Sixteen years of reading wildly at Time's Flow Stemmed. Two peaks, one trough. Gratitude.

You don't have to reveal yourself to others, only to those that you love, because then it's no longer revealing yourself to appear but only to give. There's so much more strength in a person who appears only when necessary. — Albert Camus, Notebook entry, September 1937

The water tower that Mathias Énard lived in in Berlin (according to his memoir/travelogue, which I'm currently translating)

Every time it seems to me that I've grasped the deep meaning of the world, it is its simplicity that always overwhelms me. — Albert Camus, 'The Wrong Side and the Right Side'

'It seemed better to accept my pride and try to make use of it, rather than give myself, as Chamfort would put it, principles stronger than my character.' — Camus, preface to 'The Wrong Side and the Right Side'.

My Book of the Year. Read about it (and others) here: review31.co.uk/essay/view/1...

‘Except for certain evenings when Marthe came or when he went out with her, and except for his correspondence with the girls in Tunis, his entire life lay in the yellowed image the mirror offered of a room where the filthy oil-lamp stood among the bread-crusts.’ — Albert Camus, ‘A Happy Death’

Some tentative reading plans for 2026, subject as always to caprice: timesflowstemmed.com/2025/12/20/r...

Found in the @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk today, one of the books I've most anticipated this year.

Looking forward to Nastassja Martin's 'East of Dreams'. 'In the Eye of the Wild' has never left me.

That particular register, call it the pedagogue's affliction, which announces itself in the voice before the actual advice arrives. The woman on the train station platform to whom the counsel was directed maintained an admirable composure throughout.

‘Murder by the Book’: a Sunday evening well spent.

'Nothing very remarkable has happened.' — A. E. Housman, letter to his mother

A masterclass in psychological pressure that makes Hitchcock look merciful.

'What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.' Sir Thomas Browne, 'Hydriotaphia', 1658

Hammer, heat, and twisted steel. All in a day’s blacksmithing.

Major Rowland Raven-Hart and his “Canoeing in Ireland”: irishwaterwayshistory.com/people/major... Not quite the rabbit-hole I intended to follow.

A satisfactory year in reading. Particular favorites: Flaubert’s ‘Salammbô’, Hélène Bessette, Bukowski’s ‘Post Office’, ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, Édouard Levé‘s ‘Autoportrait’, ‘Kokoro’, Danilo Kiš, and ‘On the Calculation of Volume I’. timesflowstemmed.com/2025/12/12/m...

A satisfactory year in reading. Particular favorites: Flaubert’s ‘Salammbô’, Hélène Bessette, Bukowski’s ‘Post Office’, ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, Édouard Levé‘s ‘Autoportrait’, ‘Kokoro’, Danilo Kiš, and ‘On the Calculation of Volume I’. timesflowstemmed.com/2025/12/12/m...

‘I find the task has grown on me and I continue with it for my own sake too . . . The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them.’ Plutarch is every bit as companionable as Herodotus. Good company at dinner: many stories, questions. They’d stay late.

'Contact with Greek culture came to him late in life, and he was really quite old when he took up Greek books and had his rhetorical style improved by Demosthenes, and to a lesser extent by Thucydides.' Plutarch on Cato the Elder (Robin Waterfield's translation)

Jean Rhys being furious with Diana Athill that Wide Sargasso Sea went out with two unnecessary words: “then” and “quite”.

Sunday: Cristina Campo's essays (and puzzling over Kathryn Davis's faintly odd introduction - "a firm believer in destiny, she was also born with a yod in her chart, betokening an extraordinary and unshakeable sense of purpose").