June 2025 Wrap-up and July TBR

It’s been a good reading month for sure! The biggest news is that I completed my Oblomov read-along on time! My normal style is to start a project with all guns blazing and then just kind of dwindle as I get nearer the end, so I’m quite proud of myself for getting to the end on time. It was a very rewarding experience to be reading one of my favourite novels so closely and I hope to do another such project before the year’s out. Possibly White Guard by Bulgakov, but Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake could be fun too, and would show my readers that there’s more to me than just Russian literature!

Books mentioned:

• Oblomov — Ivan Goncharov, Stephen Pearl

• Goncharov’s Oblomov: A Critical Companion — Edited by Galya Diment

• Poyums — Len Pennie

• Duma Key — Stephen King

• Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

• Nervous Conditions — Tsitsi Dangarembga

• Stalin’s Children — Owen Matthews

😍Loved

📖 Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov, 1859

Fiction, Physical Book, Translated by Stephen Pearl

Anyone who’s been on my channel for more than week will know of my love for this novel. This was my third time reading it and my first with Stephen Pearl’s translation. I led a group through it here on my channel through May and June and it was a rewarding experience in so many ways. It’s an all-time favourite that has resonated with me since I first read it as a student of Russian language and literature at the University of St Andrews in the 90s. I just find the character of Oblomov so relatable and imagine that, were he alive today, he’d almost certainly qualify for some kind of neurodiversity diagnosis.

If you were to ask me to recommend a Russian classic, it would be Oblomov.

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📖 Stalin’s Children, Owen Matthews, 2008

Fiction, Physical Book

I heard Owen Matthews on a podcast discussing the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I could tell straight away that this was someone with expertise on the region, so when host Liam Halligan mentioned Matthews’ book, Overreach, I immediately bought a copy and read it. It’s included in last month’s wrap-up. It turns out that I already had Stalin’s Children on the shelf; I don’t remember buying it, but such is the life of a book nerd I suppose. I pulled it down, read the blurb and was like, ‘I need to read this right away’.

So I did.

And what a fantastic book! Matthews’ starts out by going through some old love letters between his Russian-born mother and his Welsh-born father. It paints a vivid picture that I found relatable in my own small way, having got through an 18-month, long-distance relationship with the woman that became my wife. Matthews’ maternal grandfather was purged by Stalin in 1937; his mother, aged only 3, has a brutal childhood, surviving famine and war. She meets Matthews’ father in Moscow, where he was a student on an exchange programme at Moscow State University and they fall in love. Then begins their attempts to marry. Matthews’ father is eventually being kicked out of the Soviet Union when he rejects the KGB’s offer of ‘assisting world peace’ or some other euphemism that basically amounted to spying.

We also get some of the author’s own story of becoming a journalist in the region, including a fascinating bit about Moscow in the 90s, something that I could relate to, having visited Moscow in the mid 90s and then lived in Ukraine for a year.

So, the book could have been written with me in mind: Russia, USSR, long-distance love. But that’s not to say that you need to be interested in the region to enjoy this book. At its heart, it’s a love story against the odds and that gives it universal appeal.

👍🏻👍🏻Liked a Lot

📖 Poyums, Len Pennie, 2024

Poetry, Physical Book

I’ve struggled with poetry on and off through the years, but this collection was one that I found my way into right away. I’ve been following Pennie’s Scots Word of the Day on her Instagram for a while. It’s a topic I’ve been interested in all my life and I wrote a term paper on it as part of my Master’s degree in 1998. Pennie’s poetry is mostly written in Scots and is an exploration of her trauma and mental health. These are topics that resonate with me, albeit from different angles. The poems are strongly feminist in theme, coming across as a strong woman’s way of talking to her weaker self, and in that it offers hope and solutions. It helps to read the poems out aloud as they are very rhythmic in their meter, something about which I’m currently learning more as I read Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook.

