Happy 2025! May it brings the world the peace we so much need and is at least marginally better than we expect right now, three days before the second inauguration of President Trump (President Musk? President Trusk? President Mump?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, a confession: I\u2019m distracted this semester with other personal and professional matters and I\u2019m finding it hard to focus and find inspiration for the blog. Add to this that I joined Bluesky almost two months ago, and for the first time in decades I find myself engaged enough to participate in social media. I say \u2018decades\u2019 because using Bluesky (as it is now, before the trolls arrive) I\u2019m reminded of the good vibes of the early Fidonet, a worldwide computer network used for communication between bulletin board systems (BBSes), and that according to Wikipedia still exists. I used Fidonet enthusiastically in the early 1990s, before the internet became commercially available, and I appreciated very much the intense online conversations. Like any other social network, Bluesky is far more hectic and has a torrent of images (Fidonet only used text!), but there are moments when I\u2019m reminded of Fidonet and the broken promises of the early internet. All these are excuses, I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, one type of post (blueet?) I\u2019m seeing very frequently on Bluesky these days is the typical end of the year post with lists of the best books, films, series, music, videogames\u2026 and the typical new year post announcing the novelties for 2025 in these fields. I find the two types exhausting and I wanted to protest here a little against them. I refer to book lists specifically and I\u2019ll begin with the first type.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve been keep a list of the books I read since I have fourteen, as I have explained here now and then, because I like keeping track and because I tend to forget books I have read and might read them again otherwise (this is not a sign of old age, it\u2019s just bad memory for titles). I have a personal rating system and I certainly enjoy checking at the end of the year what I have read and whether it was any good. I don\u2019t particularly like, however, sharing the results. In fact, my reading is private: I have a GoodReads account which I never use, and I would not post lists on any other social media. Who would care?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is why I feel a bit baffled when people insist on commenting on the best books they have read the previous twelve months. I dislike in particular any mention of how much they have read. Many boast, whether they read 50 or 200 books, which I find silly because the figure means in the end very little. I tend to read on average 100 books a year (no boast, it\u2019s part of my job!), but this year, for instance, about half of the books were no good, and I may have abandoned 25. In fact, in 2025 I\u2019ll also keep track of the books I\u2019m leaving, if only out of curiosity. So, I would have been much happier reading just 25 good books. I will be soon beginning a book on very long 19th century novels, besides, which means that I might end up reading fewer books in 2025 than any other year, though this might be one of the richest years in my life as a reader, we\u2019ll see. So, the message is please read but read only as much as you need, don\u2019t undertake any reading challenges, don\u2019t force yourself to reach any given mark (50, 100, or 200 books) if 25 will do (with less than 2 books a month, are you really a regular reader?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I check the list of 2024, I see that I only rated 18 books with top four stars, all of them non-fiction, except for two novels. My favourite book of 2024 was Alasdair Gray\u2019s Poor Things (1992), which I re-read possibly for the sixth time after watching Gi\u00f3rgos L\u00e1nthimos\u2019s quite accomplished film adaptation with Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in January 2024. I\u2019m not going to say that everything went downhill from that moment until December, but if I were to publish a list of 2024 reads it would be perhaps a list of the duds to warn other readers not to waste their time, an anti-list, so to speak. If you\u2019re wondering, apart from the many books I have abandoned, the most disappointing reads of 2024 were two novels: Esther Garc\u00eda Llovet\u2019s Los guapos<\/em> and Dolly Alderton\u2019s Good Material<\/em>. A friend told me that negative reviewing and anti-recommendations like these should be avoided, but what I\u2019m telling you here is please avoid overhyped books with misleading blurbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now for 2025. My strangest habit as a reader is that I enjoy reading the final pages shortly after starting a book for two reasons: I can\u2019t stand suspense and I like guessing how the story progresses from beginning to end (I never get it right!). I have no fear of spoilers and, as a Literature teacher, I enjoy more how the plot is built that any twists and turns. However, with book recommendations it\u2019s the opposite: I absolutely hate knowing beforehand which books are going to be published in 2025 (same with films, series, music\u2026). That is the kind of spoiler I don\u2019t like perhaps because, rather absurdly, I abhor being reminded that book publishing is a business with launch dates