Not going to lie, I’m finding this heavy going… So much about it that I want to like (a novel about psychoanalysis, about sickness, about a world that doesn’t quite know its own upheavals), but I can’t make those interesting things click into place… Have others had a better time with it?

❤️

Happy Christmas! If the reading year begins on 21 December, this is my first of 2026: Zeno’s Conscience, trans. William Weaver. Cigarettes and psychoanalysis.

Radical Times New Roman: “A font is not a transparency which you can entirely ignore as you read. It mediates the text, and the medium is, as we know, full of messages.”

A desperate story for Cambridge University (and UK HE), however you spin it. I get that public organisations need to speak to incoming governments, but more than three years away from an election...? Does anyone think that they used these meetings to push back? I'd love to be wrong about this.

I'm about three months late to this, but I read it today, and after a term of teaching students to care with their lives about reading, and writing (and feeling, and experiencing, and creating) it hit really hard. Every single line. anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

The Twenty Days of Turin (‘A Report from the End of the Century’), trans. Ramon Glazov; it’s a ghost story, a political allegory, a prophecy. It’s barely a hundred pages, but I liked it a lot and it freaked me right out.

Ok, this was brilliant: an incredibly (impossibly) erudite study of European art and culture’s debt to the Middle East - but also feverish, woozy, romantic, forlorn. It’s almost too much (and too intense) to take in - but so affecting. I loved it.

“The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought.” Must read piece by Noah McCormack with too many quotaboe lines to select one! thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

And now this, my first Enard - Compass, trans. Charlotte Mandell @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social

Two crackers just finished. Oğuz Atay, Waiting for the Fear (trans. Ralph Hubbell), knotty stories of inertia, loss, absence, beautifully felt; Annie Ernaux, The Other Girl (trans. Alison L. Strayer), even by Ernaux’s standards this was stunning, a letter to the sister who died before she was born.

New on the blog today, I've written about ten excellent novellas I highly recommend. Featuring books by Anita Brookner, William Trevor. Muriel Spark and many more! #BookSky #Novellas #NovNov 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/10/30/t...

Ebert’s review looms large for me, not the least of which because he pinpointed a moment I found mesmerizing;

I loved it. So unforced, so easy, but no glib conclusions, and an ending that tilts it all off balance, leaves you speechless. A beautiful, sweet, sad film.

For one reason or another it has been weeks (months!) since we’ve sat down in the evening to watch a film, so this feels really uncommonly exciting. So much praise and love for this film on here!

Next up: Oğuz Atay, Waiting for the Fear, translated by Ralph Hubbell.

‘For Jorie Graham, the teeming possibilities of lyric – tense and mood, syntax and sound crossed with layout and measure – harbour a fullness of time which is neither mere chronology nor novelistic plot.’ Fiona Green on ‘To 2040’ and other recent work: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Update: they didn't. I just love teaching with Gillian Rose, even though I have such a fragile grounding in the philosophy. LOVE'S WORK is a gift.

These books never fail.

It’s going to have to wait for a few weeks, but my copy of Schattenfroh arrived this afternoon.

New teaching year; let’s go!

One Battle After Another is incredible on the big screen, and there’s so much about it to love and admire (it’s funny, it’s thrilling, it moves with such a sinuous and hazy rhythm), but I left feeling underwhelmed by the final 15 minutes or so.

Wow. This didn’t quite click (for me) until a hundred pages from the end; it’s funny and tender and formally brilliant - and then something desperate and furious and awful bursts out and consumes it. I wasn’t prepared for how hard the ending would hit: I think I always feel that with Krasznahorkai.

Today is publication day for PAPER AND THE MAKING OF EARLY MODERN LITERATURE! Available in paper or digital form www.pennpress.org/978151282744... @pennpress.bsky.social

Godt voet alle creaturen / God feeds all creatures. Leiden botanical gardens

One last day of summer light!

Best thing I've ever read about AI and the academy - every line a banger

Back to Proust (trans. James Grieve). The Lydia Davis translation of the first volume was so good: really looking forward to this one too.

Also found my way to the end of this brilliant, kaleidoscopic book. I get the frustration with Pynchon, but it’s dazzling, just as funny as I expected and a thousand times more moving.

Hmm, I didn’t love it. Fernanda Torres is amazing, everything has real conviction and urgency, but I feel like the film doesn’t know what it wants to grab onto, jumps over the hard questions and settles as a warm tribute to great people (Rubens & Eunice Paiva) and great actors (Torres, Montenegro).

The end of three weeks in Brazil, and I’m finally getting round to seeing this.

Always proud of the things Peterhouse Choir achieve, but never more so than on days like this, when the Choir's first ever album goes on general release with Naxos. Remarkable music from @peterhousecam.bsky.social Chapel from the 1630s Listen here: naxos.lnk.to/8574700AC

“Was the signal going around the planet, or through it, or was linear progression not at all the point, with everything instead happening simultaneously at every point of the circuit?” (Pynchon, Against the Day, p. 123) This book is beautiful!

Summer reading; lots of it was wonderful. Now time for a short pause, and a long book: about to crack open AGAINST THE DAY.

"Bill Forsyth’s 1983 masterpiece LOCAL HERO is perhaps the greatest film ever made about attuning to the frequency of a place, of someone fitting in where they least expected."

Radiant this morning.

Just opened a book I started a fortnight ago, but then left for a bit. Two bookmarks fell out. Which led me to think maybe there’s a small ghost story where, every morning, a book contains more and more bookmarks. Different readers on different pages. Who reads the book while you sleep?

May I also add to this thread of early modern images of happy student life?

I'm late to this, I know, but MICHAEL KOHLHAAS is so, so good. One hundred pages long; it moves like some terrible machine, no waste at all. Wilder and wilder with every step, and deeper and deeper into the grip of its own crazy story. Really does read like a Kafka ur-text. A banger!

Two new reads, two recommendations, two German novels from 1809-10. Goethe is brilliant, unsettling; you keep thinking it's about to settle into schematic observation, and then something ecstatic or horrific blows it out of the water. Have just started Kleist: such an amazing, relentless narrative.

Bookshelf ghosts.

One new read and an old one. Two books of puzzles: stories within stories, worlds within worlds. Loving them.

#A-Schubert-A-Day starts today. I am attempting to listen through the complete Hyperion Schubert Song edition, one song per day until there are no more. I have no idea how sustainable this will be, but I am going to give it a try.

This is so weird and so hypnotic, and the starry cast just makes it more of a mixed-up dream -- like a crossover between Picnic at Hanging Rock and A Field in England and somehow more unsettling than either -- amazing to think that it predates them by so many years.

‘Power is surely the greatest moral problem that human beings face, and is important above all in monarchical, courtly, political tragedies like Hamlet: this of course gives the play its mysterious third line, “Long live the king!”’ Barbara Everett on ‘Hamlet’: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Beautiful. I had been in a (very slight) funk, but then I watched these two intriguing little films and started a book that I actually wanted to read and had a bit of chocolate, and everything's ok again.

This and 26 Bathrooms: fantastic short Peter Greenaway documentaries. Moving, puzzling little reveries. Wonderful to see them both for the first time! www.architectural-review.com/essays/26-ba...

Such an exceptional novel. Read it a few years ago and it blew my mind. Don't think I've ever read a work of fiction that so urgently challenges the willing suspension of disbelief. Nothing quite like it.

I've been reading Trieste by Dasa Drndic for the last few days and it has absolutely wiped me out. Reading it next to Celan, Pound, etc., and my head is spinning. What a work of fiction - as well as a historical and documentary indictment of the world that reads it.