I read out a poem in Scots for my YouTube channel as I sat by the River Ayr after having just bought the book.

https://youtube.com/shorts/0XMMxksMHFQ?feature=share

And there’s another one in my June Wrap-up video:

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📖 Duma Key, Stephen King, 2008

Fiction, Physical Book

I’ve been a fan of Stephen King’s novels for years. I bought this one from the amazing used-book shop in Wemyss Bay train station for £1.

The main character, Edgar, is a successful businessman in the construction industry who has an industrial accident in which he loses an arm. He moves to Duma Key in Florida to recuperate and takes up painting. He paints rather too well for a beginner, channeling the itch from his phantom limb into his paintings and going into a flow state. When he comes to, he is overwhelmed by hunger and he eats the contents of his fridge almost in a single gulp.

It’s a gothic novel, with all the tropes of the genre: a haunted house, ghosts and ghouls and supernatural elements. As always, King’s characters are sympathetic and believable—I still ascertain that he’s the master of character writing. Where this novel really hit me was in King’s exploration of art: Where does it come from? What’s it for? WHO is it for? It’s a fascinating study from a man who himself survived a serious accident, is an artist and went through addiction, a topic that’s also alluded to in the novel.

This might just be a top-five Stephen King novel for me. I should do one of those tier list thingies!

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📖 Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, 1925

Fiction, Physical Book

Well, this was a surprise! I follow

Henry Eliot

on Substack and he announced a one-day readalong of this novel to mark Dallowday, a Wednesday in the middle of June. So I joined the group and spent Wednesday, 18 July reading this wonderful novel. It wasn’t my first Virginia Woolf, but it might as well have been as it had been 30 years since I read The Voyage Out. It was such a treat to be watching Henry’s video updates through the day, as he visited the story’s locations in London while we were reading. A thoroughly rewarding experience that I can see myself repeating annually on Dallowday, now that I know of it.

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📖 Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga, 1988

Fiction, Physical Book

This was a recommendation by BookTuber Katie Lumsden on my anniversary video at the end of January. It follows the main character Tambu who, at the beginning of the novel, is a 13-year-old girl living with her family on a farm in post-colonial Rhodesia in the 1960s. How’s this for an opening line:

I was not sorry when my brother died.

It’s a first-person narrative that follows Tambu as she’s taken in by her wealthy uncle to be educated in place of her deceased brother. It’s a strongly feminist novel that looks at gender, class and race. Tambu is a sympathetic character, who has strength beyond her years and a desire to raise herself out of the poverty trap and above the patriarchy in which she finds herself.

The novel is the first of a trilogy and I would like to follow up at some point.

I’m glad I asked for recommendations in my anniversary video as, so far, it’s been three for three!

👍🏻Liked

📖 Goncharov’s Oblomov: A Critical Companion, Edited by Galya Diment, 1924

Non-fiction, Physical Book

A series of essays on Oblomov that I read to learn more about the novel while running my group read. Some essays were better than others. A particular favourite was Ronald D. LeBlanc’s essay about food entitled Oblomov’s Consuming Passion: Food, Eating, and the Search for Communion. You can read all my thoughts about that in my essay on Part Four of the novel.

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Fiction vs Non-fiction (and Poetry)

Fiction

• Oblomov, Ivan Goncharov

• Duma Key, Stephen King

• Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

• Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga

Non-fiction

• Stalin’s Children, Owen Matthews

• Goncharov’s Oblomov: A Critical Companion, Edited by Galya Diment

Non-fiction

• Poyums, Len Pennie

July Reading

• ADHD 2.0, Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey

  • This is a Kindle read that I try to open when I’m in the throne room instead of doom-scrolling, but so far I’m not doing so well with that. If I don’t finish it this month, it’s getting DNF’ed.

• Anna Karenina, Tolstoy

  • Reading with Henry Eliot

• The Karamazov Brothers, Dostoyevsky

  • Reading with Dana • Dostoevsky Bookclub

• Dragon Keeper, Robin Hobb

• The City and its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami

• A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver

• Dust and Light, Andrea Barrett

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