March 2026 Reads

 March 2026 Reads

For March I started out with a mind to read a couple of novels and something political, which I nearly managed... but The Difference Engine slowed me down a bit more than anticipated, and then I had most of a week away without many opportunities to read, and then the next thing you know the clocks have gone forward, spring is sprung and April knocks on the door once more. 

Still, an interesting selection... 

The List

The Difference Engine - William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

The Spike Milligan Letters (ed. Norma Farnes) 

The Agricola and The Germania - Tacitus

The Way I See It - Cliff Richard 

What is Anarchism?- Donald Rooum and Others

The Books 

The Difference Engine - William Gibson & Bruce Sterling

 From 1990, this is considered a foundational text of steampunk, based in a world where we see the earlier adoption of computation devices, particularly by France and the UK.  

There is an unwieldy globetrotting plot involving various characters in search of a McGuffinish set of data cards, coveted by "clackers" (hip retro-lingo for hackers) for bringing Babbage machines (ye "difference engine") grinding to a halt... in much the same way as a lengthy Untouchables-inflected middle section where a gang of four Imperial likely lads takes on a band of anarchists in an East London dockside warehouse (an idea surprisingly untouched by Guy Ritchie at time of writing) does for the novel. 

 Although touching on details of equipment (the "camphorated cellulose" data cards, steam powered racing cars, kinotype devices for projecting images, etc) Gibson and Sterling don't lavish attention on machine-gun wielding Zeppelins piloted by people with flying goggles and leather kit, as later iterations of the genre tend to; they do seem to enjoy getting into period costume and romping about a mostly-convincingly-rendered London, and the focus is the people and their intrigues within a world that is being shaped by an emerging technology, which is of course far more interesting in many respects. Still, though, with a closing section rammed with excellent but tangential riffs, I felt more a sense of loose endings and hinted-at story lines wafted past.  

The Spike Milligan Letters (ed. Norma Farnes) 

 Dear Mark

It has come to my attention beyond the grave that you found a slightly water-damaged copy of a small collection of my correspondence, on a supermarket charity table. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Yes, yes - some of them are funny, some haven't aged well, some seem to be barely-disguised cries for help that should have stayed in Norma Farnes’ filing cabinets… but that's not why I'm writing. 

Listen, chum: I know you can't resist a bit of Milligan, classing me among the absurdist geniuses from the 1950s - and rightly fucking so,  I might add - but it's precisely this sort of whim-driven impulse purchasing that’s maintaining yer Endless Piles of Books. You're never going to get through them if you carry on snapping up any old shit - even if you do read it in about half an hour. 

Focus!

Love, light, and peace 

Spike 

 Tacitus - The Agricola and The Germania

In advance of a trip to Rome I thought I'd tackle one of the "classics" on the shelf and read two pieces of Imperial Roman propaganda, one a biography of the Governor of Britain (Agricola), and one a study of the peoples of Germany. A timely reminder that history is written by the winners. Our tour guide at the Colosseum later noted that the continent-spanning frenzy of slaughter witnessed by thousands of spectators was predicated on Roman superiority and hierarchy. As actual history, The Agricola in particular is short on detail that would be useful (locations in the British Isles are frustratingly vague), but written (translated) with a certain kind of dry understatement that has likely led to the enduring appeal nearly a couple of thousand years after.      

 The Way I See It - Cliff Richard

From 1968, another impulse pick-up from the local charity shelves in the supermarket. Here's Sir Harry Webb aka Cliff Richard at age 28 offering his thoughts as a high-profile Christian on various issues. He's quite keen to deploy a kind of folksy non-judgmental casual tone (e.g. the chapter on drugs is called "Not For Me!") while also being quite low-key dogmatic in matters Christian, which comes across as insightful and annoying as you might expect. 

 

It was also interesting to note that his hankering to play Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights in some capacity had already taken firm root at this point. 

What is Anarchism? (Donald Rooum and others)

Finally shifting away from definite articles to this slender volume, which I enjoyed as the political something earlier identified. 

The first part is a general introduction to one of the still-most-misrepresented political philosophies... most of which material was familiar, but was explained with clarity. This book is from 1992 - it'd be interesting to see how a more recent interpretation would read.

Of the various anarchist heavyweights excerpted in the second half of the book, I got on particularly with Malatesta, though this was perhaps because I'd just come back from Italy and was surfing an infatuation with all such things. He just seemed to write with directness, without a suffusion of jargon, that appealed. Perhaps this is what is needed to help people get behind the ideas. 

