March 2025 Wrap-up and April TBR

When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back.

We had two weeks of unbroken dry weather at the start of April, so my audiobook consumption went up as I took care of yard-work. Or did it? See below!

Incidentally, do we have a phrase in British English that encompasses not just planting, pruning and mowing, but also power-washing, painting, repairing fences etc? It’s not quite gardening, but we also don’t have yards. Let me know! I’m a bit of a n00b to such manual work!

I read nine books in March, three of which were February DNFs that I went back to. I had a feeling I would. The same three were history books coming under the Historathon2025 project, and four were read-alongs with other bookish creators.

Books mentioned:

• The Lost History of Liberalism — Helena Rosenblatt

• The Disposessed — Ursula K. Le Guin

• The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath

• Bleak House — Charles Dickens

• Dominion — Tom Holland

• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky, (Tr. Roger Cockrell)

• Roadside Picnic — Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky (Tr. Olena Bormashenko)

• Catherine the Great and Potemkin — Simon Sebag Montefiore

• Silver on the Tree — Susan Cooper

😍Loved

📖 The Disposessed, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1947

Fiction, Read-along, Physical Book

This is a dystopian sci-fi novel picked by Jared Henderson as a read-along on his Substack, Commonplace Philosophy. It follows the story of a scientist born on a planet with a communist system of government who travels to a planet with a capitalist system. It has a dual-narrative that follows the main character as he travels to the other planet in the present day and as he grows up on his home planet under the communist system. After finishing the novel, I listened to a few episodes of the Mythguard Academy podcast, where the host goes deep into each chapter. It says on the blurb on the front cover, ‘To be read again and again’ and I agree. I felt like going back to the beginning immediately after finishing it. It was a fascinating journey that was jam-packed with allegory. I will be reading more from this author.

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📖 Bleak House, Charles Dickens, 1853

Fiction, Physical book

I feel a strong urge to read all of Dickens’ novels. I’m not sure why that is. FOMO perhaps? Being in my 50s? I mean one should never read literature out of a sense of duty, and this isn’t that; I just feel that it’s time.

This was my second of Dickens’ novels, the first’s being Great Expectations, which I read in 2023. I enjoyed both. I find them to be challenging but rewarding. It took me some time to get into the style. With Bleak House, I was about 200 pages in when I found myself feeling a bit confused with the characters, so I watched a few episodes of the BBC adaptation starring Charles Dance, Anna Maxwell Martin and Gillian Anderson, and that helped me to get the story straight. After that, the reading was utterly delightful. It was enhanced by watching Katie Lumsden’s vlogs. She’s a favourite BookTuber of mine.

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📖 Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1866/2022 (Tr. Roger Cockrell)

Fiction, Read-along, Physical Book

One of my all-time favourite novels. Beware though—spending a long time in the MC Raskolnikov’s head can get to you! This was a slow-read I was running on my channel here. I went through the book chapter-by-chapter and compared some key phrases across eight different translations. I read the McDuff translation over a few days in 2023, after buying the Penguin Clothbound Classics edition for a Christmas present. That was my second time reading it, with my first’s being back in the 1990s as a first year undergraduate at the University of St Andrews where I read Russian language and literature. My primary translation was the most recent, translated by Roger Cockrell, and it is the one I will be recommending when asked. I have his translation of The White Guard by Bulgakov on my TBR and hope to read it in May.

👍🏻👍🏻Liked a Lot

📖 Catherine the Great and Potemkin, Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2010

Non-fiction, Historathon 2025, Physical Book

I have a large shelf of Russian and Soviet history books on my shelf to read, so it made absolute sense that I buy a book that wasn’t on my TBR to read, right? I even have another five books by this author on my shelf. I’ll get to them soon, I promise!

This was one I announced in February that I was quitting. That’s not a reflection on the book; it’s more about my having taken on way too much and not getting the most out of what I’d committed to. In the end I’m glad I went back to it. As history books go, it was actually quite entertaining. I enjoyed in particular learning about the formation of the Black Sea Fleet and the founding of Odessa; I spent a year in that city as a student and so I knew a little of its history, including the famous Potemkin Steps that lead down to the harbour.

My Sebag TBR

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📖 Dominion, Tom Holland, 2019

Non-fiction, Historathon 2025, Physical Book, Audiobook (Narr. Mark Meadows)

I heard author Tom Holland on the Honestly podcast with Bari Weiss in December and it piqued my interest in reading this book. This was another of the books I announced I was quitting in February and, once again, that was a reflection on my having had too many books on the go. This is a book that would reward a second read with a notebook and pen. I ended up listening to the audiobook while doing chores so my retention wasn’t great. I doubt whether I’ll go back to it though, as I would much rather spend my history-book time reading about Russia and the former FSU. It’s still a four-star book, as it’s superbly well written and researched. It’s just not a big area of interest for me.

