I'm going to do a rapid-fire review of each of the novels I read in 2025 that I didn't get around to. I already posted about The Silmarillion, The Children of Hurin, and The Weather Detective, but there are five more.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Just for the fun of it, let's start with my least favourite and end with my most. This book is a classic, written by the well-respected Mario Vargas Llosa. From the style, you can tell the author is competent, but the story itself didn't hold any substance for me.
The book is about the life of a guy named Mario (named for the author) who works at a radio station in Peru and has a crush on his Aunt (not by blood) Julia (named after the author's first wife). Every other chapter is one of the stories told by a renowned and eccentric Bolivian scriptwriter, Pedro Comacho, who has moved into town.
This book commits a pet peeve of mine, in that the drivers of both sides of the story are both writers. I just think that's a little too easy for an author, although I suppose it gets a bit of a pass because it's semi-autobiographical. Part of the main plot is Mario lacking inspiration and seeking the mentorship of Comacho. Reading about a writer being bad at writing is always tedious. This bothered me in The World According to Garp as well.
Comacho's stories don't impact the plot of the book in any meaningful way, other than being referenced in the main plot occassionally and I suppose as justification of his reputation. Perhaps we were supposed to track his mental deterioration through these, as increasingly he has difficulty keeping track of the storylines and after the flash-forward we see him reduced to a more humble figure. If so, I didn't mark a noticeable change in writing style as he became more confused.
In the main storyline, Mario tries to convince his Aunt Julia, after she is widowed by his Uncle by blood, to marry him. She's apprehensive, as she believes that due to his youth, the relationship would be doomed to fail. Eventually she agrees under the condition that he promises five years of dedication. The rest of the book concerns lashback from the family and the legal hoops they have to jump through to make the marriage happen.
Throughout all of this, Mario keeps reminding everyone that they are not related by blood. However, he never stops referring to her as Aunt Julia. I really think he should have dropped the familial honourific if he wanted to decrease how creepy the situation looked.
The final section is a flash-forward to Mario explaining how things all went down. Apparently, despite Aunt Julia's belief that they would only last five years, they managed eight! Now Mario is married to his cousin. So the suspicion of him being incestuous is bolstered. This also weirdly frames the adventure as a success, even though ultimately Aunt Julia's reservations were correct.
But that barely even gets covered. Mario, after some success abroad, returns to Peru and runs into some old friends. The book ends covering at length the stories of two side characters.
I just really couldn't find anything to take away. The alternating storytelling never paid off, the incestuous overtones were a little gross, and the conclusion almost ignored the topics leading up to it.
Nation
One of the few Terry Pratchet books that are not part of the Discworld series. A boy, Mau, embarks on a quest as part of a coming-of-age ceremony but is intercepted by a calamitous tidal wave. He manages to return home but there is no one to greet him. It becomes his job to rebuild The Nation.
Alternately, a girl of equivalent age, Daphne, finds herself shipwrecked on the island. The two meet and learn to communicate and survive with each other.
Mau takes it upon himself to restore The Nation, guided by the voices of his ancestors (I think they're called The Fathers?) Eventually, survivors from surrounding islands come and contribute what they can. Eventually, they have to contend with mutineers from the boat Daphne was on, and then eventually, the larger trouble of collonialism when they are discovered by her aristocratic family.
I don't have much to say about this one. It's competently written. There is a clear and noble goal with obstacles for the protagonists, and eventually an antagonist that needs to be dealt with. There are themes of learning what makes a national identity and a bit of an exploration of collonialism.
I find Terry Pratchet's books are usually solid and unobjectionable, but also don't stick in my memory too well. You can feel his tone in most of his work, which is a kind of a playful snark. This didn't feel too different from Discworld.
I liked Mau getting sassy with The Fathers. The voices seem to know what needs to be done, and they have the same objective, but they have very little understanding of how to do anything, and are very entitled.
It bothered me that Mau kept insisting that he "wasn't a man" because he'd given up his child's soul to do the coming of age ceremony, and had failed to receive an adult one by completing the ritual. It seemed obvious to me that he had fulfilled his task, which was to escape the island and return to The Nation. But I guess his perspective was that, there being nothing to return to, there was no one to give him his adult soul. So he refers to himself throughout the book as a demon, which to me seemed unwarranted.
I liked that Mau and Daphne both seemed like relatively intelligent people, who speculated at each others actions when unable to communicate in a reasonable way. They often get things wrong, but it felt a bit more realistic than some depictions of cultures clashing. Their gradual ability to learn each other's languages felt pretty natural, too.