 

 Coming Up In April

Thoughts turn to Home and Away (writing about football by Knausgaard and Ekelund), Notes To John by Joan Didion, and a pile of Italo Calvino. And the month begins with a much-anticipated trip to Barter Books in Alnwick. Oh dear, what was they a-thinking of?! Sometimes it snows BOOKS in April. 

February 2026 Reads

Fires, and being fired up

Context 

In the northern hemisphere, Celtic traditions etc, the start of February marked Imbolc, midpoint between winter solstice and vernal equinox, marking the first stirrings of spring. At which point thoughts turned to spring cleaning, and thanks to Imbolc's associations with fire festivals, with an occasionally resentful eye and winter-dimm'd eye on a still-teetering Stack of Books, scorched earth modes of radical rejection and renewal flit through light-starved synapses. 

I cannot lie: I have thought about just blazing away all of these books I've accumulated down the decades, the composting mass of prior enthusiasms. Metaphorically, obviously - they'd go to the charity shop, at least. I am always reminded of Henry Jones Sr's injunction to try reading books instead of burning them. And anyway, now it's the start of March. Time flies. And the world is actually on fire, by which I mean even more so than it was a week ago... so time may be shorter than we dread to think. 

All of which to say that, for a short month, I managed to get through quite a few books in February, proving a point to myself about my relative interest levels. If time is going to tick out quicker than we hoped thanks to human folly then I am going to foreground any opportunities to spend free moments flopped on a bed or sofa browsing some pages, trying to make some sense of it all through non-aggressive means. 

Stop wars, go books.

February 2026 reading list:

Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett

Ariel's Gift - Erica Wagner 

I Am Sovereign - Nicola Barker

Beneath the Night - Stuart Clark

Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny - Limmy

Orbital - Samantha Harvey

Golden Years - Ali Eskandarian

 

The Books 

Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett

Finished this one quite quickly at the start of the month. What a stunning piece of work. Malone is dying alone, possibly, retreating further and further into loneliness and unreliable, increasingly dark reveries.

"Perhaps it is just another story, told me by someone who found it funny. The stories I was told, at one time! And all funny, not one not funny. In any case here I am back in the shit." 

The 1950s prompted some of the best bleak humour.  There's something I love about the post-war sense of the absurd as the only proper response to the hollow certainties of human endeavours. As I noted in January's post, I had a Beckett-shaped gap in my prose experience, for some reason, and obviously this read had me pricing up all available Beckett. 

  

Ariel's Gift - Erica Wagner

This study of Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters seeks to put that volume in context as a response to the art of Sylvia Plath, particularly the collection Ariel, and some of the often confusing and divisively-portrayed biographical contexts. 

I got through Birthday Letters some time the year before last I think, though have only dipped into Ariel, and that some decades ago, which I'll remedy at some point. When I found this in a charity shop it looked an interesting piece. Part biography, part critical essay, it doesn't seem to be interested particularly in trying to take sides in any of the Ted vs Sylvia projections, which probably makes it worth your while if you're interested in either or both of Hughes and Plath as poets.

    

 I Am Sovereign  - Nicola Barker 

 A slim, library sale volume picked up on a hunch, the cover art and blurb doing a good job of tickling my fancy. It was a speedy read (it's short), and I started off a bit unsure which way to take it.  It seemed unbelievably trite, with wafer-thin characters, intrusive narrator and a slight premise, but it rapidly condensed into solid dimensions, like a tulip emerging from the bud, gradually revealing something quite lovely that then falls apart just when I was loving it. 

"The Author (The Author claims) will persist in calling it 'unbelievably trite' because - at some profound level - it is unbelievably trite."

Having wanted to think I Am Sovereign was a bit too clever, The Reader finished it in a strange rush of recognition and affinity. 

Beneath the Night - Stuart Clark

Another library sale interest piqued by this popular science book. Beneath the Night tries to articulate something of the enduring sense of wonder imbued in humans by the night sky, or projected out into the heavens by humans. It had lots of thought-provoking moments, though seemed to keep stumbling over a tension between veneration for The Science and a recognition that we have a deep need as a species "to understand the interconnectedness of all life". This leads Clark to try and keep all "prior" thought systems at bay with qualifying adjectives like "erroneous". Multiple astronauts communicate (Clark notes) a thoroughly mystical sense of awe, connection, and blissful unity when in space looking at Earth in context. It would have been interesting to hear more about Clark's own moments of uplift, such as we see in the final pages when he's at an observatory witnessing his own shadow flare and disappear as the planet spins and the night sky emerges.