and advertising campaigns. Somehow, I prefer books to take me by surprise and to find out that they exist through reviews when they come out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is something else. I\u2019m seeing in Bluesky these days very long lists of new books, up to 50 novelties, and I mean just in one field, whether this is SF or archaeology. I don\u2019t know how much publishers think readers do read every year, but if I put on my reading list already today 50 (or 100!) books, what margin is left for other novelties and, what is more important, for discoveries of valuable books from the past? One thing is anticipating a new book by a favourite author and quite another being swamped on all fronts with so many novelties. This is like going to a 19th century ball with your dance card already full for the next 50 waltzes, with no room to discover the love of your life and add him to your card. Just awful!! I have just opened the document with my list of books for 2025 and what I love most is that it\u2019s empty: I\u2019m beginning now a twelve-month journey with no known destination, no plan, an open road ahead. That\u2019s the fun of reading, I think, and not taking a pre-planned journey already full of expected stops. I want to be surprised all the time, and have the feeling at the end of the year that this was a peculiar journey because in this field I\u2019m a traveller, not a tourist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I read recently that the publishing world is on the verge of collapse, split between top-heavy corporations and tiny micro-publishers, and that more books than ever end up being mercilessly pulped. This might be too extreme, but in a way I\u2019m not surprised. Everyone can see the earnings in the profession of writing are shrinking, and this no doubt has very much to do with an excess of offer for a dwindling demand. The more books are published, the more readers flock towards the best-selling authors, swamped by a flood of novelties that only the most militant readers can manage (and I wonder who they are, because I gave up long ago the hard task of being up-to-date). A journalist wrote, I can\u2019t remember where, that reading would end up being like classical music, an elite pursuit to enjoy mainly the work of dead creators, but I don\u2019t see it that way at all. Reading is now closer to pop music, though we still lack the equivalent of Spotify, or perhaps more accurately to fashion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I know that I\u2019m not saying much today, except that I don\u2019t like end-of-year and new-year book lists, the former because they remind me of what I haven\u2019t read yet and the latter because they threaten to structure my reading too tightly. There is something else. These lists have the unwanted side-effect of ageing books too quickly. Suddenly, it seems that reading a 2024 book in 2025 is backward, a sign of cultural disorientation. Reading a 2020 book in 2025 is proof positive of a total loss of bearings. Few can imagine today reading a book which is not a classic published (to name random years) 1983, 1972 or 1961. Why would you do it? It\u2019s so vintage!! The endless cult of the novelty increases presentism but, as I\u2019m arguing, pushes still new books, and those of the recent past, into a limbo. No wonder so many books are pulped. This is why in Bluesky I\u2019m enjoying in particular the accounts that recommend books just because the account runners find them cool, whether they are very well-known already or almost forgotten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To end, I do know that big and small publishers must sell their wares to us, readers, but it\u2019s getting too hectic at our end. This week the European Union has passed legislation to force garment makers of fast fashion to recycle their wares, which now end up as discarded trash in places once as beautiful as the Chilean Atacama desert. It\u2019s easier, it seems, to pulp books to print more books than to recycle garments made of cheap polyester but the principle is similar: there is an overproduction problem, made even worse by the habit of introducing a constant stream of novelties. I might be wrong but I think that we\u2019re reaching the tipping point when not even the most committed readers can cope with the business needs of the publishing industry. The solution is not overwhelming existing readers but widening the field and engaging more readers of all ages and, let\u2019s say it, increase the quality of what is published. I\u2019ll leave that for another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Happy 2025! May it brings the world the peace we so much need and is at least marginally better than we expect right now, three days before the second inauguration of President Trump (President Musk? President Trusk? President Mump?). First, a confession: I\u2019m distracted this semester with other personal and professional matters and I\u2019m finding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1137,18,799,22],"tags":[1202,1205,1204],"class_list":["post-3590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literature","category-general","category-literary-criticism","category-literary-studies","tag-bluesky","tag-lists","tag-novelty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3591,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3590\/revisions\/3591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}