January 2026 reads

January Reading

The Qur'an - translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem

Les Enfants Terribles - Jean Cocteau

You Are Awesome - Matthew Syed

 The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster

Malone Dies  - Samuel Beckett 

 

The Qur'an 

This translation of The Qur'an was something I found in a charity shop (checks calendars) yeah some while back, then it sat on the shelves for quite a while in advance of my finally picking it up at the back end of 2025. While I do not profess to any particular faith (I was brought up Christian, left to my own decisions early, and have enjoyed much doubt, study of literature of all kinds, and problems with literalism, since), I started The Qur'an with an open mind and a desire to try to understand it better. 

 

I'm glad I've read it. It was sprinkled throughout with intriguing moments of poetry, which had me harbouring a wish to have enough of a grasp of Arabic to get more out of the original words. This seems quite central a point: that the book is, explicitly, God communicating in Arabic, at a specific point in history, and as part of a canon of works doing the same thing in different situations (as recorded and studied by the Peoples of the Book).  As a modern English speaking human, there are a number of aspects that are difficult to reconcile. However, the injunction to "Be mindful of God" is a recurring feature of human thought, and an appropriate summary of the intent of the text.

 

Les Enfants Terribles

Overlapping with The Qur'an, I started into Les Enfants Terribles. I suppose I might have been able to find a more "Modern" text to juxtapose with the desert certainties of the former,  but the snowbound 1929 avant-garde poésie of Jean Cocteau would take some beating. Also of its time, yet occupying a similar liminal space. Some of the descriptive moments communicated a (melo)dramatic sense of the cosmos that was quite appealing, though I also got the sense that reading it as a teen it might have had a more seismic impact. I've not read any other Cocteau, or seen any of the films, which it occurred to me was a bit of lacuna, to be added to the list of Things To Check Out.

 

 

You Are Awesome

Matthew Syed's book is basically a growth mindset/Carol Dweck primer for young people. One of the kids had read it and got a lot out of it, so I enjoyed a riffle through it to engage with that. It covers ideas like marginal gains and positive self-belief, and is an easy read. 

 The New York Trilogy

Well, this was a game changer. 

Like Cocteau, I had not read any Paul Auster before. This came to me via a friend who had, as I recall, made some off-hand comment about it being something I'd be into. So, I popped it on the shelf and there it sat, full of promise, something I might be into. Sure enough, several years later in December 2025, J read it and handed it to me with a raised eyebrow and a "Well. You're going to have to read this." Finally following which, I dived in and raced through the three stories in a few days of open-mouthed excitement. 

 

It was one of those books where by the end of the second section I was flipping through the front pages looking for the list of whatever else I needed to get my hands on. Thinking about finding him on trips to the library, charity shops, even contemplating going into actual book shops. As well as manifesting an urge to dive deep into the catalogue, it also provided a reminder that I love those worlds of words and writing, characters, authors, notebooks, the published and unpublished, and the suspect overlays between them.

 

Quite enjoyed it, then!

 

Into February

  

January is rounded off with Malone Dies, which as I type I am about one-third from the end of, or two-thirds from the beginning, depending on which way I pick up the book. Like Cocteau and Auster, there is a Beckett-shaped gap in my reading. Back in time I read Godot, sans dire, and I was lucky enough to see John Hurt in Krapp's Last Tape, part of a Beckett Centenary Festival at the Barbican in London, 2006. Which I note with some alarm was 20 years ago now. Time flies. Beckett's prose is funny in a way that suits wintry nights, and the mood of age inexorably creeping up behind hefting a leather sap.  

 

 

 

 

A few notes on process

Rather than individual posts for books when I've finished them, an endeavour that comes under what I recognise as "best intentions", for the start of 2026 I thought I'd attempt a trial of having one post for all the books (and in the front room pile them). 

The intention is to make keeping up to date with writing the blog a more manageable process, rather than resulting in multiple partially-completed posts on individual books that I never get round to finishing for whatever reason. 

This shouldn't preclude longer-form posts on individual reads, or whatever thematic explorations may pop up from time to time, and I'm always amenable to the concept of expanding ideas or responses to particular books such as they might occur. 

There is also a potential problem of bounding off to complete a response immediately upon completing a volume, rather than letting it settle. Instant reactions can tend to distort one's opinions slightly. Hopefully the monthly digest format will allow for more reflective responses. 

Stack status

2026 seems to be very much like 2025 and several years preceding. All stacked up and nowhere to shelve.

This is what we're dealing with. Vertical arrangements to maximise space. Titles that have been here in excess of multiple years. Four of these arrived as Christmas presents in the last week. 