  

Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny - Limmy

Touching down for a moment between a pair of cosmic explorations, Limmy's autobiography is a quick read. If you don't know who Limmy is, he's from Scotland, started as a web designer (Flash games), then became known for hilarious-to-some (e.g. me) short sketch videos with a peculiar, abrasive, often quite nihilistic-seeming tone. Then he got picked up by the BBC for a few sketch show series, has had a few books of short stories out, and here's the autobiography.

The title comes from a regular Limmy Twitter gag about whatever celebrity had recently passed away, noting that he had had the privilege of meeting (name) at a party once and finding them  "Surprisingly down to earth, and very funny". He's got a lot going on behind a provocative public persona, and it's often quite dark. Non-more-west coast of Scotland vernacular (liberal use of the "c-word") might upset some palates. Quite liked it masel. Resonated.

Orbital - Samantha Harvey

This was off a pile of books a colleague was bringing in for swapsies. Really good; won the Booker Prize in 2024, and well worth awards of whatever kind. It paired well with Beneath the Night; it had the kind of valorisation of Science of that book tempered with more of a grasp of the transcendent, bringing in a poet's eye for image and the proper weight or weightlessness of a phrase. It follows the extra-planetary perspectives of six (fictionalised) inhabitants of the International Space Station, who are watching a gigantic typhoon sweep across the Pacific while dealing with the unrealities of several sunrises and sunsets in one 24 hour sequence. There are also some mice, who I liked to think of as running complex experiments on the humans.    

  

   

 Golden Years - Ali Eskandarian

  Still yet another book I found on the shelf in a charity shop, and I'm really glad I picked this one up. Ali Eskandarian was an Iranian musician and writer, who had left Iran with parents to the USA via Germany. Golden Years details an ecstatic "beat psychosis" view of how drug use, music, art and sex all might combine to make one's 20s rocket past in a blur of confusion and missed moments. This one resonated as well. 

"...multi-dimensional thoughts barely decipherable but completely understood and forgotten in a flash."

It has some excellent sections I found myself re-reading, reading aloud, sharing.  There are a lot of "raw" moments that don't work as well, where the energy overwhelms the prose a bit. As the editor points out, however, before they got a chance to work on it Eskandarian was killed, shot, along with two former bandmates in a senseless New York minute. 

We're left with a sense of a story that might bear telling in more detail, but that also comes across completely in this book, with its preface and endnotes from the publishers. What I was left with was a sense of a lust for life, and an enthusiasm to get on with it, whatever it is. 

Started (Coming Soon! Ish! Later in March I Mean!)

I started The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, having spotted it in the library. Hey, I liked the design of the cover, and it's Rick Rubin. However, I am almost certain to get my own copy and bump the library version for books I already have awaiting attention. Spring is upon us, and the shelves are not yet cleared.

 

Process Updates

 While editing this month's post (February 2026) I have been tinkering with the desktop/mobile view settings for the blog. The pictures should be sat where they're supposed to be in relation to the text now... 

And, while under the hood, thoughts turn to themes. Up pop the options. A buffet! of... wait, I muse as I scroll down-screen. Hmmm. A buffet in the sense of the long table at lunch time during some sort of training day, a fairly unappealing selection of largely similar items. All clearly tailored for generic appetites and content - food blogs, travel blogs, etc... I can't get excited about any of them. 

In the event I go for something pretty vanilla to avoid decision fatigue, swallowing feelings of abjection and channelling l'esprit de garde-robe of Einstein.

"...a book background on a book blog, Seth? How innovative." They blow a thin hiss of smoke over my shoulder.

Decision fatigue, and a distracted mind, unable to choose while extrapolating fictions from the names, e.g. the above extract from the Soho trilogy of sci-fi noir thrillers (Soho Neon, Soho Dark, Soho Light).  

Options in the Contempo range currently have me repeating "Dark Flamingo" in the gravel larynx tones of Trailer Voice-over Man. You know the one.

Dark Flamingo: Return of The Crimson Wing 

In theatres this Fall. 

 

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.