The Will Of The Many || James Islington ★★★★★ Started: 25.12.2024 Finished: 31.01.2025 Favourite

“Love the erasure of everything else, a blinding worse even than the sun.”

— David Vann, Bright Air Black

JOMP Book Photo Challenge

August 13, 2023 - Published This Year

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke

“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.”

JOMP Book Photo Challenge

December 09, 2023 - Favourite Page Design

The River Has Roots || Amal El-Mohtar ★★★★★ Started: 22.05.2025 Finished: 01.06.2025 In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees. But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…

We || Yevgeny Zamyatin ★★★★★ Started: 22.02.2025 Finished: 23.02.2025 Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel. In the totalitarian society of the OneState of the great Benefactor, in a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, is a world where people are numbers, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life has been reduced to a mathematical perfectly balanced equation, an ongoing process of mathematical precision. Free will is a disease. Primitive passions, instincts, and creativity have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier, and whatever alien species are to be found there, will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State… the discovery, or rediscovery, of inner space, and that disease the ancients called the soul, and Love. If you are interested in dystopian literature in the vein of Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, We is a must read!

Mina's Matchbox || Yōko Ogawa ★★★★★ Started: 12.02.2025 Finished: 23.02.2025 In the spring of 1972, twelve-year-old Tomoko leaves her mother behind in Tokyo and boards a train alone for Ashiya, a coastal town in Japan, to stay with her aunt’s family. Tomoko’s aunt is an enigma and an outlier in her working-class family, and her magnificent home—and handsome, foreign husband, the president of a soft drink company—are symbols of that status. The seventeen rooms are filled with German-made furnishings; there are sprawling gardens, and even an old zoo where the family’s pygmy hippopotamus resides. The family is just as beguiling as their mansion—Tomoko’s dignified and devoted aunt, her German grandmother, and her dashing, charming uncle who confidently sits as the family’s patriarch. At the center of the family is Tomoko’s cousin Mina, a precocious, asthmatic girl of thirteen who draws Tomoko into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling. Having read and loved two of Yoko Ogawa's other novels - "The Memory Police" and "The Professor and the Housekeeper", I was very excited about Mina's Matchbox, but I just couldn't get to it in 2024, when the translation came out. I do regret not reading this beautifully haunting book earlier, but you know what they say - better late than never! I really enjoy Ogawa's character studies, and Mina's Matchbox definitely doesn't disappoint with it's ensemble cast of characters, none brighter than the titular Mina - a sickly young girl that collects matchboxes and lives vicariously through the stories she writes about the illustrations on their covers. A quiet, understated, yet powerful coming of age story, Mina's Matchbox was an absolute pleasure to read!