And it's not even all the unread books in the house. Bedside cabinet, shelves in the lounge... The bibliophilia is real and enduring, but I'm getting uneasy about it.

It isn't the first time this has happened. The Great Cull of 2018 saw 14 boxes of books moved on with love, a radical overhaul of a lifetime holding them close, building walls, a fortress deep and mighty. Howl's castle had to move.

The problem, book aficionados will recognise, is that all of these volumes made their way here for some reason. One doesn't simply bring books in on a whim. 

         Well okay yeah one does, but mainly they're all validated and subject to, er, strict critical scrutiny processes. And fairness! Why trust one passing fancy and not another?

 Anyway, yeah, the piling up is generating unease. A more concise reading programme is required. Strategy-wise, this will mean a blend of:

Dave's Project Rule

 If the books were procured to aid some Future Project and this Project is, realistically, unlikely to begin within six months - move them on. (Thanks Dave)

The 30 Page Rule

If it's not happening after 30 pages, move on (variant on various writers' 20—50 page rules).

And, well, reading, reading, reading. Last year it was about 36 books, which should see most of this pile reduced in 12 months, unless anything, y'know, whimsical happens.

Right, that's the terrain. Now, back to the freshly-returned Apology podcast, where Henry Rollins has been on 12 minutes and I've already noted down five must-get titles.

2025 Year In Books

 Having begun the year with best intentions ("...you were saying something about best intentions?") the full-dress documentation of what I've been reading fell by the wayside a bit. OK, by "a bit" I mean "entirely". Life is what happens, as any fule kno. 

However, I was doing what passes for meticulous documentary process here in the big 25, by taking a picture of every book as I read it. So here, with a slightly starey eye on the calendar and a bit of hasty last-minute tidying up, I present Blogocentric's Pictorial Guide to the Year's Reading:

As a selection, it looks quite appealing stitched like a patchwork quilt. 

There are a few titles missing from the gallery, now I come to peruse it. I definitely read a copy of Grant Morrison/Sean Murphy's Joe the Barbarian from the library, for example - I'm fairly sure I snapped it at the same time as the Dredd volume, but... *shrug*... And there are of course books I pick up off the shelves and scan a few sections from now and then when I feel like reconnecting, but they're not for inclusion here.

Henceforth (part of a general drive, etc) I intend to devote time to writing up at least brief notes for all the titles, with more detailed responses for some. And I'll italicise that best intention in anticipation of whatever metaphorical Tyson-esque punch in the face might occur to nudge a rethink.

Looking at the stack, certain themes dominate. Walking/travel-related books and lots of chess study, mainly. Along with that there was a Marlowe trifecta, a few shelf-clearance completions, some fascinating music bio, and weightier tomes that added challenge for someone who discovers they have put on a few pounds around the middle in reading terms. 

Maybe the biggest single reading-related shift occurred earlier this year, when we finally acted on a notion of forbidding phones from the bedroom. I am not as fond of graphs as, say, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal or XKCD, but if I was, I'd insert one right here demonstrating a dramatic relationship between falling scrolling times and rising attention to books. 

Hope all was as intended for your new year celebrations, and see you here for book-related stuff in 2026.

 

The Fearful Void

(March 2025)

There's a moment where Geoffrey Moorhouse, on the first leg of an arduous journey across the Sahara the ill-advised latitudinal way, discusses the thought process that got him into this mess, and now prevents him from getting out of it.

"I was, simply, very afraid that I might become like these people... so my haunted imagination told me as it strove to delay the loss of self."

These ruminations being precipitated by taking a dump in a dune. Such mixing of the mystic and the coarsely material is something that Moorhouse leads us through repeatedly across a fascinated and fascinating book. 

Moorhouse's account of his alarmingly swift physical deterioration on the journey seems a salient lesson in any number of things. Blurb by Susan Hill refers to "courage, endurance, and triumph", which last adjective seems to discount the unfinished journey, the hallucinatory sickness, the "raw and weeping patches of flesh", to say nothing of a strongly-hinted-at imminent marital breakdown.

Such suffering seems at times not a noble achievement but an unnecessary one. A little hardship may be that grain of sand in the oyster of the soul, but Moorhouse's privations seem, at their worst, a kind of martyrdom, "beautifully written" though it is, at its best. His prose throws up more than occasional thrills of scale: at one point he and his current companion and their camels are "insects creeping forward to a rim of the world that might never be revealed, across pure and unbounded space..." The madman dragging himself across a desert of the mind, teetering "close to a brink of a revelation... But not quite" put me in mind of a tormented HP Lovecraft narrator, desperately scrawling their fleeting apprehensions of some vast exterior truth hinted at periodically in and on the distant hills.