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📖 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath, 1963

Fiction, Physical Book

I bought this as a birthday present for my daughter for her 21st birthday. I knew of the author through her poetry but had never read this novel myself. As I don’t like to give books I’ve not read as gifts, naturally I had to read it first! I bought a hardback edition, beautifully illustrated by Beya Rebaï. It’s a very dark novel, but I knew that going in. It did leave me with doubts as to whether it would make a suitable gift for a 21-year-old woman, but I got some good responses to my putting that out as a question on my YouTube channel and I did end up giving it to my daughter. It’s got me feeling like pulling Ariel off the shelf again.

I recorded a quick video review of this when I was finished, including some top-down views of the artwork.

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📖 Roadside Picnic, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, 1972, (Tr. Olena Bormashenko)

Fiction, Read-along, Physical Book

Finally! This book has been on my TBR for years, ever since I first saw Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie adaptation, Stalker. It’s one of my top-10 movies of all time, so I’m really not sure why I took so long to read this book! When I saw that the Folio Society had published an edition of this book last year, I kept the tab open in my browser for weeks until I finally succumbed and ordered it. And what a gorgeous book. It was therefore already on my TBR when I saw a fellow BookTuber, Reading with Rebecca Nicole, announcing a read-along on her Discord server.

I was very surprised at how different the book is from the movie. The main premise is the same—aliens have visited earth and left a bunch of space junk behind in areas that are now forbidden areas called Zones. Stalkers take people into these zones illegally to salvage the space junk in the book, or to have one’s deepest wish fulfilled in the movie. Both are fantastic and stand on their own as great works of sci-fi, but I’d have to give the extra star to the movie over the book. Thankfully we have both and don’t have to pick one over the other.

By the way, the movie is available to watch for free on YouTube, with English subtitles. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

👍🏻Liked

📖 Silver on the Tree, Susan Cooper, 1977

Fiction, Physical Book, Audiobook (Narr. Alex Jennings)

This is the fifth book in the Dark is Rising Sequence by British author Susan Cooper. I’m going to write a longer post on this sequence quite soon. It’s a series of children’s fantasy novels that I first read in my mid-teens at high school. The second book, The Dark is Rising, is the one that really stood out in my mind and I wanted to revisit them now, along with some other of my favourites from childhood. It’s been a fun experience.

For some reason, audiobooks are not sticking in my brain at the moment, something which I hope passes soon as it’s an important input method for me. I listened to this audiobook while taking care of those ‘yard’ chores I mentioned earlier, but by the end I’d remembered very little. So I went back and read the physical book, given that I want to write an essay about the series, and that went much better. And why would I not, given that I’d found the whole set with the covers I remembered on sale locally!

If you’re interested in reading my thoughts on this series, look out for a post soon!

😐Meh

📖 The Lost History of Liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt, 2018

Non-fiction, Read-along, Historathon 2025, Audiobook (Narr. Xe Sands)

This was a read-along on the Historathon Discord server and the last of February’s DNFs. I could easily have not picked this back up and not have missed much. I read books on conservatism (Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony, 2022) and liberalism (Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick J. Deneen, 2018) in 2022 and thought this history would be interesting to consolidate some of what I learned then. It didn’t. It could be that it’s to do with my thing with audiobooks not sticking right now, but this didn’t feel like it taught me much, other than that there’s really no clear definition of what is meant by liberalism because it’s many things to many people and keeps changing.

Read-alongs

• The Dispossessed

• Crime and Punishment

• Roadside Picnic

• The Lost History of Liberalism

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Historathon2025

• Catherine the Great and Potemkin

• Dominion

• The Lost History of Liberalism

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Fiction

• Silver on the Tree

• Roadside Picnic

• Bleak House

• The Bell Jar

• The Dispossessed

• Crime and Punishment

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Non-fiction

• Catherine the Great and Potemkin

• The Lost History of Liberalism

• Dominion

April Reading

• We, Yevgeniy Zamyatin

• The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

• The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon

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

• The Iliad, Homer

  • Reading with Matthew Long

• Anna Karenina, Tolstoy

  • Reading with Henry Eliot

• The Karamazov Brothers, Dostoyevsky

  • Reading with Dana • Dostoevsky Bookclub

• Red Star Over Russia, David King

• A Disaffection, James Kelman

• Stephen R. Donaldson and the Modern Epic Vision, Christine Barkley

So, it’s been a good reading month, and April’s already looking good. A Disaffection was a pure mood-read choice during a spell of low-mood and it inspired me to make a video about it when I felt my mood lifting. I’m enjoying it immensely. There’s a good chance I’ll follow it up with London Fields by Martin Amis. I read both books around the same time and was tickled to learn that there were both Booker short-listed in 1989, albeit with London Field’s then being unnominated for political reasons.

And just afore I go, I’d like to give a shoutout to

Petya K. Grady

for the inspiration on how to create monthly posts. I love Petya’s channel and you will too! Go and check her out!