With novels set in Malaysia, Russia, Germany, India and Serbia, along with some interesting non-fiction, here’s what I read this month.
Amid turmoil and mass protests here in Serbia, my reading year still got off to a good start, with some good novels and interesting non-fiction. I hope to write about some of them in more detail, but in the meantime, here are the highlights.
The Art of Memory by Frances Yates
I hadn’t read the description carefully enough so was expecting more practical aid in memorising things. The Art of Memory didn’t really do that, but it did take me on a fascinating historical journey through memory techniques from classical times to the Renaissance, with interesting observations on how the evolution of the techniques reflects the values and priorities of each era.
The Last Days by William Tham Wai Liang
This Malaysian novel was a purchase from my trip to the country in 2023. The “last days” in the title refers to the demise of the Communist insurgency as Mahathir Mohamad takes power in 1981. It’s a fascinating glimpse of a time and place that I knew little about, and the novel has elements of both thrillers and literary fiction.
Quaker Faith & Practice
I’m not a member of any organised religion, but if I were, I’d probably be a Quaker. I’ve been running into Quakers at protests for decades and always admire the uncomprising stances they take on things like peace and social justice. So I enjoyed reading more about their ideas and practices. This book is not the “Quaker doctrine” or anything as prescriptive as that—it’s a kind of compendium of things different Quakers have said and done over the centuries, and I found it quite inspiring in places.
Why Machines Learn by Anil Ananthaswamy
Another one where I didn’t get what I was expecting but got something else valuable (I should probably read blurbs more carefully!). The “Why” in the title made me think it would be something more philosophical, but really this is a lot of mathematical detail on how machines learn. I couldn’t follow all of it, but it was good to grasp some of the principles of machine learning and how AI works.
The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
This was a bizarre Russian novel about a Moscow scientist who conducts an experiment on a stray dog and a recently deceased human and ends up creating an obnoxious creature that combines the worst aspects of both species. It’s a successful satire of Communist social engineering efforts, but for me it wasn’t up to the level of Bulgakov’s masterpiece, The Master and Margarita. (Side note: there’s also a fabulous pizza restaurant by that name here in Serbia.)
Disobedient Women by Sangeeta Mulay
I enjoyed this deeply political novel about religious bigotry, violence and misogyny in contemporary India. The book starts with a vicious sexual assault and then traces the events that led up to the attack. Those causes are very broad, taking us deep into the lives of multiple characters across decades, with the rise of the BJP overshadowing it all. It’s depressing at times, but as the title and cover suggest, there’s also a large dose of hope in the form of those disobedient women fighting the status quo all the way.
Playthings by Alex Pheby
This historical novel is based on the true story of a 19th-century German judge, Daniel Paul Schreber, who wrote an account of his schizophrenia. This is the unreliable narrator taken to an extreme, as we don’t know which characters are real, which events are real, what reality even means, etc. It’s a fascinating and compassionate insight into what schizophrenia is like from the perspective of the person experiencing it.
Faded Souls by Mladen Jakovljevic
I picked this one up at a bookshop in Belgrade, knowing nothing about it but liking the sound of the title. It turned out to be a literary novel about people in a remote Serbian village getting caught in a kind of limbo between life and death due to an ancient curse. A priest tries to solve the problem by dabbling in black magic, while a young man who’s just been decapitated by Turkish soldiers must find a solution before he fades out of existence. I enjoyed it, although I found the translator’s decision to render the rural Serbian dialect into rural American dialect a bit distracting.
Over to You
What good (or bad) books have you read lately? Do you know any of these or would you like to try them? Let me know in the comments.
There are 24 comments
Interesting reads! I enjoy Bulgakov’s minor works, possibly The Fatal Eggs more than Heart. Fatal seems to me to catch the changing face of Moscow at the time quite brilliantly. What a writer he was!
I haven’t tried The Fatal Eggs, so thanks for the recommendation! He was an incredible writer, and also must have been very courageous – I don’t know much about his life, but writing such satirical works at that time in the USSR must have been very risky.
What a variety of books for January! Did you try and construct a memory palace after you read Yates’s book? I read it long ago and gave it a try and it really is an interesting memory technique but you have to keep going through your palace to keep it fresh and I’m afraid the one I built is now a ruins 😀
Ah, you did better than me! Sadly mine never got beyond the construction phase.
A very interesting list, and many new titles for me, thanks for sharing. I have a difficult reading relation with Bulgakov. I read Black Snow last year, but found it a bit average and his other minor work The Fatal Eggs is on my TBR. I feel, like any other author that critiques communism, he was over-hyped and over-lauded in the West who considers him their champion of what they would have liked to see more in Russia. I don’t know how you feel about films and film adaptations but there is a televised Soviet film version of Heart of a Dog which some consider to be very masterful. I think it is of the year 1988. If I did see it was a long time ago and I don’t remember, but I am hoping to watch it (again) this February.
Hi Diana, That’s a very interesting point about Bulgakov as a champion of what the West would have liked to see in Russia. Certainly the Cold War played out heavily in the cultural sphere, and no writer from that era is immune from being used by one side or the other to make a point. I’d be interested to know how he’s viewed in Russia, but that’s not a subject I could find much information on. Thanks for letting me know about the film version – I’ll see if I can find that one.
Bulgakov is viewed positively in Russia, but I guess I detect the obsessive drive to showcase certain Russian authors and only certain works by them over others in the West and that makes me question all the evaluation. It is my personal opinion about the over-hype of Bulgakov, but he is lauded and loved in Russia too, and perhaps rightly so. For most, you were either a brave, oppositional Russian author or a patriot-propagandist (for example, Sholohov) and ignored, nothing in the middle. I don’t think Sholohov’s books are quite flying off the shelves in such countries as America as Bulgakov’s do. Another example here is Pasternak. His prose writings in Russian don’t impress me at all. I am sorry to drag all this into your post, it was just something I have been thinking of recently.
