particularly lovely to see LIFE WITH A STAR here, one that continues to tick along nicely but deserves many more readers:

"It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the audacities were artistic, & that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass & a green sky. The Sideren set were tired of the conventional color-scheme in art & conduct."

“Saki’s mother was killed by a cow when he was a child. If that doesn’t turn you into a writer with a morbid fascination with, and deep-seated fear of, the natural world, nothing will” — @naomialderman.bsky.social on Saki’s razor-sharp & merciless stories 💙📚 3/8 www.theguardian.com/books/2012/s...

Starting this collection today, apt for December. First story - THE RECKONING by Edith Wharton.

'The little dog was fretting all night, growling and whimpering. And at dawn Olyonushka said in her sleep, in a loud, spine-chilling voice, "I know why the dog's howling. There's a bullet hole in that man's coat, and there's dried blood all around it."' #NYRBWomen25

Some of my favourite books this year were from @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social thanks to the wonderful #NYRBWomen25 readalong.

These are MY BEST BOOKS OF 2025 featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Anita Brookner, Dino Buzzati, Jiří Weil, Han Kang, Caroline Blackwood and more. New blog post here: readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/m...

Here are my favourite books of 2025. It was another wonderful year or reading! readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/m...

Here are my favourite books of 2025. It was another wonderful year or reading! readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/m...

These are MY BEST BOOKS OF 2025 featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Anita Brookner, Dino Buzzati, Jiří Weil, Han Kang, Caroline Blackwood and more. New blog post here: readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/m...

My new blog post on THERE'S NO TURNING BACK by Alba de Céspedes - a brilliant, perceptive novel of female friendships and women's lives set in early 20th century Rome. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/16/t...

"It's as if we're on a bridge. We've already departed from one side and haven't yet reached the other. What we've left behind we don't look back at. What awaits us is still enveloped in fog. Some lean too far out, and they fall in and drown. The others, for good or ill, go on to the other shore."

New on my blog, I've written about Alba de Céspedes' brilliant and incisive novel, THERE'S NO TURNING BACK. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/16/t...

My new blog post on THERE'S NO TURNING BACK by Alba de Céspedes - a brilliant, perceptive novel of female friendships and women's lives set in early 20th century Rome. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/16/t...

#NYRBWomen25 Who is ready to read more Teffi?! ✨ 'Considered her single greatest work, MEMORIES is a deeply personal account of the author’s last months in Russia & Ukraine, suffused with her acute awareness of the political currents churning around her.' Starting tomorrow!

Announcing the National Book Critics Circle 2025 Longlist for Fiction

Rereading The House of Dolls by Barbara Comyns and hugely enjoying it. Doesn't seem to be as celebrated as her other novels, or indeed to be much read at all, but it's dark, funny, poignant, and features one of the most deliciously appalling parties in literature.

Hosted my family for Sunday lunch. Now for some quiet reading time.

"We recall all too often how, when we last saw some friend of ours, they had sad eyes and pale lips. And we always know, once it is too late, what we ought to have done back then, how we should have taken our friend by the hand and led them away from the shadow of darkness."

I read some excellent books in November, a month dominated by Nordic Lit. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/12/a...

A novel by the grandson of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salvador Elizondo with a first line which echoes Juan Rulfo? Impossible to resist! Mateo Garcia Elizondo's Last Date in El Zapotal, translated by Robin Myers and published by @charcopress.com 1streading.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/l...

I read some excellent books in November, a month dominated by Nordic Lit. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/12/a...

One of the best (new to me) writers I came across this year was Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878-1947). All 3 of these books have the same basic idea (Horrible Thing Happens in the Mountains) but go in very different directions. Creepy, subtle, strange, modernist, fractal, and way ahead of their time.

I'm one of the contributors on this excellent episode, talking about my favourite book from a Czech author🙈 Thank you @mookse.bsky.social and @bibliopaul.bsky.social for having me.

Merve Emre in Granta on her year in reading. "I mostly avoided contemporary fiction. The American exceptions were Makenna Goodman’s hallucinatory closet drama, Helen of Nowhere...." Thanks Merve! grantamag.substack.com/p/a-year-in-...

Top 10 Books with Snowy Settings If the meteorologists have got their calculations right, the UK will be hit by a snow barrage this weekend. Forecasts like this always get people excited because we so rarely get snow in the UK (Scotland excepted) but I prefer to read about it rather than…

Post your favourite work of art from exactly 50 years before you were born. CHOP SUEY, Edward Hopper

"In New York, people feel about art the way they feel about wine in France: if it's from California, it ain't wine because wine's French, and if it's from L.A., it ain't art because art's from New York. That's their mythic definition of art."

New on my blog I've written about Eve Babitz's I USED TO BE CHARMING - a collection of essays on LA, music, art, fashion, films, celebrities, travel and more, and brimming with her trademark wit and glamorous style. Read this for #NYRBWomen25. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/i...

My new blog post on Eve Babitz's rich, varied, and witty compilation of essays on the allure of LA, Hollywood, fashion, fitness, and the vibrant art and music scene, featuring Coppola, Pacino, Jim Morrison, Walter Hopps, Marcel Duchamp, and so on. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/i...

My new blog post on Eve Babitz's rich, varied, and witty compilation of essays on the allure of LA, Hollywood, fashion, fitness, and the vibrant art and music scene, featuring Coppola, Pacino, Jim Morrison, Walter Hopps, Marcel Duchamp, and so on. readersretreat2017.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/i...