I was a little disappointed when adults with skillsets started showing up and helping out. It took a bit of the pressure off and sidelined Mau a little bit.
All in all, a solid read.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
When I read Staring at the Sun, the author quoted The Death of Ivan Ilyich as a profound resource for exploring the concept of mortality. When I picked it up, I thought it was a standalone novel, but it's actually just one of a collection of short stories.
I brought this book to Kenabeek this year. I know that my grandfather is a huge Dostoevsky fan, so I thought that might expand to Russian literature in general. As it turns out, he actually quite dislikes Tolstoy, in large part because he's been recommended to him so much from people that followed my line of thinking. I don't blame him, I can relate to having an affinity to something specific, just for people to link it with whatever large figure belongs to the given genre.
I feel a little warmer to Tolstoy, though. I read some of his short stories for a Russian Studies class I took in University, none of which were included in the collection I'm reviewing.
This book contains: The Raid, The Woodfellings, Three Deaths, Polikushka, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, After The Ball, and The Forged Coupon. I won't go into each in-depth.
This guy is definitely a tree-talker. It was only mentioned briefly, but in The Raid the narrator says "All of Nature's barely audible nocturnal sounds that defy explanation or definition and merge into one rich, beautiful harmony that we call the stillness of night" which really resonated with me. Also, in Three Deaths, one of those is a tree, and while it isn't anthropomorphised, its felling is written in such a graphic way that it almost feels vulgar.
I learned what a Russian Stove is from this book. There kept being mentions of people sleeping on the stove, which sounded bizarre to me. As it turns out, they really did have large multipurpose structures that were used for heating, cooking, and sleeping.
Despite The Death of Ivan Ilyich being the most acclaimed work, the story that stood out the most to me was Polikushka. A draft is being held and decisions are being made about who to send to war. The local aristocratic woman doesn't want to send Polikushka, a serf and obvious choice for it, as she's warmed up to him. Instead, she decides to give him the task of transporting a large sum of money to prove his trustworthiness.
The story branches off between Polikushka's attempt to prove himself and the guy who was drafted in his stead. The Dutlov family need to buy a person to replace their son going to war. Not bribe someone, but purchase them, slavery-style. Pretty brutal.
And despite Polikushka's genuine attempt at redemption, he blunders it and winds up killing himself. With the typical, aggregious sadness iconic to Russian literature, his infant son is drowned after his wife is shocked by the news when giving him a bath. That felt a little unnecessary.
The Forged Coupon was also pretty memorable, but not in a good way. Basically a series of events occuring in a sort of Butterfly Effect when a kid named Mitya chooses to forge a coupon. I'm sure there's all manner of things that I missed, but it gets so detached from the main storyline that you feel lost after awhile. Eventually, it works its way back to the characters it started with, I guess showing the interconnectivity of one's actions, but it doesn't end in a way that I could understand as delivering any kind of message. So the whole things was just a bit tedious.
The actual story of the Life of Ivan Ilyich is about a man who strives to achieve a good, normal, respectable life through conventional means. At one point, likely because of an accident after falling off a ladder, he develops a chronic illness that eventually takes his life. The story is mostly centred on his shifting perspective as his condition becomes worse. It also goes into the self-serving nature of his contemporaries who, despite liking him, view his death through a mostly opportunistic lense.
Since the story never gives an answer as to the mystery of his diagnosis, with doctors telling him it's either a "floating kidney" or "blind gut". The internet says it was likely pancreatic cancer, but that doesn't really link with his fall off a ladder, which the story sort of highlights as the beginning of his suffering.
Within this collection, I think The Death of Ivan Ilyich was actually a bit overrated, and in my opinion, Polikushka was the superior read. Maybe my Canadian tastes make me more agreeable to it for having a sympathetic protagonist
Awe
This book covers the sensation of awe, the experience of encountering vast mysteries that we don't understand. The author, Dacher Keltner, asserts that by engaging this sometimes underrrated emotion, we can connect our individual selves with the forces of life. It also helps in triggering dopamine and oxytocin, calm stress-related physiology, and vagus nerve response.
The book goes into how one can find awe, through what he refers to as the Eight Wonders of Life: Moral Beauty, Collective Effervescence, Wild Awe, Musical Awe, Sacred Geometries, The Fundamental It, Life and Death, and Epiphany. The framework of the book explains each of these experiences with examples.
He speaks at length about the death of his brother, which provoked in him a deep sense of awe and motivation to research and write.
As is the case with most of these psychology non-fiction books, I took this one up on recommendation from Lee-Anne.