To this reader in 2025, terrific though the book was, there was certainly something alien and peculiar in the scope of the project, with the British journalist moved to take up the journey because it's there, spied from the window of a passenger jet. The overt spiritual quest metaphor jostles alongside sociocultural and post-colonial allegory implied in the entire concept. The aptly-named imprint Paladin had a line in publishing similar accounts of post-war exploration and sixties ego-dislocation taken to literal extremes by (white European) hiking types. So, knight-errant Woodhouse tests his ideals of conquest and comes up short, left with a grasp at something numinous among the shifting sands of the desert. Or it could be he's merely poking at the remains of a rumination. Like the matter in the life-saving water he sips gratefully at one point, sometimes perhaps it's best not to look too closely.

Paper Towns

 (Read this one in March 2025)

Another bit of a "quick read", picked up I think from a supermarket charity shelf. I didn't realise John Green was the Fault In Our Stars John Green until talking about it after, and I haven't read that so won't say anything else about it.

My initial note (four or five pages in) was "first person American quirky, Wes Anderson vibes". By this I mean earlier Wes Anderson, recognisably Americana-ish, Salinger eccentrics vibes. Talky high schoolers in unusual situations? John Hughes another flavor note.

 

The book is from 2008 and does a lot of pre-ubiquitous-internet internet references, that sort of date it and sort of create a weird nostalgia snare: combined with the bookish self-consciousness of the rest of the novel, it evokes a now possibly wholly-dissolved membrane between digital mediation and analogue solidity, which perhaps is me retrofitting an ill-considered cultural notional something more to the book than might have been intended.

 

As the book itself seems to suggest, maybe now we're processing things differently (he drafted into a phone) we lack something that used to be offered by well-thumbed page corners turned down, highlighted connections and margin notes. Stuff literally hidden in doorways. Maybe those memories are as simultaneously there-and-not-there as the title conceit.

As a novel, though, it's deeply novelish - a manic pixie American dream girl (Margo) is quest object for the massively square Quentin, in a slightly old-fashioned (even for 2008) follow-the-clues road trip romance, complete with tokenistic support ensemble (also: too much dialogue). It seemed particularly frustrating to have a support ensemble that then just evaporates for the denouement, even as the now squarer-than-square narrator foregrounds them, and the "real" life they represent, as part of his justification for avoiding any sort of commitment to the joyful abandon signified by Margo.

Thusly, the Narrator wades squarely through Whitman, Woody Guthrie and various modes of wanderlust 'til he finally recognises his shadowy anima... and walks away from it? An apparent acceptance of enduring alienation, from true-but-too-eccentric love, or self, or something, seems yet another dumb decision made with all the dumb, square certainties of youth. 

 

Which, of course, resonated. Probably I would have loved this in my late teens/early 20s, though would even then have compared it unfavourably to early Douglas Coupland. 

 

What I got most from it now was a reminder of what it was like to find depth and power in books, music, and those cross-references that mattered more than everything else when that age, in that age. 

The Paris Notebooks

"We'll always have Paris."

"...as long as you have a notebook with the word Paris in it, right?"

My Holidays Are Short

Last posts here were a moment ago... busy, busy. This was written in half term break, October 2024.

This volume was bumped up the pile on the - as it turned out correct - assumption that relentless pulp action would be just the ticket for a brain reset.

Spillane was a master. Not having read any Mike Hammers before, I had a vague notion of plots and preoccupations, and was entirely hooked from the opening pages of I, The Jury onwards. Once started, that foot hit the pedal and it was easy to roar through all three books in about the same number of days. 

These are the first of the Mike Hammer titles, and one gets a feel for the style quite quickly. Solipsistic and simple from the titles in, it's sex-and-death-wish fulfilment with the kicker that no one gets their wishes fulfilled adequately, least of all the first person who rages his way through the tales without a damn given. 

 

One can correctly predict the deaths of most of the characters, mainly broads and hoods, by dint of the fact that literally everyone dies except Hammer, Pat Chambers (his NYPD foil) and Velda (the smokin' hot, also tough-as-lacquered-nails secretary). 

 

Sex and violence, Spillane reasoned, were in combination irresistible, so, well, here you go. There are intriguing contextual ideas of post-war nihilism and self-abuse to consider, but these are not ideas explored in the texts so much as set on fire then stubbed drunkenly with angry fingers into ashtray shreds. It's as unsophisticated and cartoonish as a character called Mike Hammer would suggest. I lined up those triple shots and drank them down in greedy gulps.