Hey, thank you for dragging all this into my post – it’s great to think about these things, so please don’t apologise! There’s definitely a lot of black-and-white thinking about the Cold War era, and I can see the truth of what you’re saying. I’ve certainly never read any Sholohov, and I haven’t heard anyone praising him either, which is probably a shame—maybe I’ll try to rectify that now!
I think Western preoccupations do distort the way that writers from other cultures are viewed here, and not just in the Cold War—I think a similar process is still at work today, for example in praising writers from the Muslim world who accord with Western ideas of what freedom and modernity should look like.
Your comment about opposition vs propagandism reminded me of a talk I attended years ago by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, when he talked about the compromises he had to make as a writer living under an authoritarian regime. I wrote about it briefly here: https://andrewblackman.net/2009/03/ismail-kadare-and-dissent/
Most of these are new to me. I’m interested in reading more about the Quakers after some of the parts in the last season of Outlander with the characters who were Quakers. Hope February is a good reading month too!
https://lisalovesliterature.bookblog.io/2025/02/01/the-looooong-and-the-short-of-it-with-a-giveaway-january-2025-wrap-up-post-and-looking-forward-to-february/
Hi Lisa, Thanks for visiting! I think Quaker Faith & Practice is a great introduction. Some of it goes into a lot of detail about meeting practices and so on, which is not so interesting to an outsider, but there are a lot of great quotes from Quakers throughout the centuries that give insight into what they stand for.
I loved The Heart of a Dog!
Two of your books are on my TBR: the one on memory, and on IA.
Here are my January titles: https://wordsandpeace.com/2025/01/31/2025-january-wrap-up/
Have a great February!
Hi Emma, Glad to know that you enjoyed it. Hope you like those two as well, whenever you get to them – I know that TBR lists for booklovers can be quite long and unwieldy 🙂
Some interesting reads last month. I have read The Master and Margarita and always wanted to read another book by Bulgakov, so will have to see whether that will be my next one even though you think it’s not as great. Or could you recommend another one.
Also the book about the German judge sounds good. Would you believe it, I am German, I love reading books like that, but I never heard of him. Thanks for introducing him to me.
Thanks for visiting my post:
https://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2025/02/six-degrees-of-separation-dangerous.html
Hi Marianne, Thanks for stopping by! I haven’t read any other Bulgakov novels, so can’t recommend any beyond those two. There have been a couple of votes in favour of The Heart of a Dog in the comments, so don’t let me put you off 🙂 I did enjoy it – just not as much as The Master and Margarita. Also Kaggsy recommended The Fatal Eggs, so you could try that perhaps.
You’re welcome for the recommendation of Playthings. I’d never heard of Schreber either, but apparently his writing influenced Freud and others. I might try to find his original work now that I’ve read a novel about him!
Wow! You really did cover a lot of the world in your reading last month. I think the book on Quakers would be especially interesting to me. My great grandmother was a Quaker.
Hi Olivia, Yes, I suppose I did! I love to travel, and one thing I love about reading is that it lets you travel the world without ever leaving home. The Quaker book was excellent – the “practice” part was less interesting to me because it was more of a manual for Quakers themselves on how to conduct meetings etc, but the “faith” part was fascinating.
I am so impressed by the amount of reading you got done! My January was rather disrupted and the books suffered. Also, an extraordinary variety of reading with all kinds of unusual books in the mix. I’m most tempted by Playthings, as psychological novels still tick a big box with me.
Of course, I can understand why after reading your recent post. I do think you’d like Playthings when you have more time and space for reading again.
Phew, you have had one thoughtful reading month! Although I giggled at the idea that you thought the memory book was going to be more hands-on. (I can’t think of an example, but I know I’ve done this myself. But fortunately it sounds like you were in the mood for a more philosophical approach anyway!!) I think your book titles in January would combine into a lovely bit of bookspine poetry (except for the Quaker book title maybe? so functional!). My reading so far this year has been mostly about beginning books, not so much about finishing them. The one that I’ve read, which you might also enjoy, is adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy (which is part self-help and part philosophy, so, maybe perfect? heheh). Happy February!
Hi Marcie, Yeah, I really need to read book blurbs more carefully 🙂 It was a very interesting 580-page digression in a completely different direction, though.
Hey, I like the bookspine poetry idea! I think I’m missing a few verbs to make it work, and yes, the Quakers are messing things up. Here’s what I have so far:
Disobedient women master the art of memory
Faded souls argue about why machines learn
In the last days, playthings are the heart of a dog
Quaker faith and practice, fifth edition
Something about that last line just isn’t quite working…
By the way, I just tried commenting on your blog and got a weird error message:
Not Acceptable!
An appropriate representation of the requested resource could not be found on this server. This error was generated by Mod_Security.
Will try again later – hope it’s just a temporary glitch. Or maybe my comment was truly unacceptable.
Never mind, I tried again and it worked this time!
The Art of Memory is the one I will choose. The rest sound fascinating too, but as with most contemporary literature, it is hard to read -for me, the topics are heavy. My best January/February books have been the Ferrante novels and Hurricane Season. Contemporary and beautiful but also demanding.
Hi Silvia, The Art of Memory was fascinating. You’re right about the topics being quite heavy in the novels. Oh, I’ve always meant to read the Ferrante quartet—I’ll check out your post on that.