At one point he interviews Pete Docter, writer of Inside Out. This is interesting because in another book I've read recently, Bittersweet, they cover the same film. In fact, Keltner cites the author, Susan Cain, on their overlapping points of research as she explored the positive side of sadness.
There was also a lot of overlap with Staring at the Sun in the Life and Death section, and was wondering if Irvin Yalom would get a shout out. He didn't.
I learned about what is referred to as the Default Mode Network. This is the part of us that perceives our individuality and what separates ourselves from others. It was a little mind blowing when he said that our sense of self is built on what we believe makes us different from others. Something I kind of knew but never thought about.
But the Default Mode Network all of who we are and it's not healthy to stay in that state for too long. It's a common frame of mind in individualist cultures. Interestingly, I'm reading Unwinding Anxiety right now and they make ample use of the phrase.
There was a study where they had people that lived near giant trees, and people living in the city draw themselves. The people by the big trees drew themselves small, while the city folk drew themselves large. The idea here is that the first group were less engaged in their Default Mode Network than the second, feeling a heightened sense of being part of something larger due to the phenomenon of Wild Awe.
I think it's interesting that it's not just the size of things that provoke the sense, otherwise buildings, which can be massive in scale, would generate the same feeling of smallness. Instead they seem to make people feel larger and more self-centred. This kind of goes with my belief that people talk to trees, even if they don't realize it.
Culture, genetics, and individual experience impact the way we express ourselves, but there are also universal similarities. It's pretty normal to smile when happy, frown when angry etc. regardless of where in the world you were born. Apparently the indicators that people show when they experience awe is more universal than any other emotion. Raising one's eyebrows, forming the mouth in a circle, raising hands to face, utterances similar to "whoa". Suggests that the sense of awe is hard-baked into the human condition.
Overall, I was impressed at the thoroughness of the research and the variety of examples that Keltner gave. The book was pretty compatible with Bittersweet and Staring at the Sun in its introspective nature and the search for greater meaning.
Is a River Alive?
This one was the Book of the Year for me. It's deserving of its own post, but I never got around to it. I found myself wanting to read this after hearing Robert Macfarlane, the author, being interviewed on the radio. Realizing that I don't know much about rivers, I put it on my reading list.
Despite reading The Weather Detective, by Peter Wohlleben, same guy that did Hidden Life of Trees, I now see Is a River Alive? as the superior follow-up. Sometimes people need to stick to their passions. A tree guy should talk about trees, not weather. A river guys should talk about rivers.
And Robert Macfarlane is a freak for rivers and I love it. He believes he can hear them talking and he credited some as co-authors of the book: Rio Los Cedros in Equador, the Adyar, the Cooum, and the Kosasthalaiyar of Chennai, India, the Mutehekau Shipu and the St Lawrence of Canada, and one unnamed who flows from his home in Nine Wells Wood, England.
I used the word "who" as opposed to "that" intentionally, as its how Macfarlane speaks, respecting the personhood of rivers.
It's more action-forward than Hidden Life, in that instead of being an overview of the subject, it's a first-hand account of him engaging in preservation projects for rivers that are in danger of extinction by human interference.
In doing this, he links up with a variety of people who are just as passionate about niche interests. There's a mushroom lady, an insect guy, an earthquake guy... One of them is Cosmo Sheldrake, the musician that I highlighted in my Goblincore post on my main blog. He and the Rio Los Cedros wrote and performed a song together, with proper creditation to emphasize the river's personhood and right to life.
You can listen to it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH_timp2S3E&list=RDHH_timp2S3E&start_radio=1
I was honoured that the last and most immersive experience he wrote about was with the Mutehekau Shipu in Quebec, Canada. Not my province and not my land by heritage, but it still made me appreciate the distinct qualities of the land I've grown up on. The river flows through the Canadian Shield, which is the climate my grandparents live on.
He follows the advice of an Indigenous mentor, who told him and his travel companion to fast while paddling the Mutehekau Shipu, to identify a Mother Tree, and after these conditions were met, to ask one question which the river would answer. Through this arduous trip, Macfarlane continually frets over what his question should be. I began to fear that it would be "Is a river alive?" which I would find horrifically cheesy. Fortunately, it wound up being something strange and incomprehensible, with a similarly difficult to decipher response. "Why should a god make choices we recognize as choices?" "It may involve a great reach of mind and imagination"
I will say, I don't feel like I learned as much about rivers from Is a River Alive?, than I did about trees from The Hidden Life of Trees, probably because of the first-hand account format. It definitely had the right energy, though.
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