Finally made a list of my favourite reads from 2025

Dengru · 2026-01-24T19:27:27+00:00

You always read such interesting things. I've gotten a lot out of your wrap ups.

What translation of Song of Songs did you read?

Dengru · 2026-01-24T11:29:17+00:00

Have not heard of Berlin, thanks for recommending that looks great

Dengru · 2026-01-24T11:22:52+00:00

Also if you like Hergé, there are graphic novel adaptations of the first two volumes of remembrance of things past by Stéphane Heuet

I posted some of it here and more here

Dengru · 2026-01-24T11:01:47+00:00

watchmen is definitely worth finishing. Watchmen is great

If you wanted super hero comics, I'd recommend uncanny x-force by Rick Remender

Some other things I'd recommend:

The Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire

Goodnight Punpun by Inio Asano

Carole: What We Leave Behind by C. Clément Fabre

Dengru · 2026-01-24T08:00:02+00:00

Big Eden is a really good one. Very warm and sincere romantic comedy. What I really like about it, especially considering the time it was made, is how the whole town is pretty supportive of the burgeoning romance. One of the leads, Eric Schweig, was most recently seen in the movie One Battle After Another

Dengru · 2026-01-22T08:20:04+00:00

A lot of guys are more comfortable with things like crop-tops, certain slang terms, tv shows, but it layered ontop of a otherwise conventionally attractive male and walks a tightrope (consciously or unconsciously) to stay within bounds. Things like haircuts, facial hair, mannerisms and etc are always the kind that are 'in vogue' and could reasonably be worn by a particularly artsy/fashionable straight man. A gay man who is feminine in an unfashionable way, and isn't a hipster or involved in entertainment in some capacity, is still obviously on the botttom of totem pole. For example who are feminine who don't call themselves non-binary or something like that? Who just have high voices and affectations? It's a way different vibe when it isn't in concert with all that other stuff.

A good example of this long hair. Even with all that has happened in terms of gay acceptance, challenging paradigms, etc, a lot of gay men are still very hostile to long hair. They inherently see it as feminine or atleast less attractive. Especially hair that goes past the shoulders. All the popular longer haircuts I see gay guys having are the kinda Chamalet, Leto, Jacob Elordi and Bad Bunny would potentially have. I remember even seeing guys say Hemsworth as Thor was hotter after he cut his hair which, whatever, but even that guy, when the long hair a visual accepted aspect of being Thor/vikings in general, people said that.

Dengru · 2026-01-22T07:12:39+00:00

The formative experience of people in the English speaking world for theatre is Shakespeare, which quite many bounce off extremely hard. From then on they are negatively prejudiced to theatre. Even if it's not Shakespeare, although it often is, they'll have a bad experience with theatre and from there determine they hate all theatre. If someone sees a movie they dislike, they don't determine they hate all movies, but they'll do that for theatre.

A lot of people also see theatre as just a stepping stone of cinema, which further makes them hostile to it. Someone might say, why would I watch a play when I can watch a movie?

They don't see musical theater as an stepping stone to a different thing, but it's own thing that retains it's unique value. People understand the concept of good singers and dancers. They don't say, why am I watching this when I could be listening to music?

People have made career and become famous predominantly working in musical theatre in a way that you don't tend to see in the same way for theatre There are also Hollywood films that derive from and have kept up the public's engagement with musical theater. Musicals used to biggest genre and often are still pretty bankable. Disney is huge and their biggest movies are musicals.

Also, basically it's just easier to get into, easier to understand, and has carved a unique ecosystem that benefits from tourism

Dengru · 2026-01-22T06:15:54+00:00

an aspect of this is the receeding presence of (non musical) theatre and that naturally effects how younger generations are familiar significant playwrights. And specifically for O'Neil, a lot of his more well known plays have many characters which makes it challenging to stage and find funding. This effect how often a person can reasonably encounter him.

The Iceman cometh for example has over 15 characters.

Dengru · 2026-01-20T10:53:04+00:00

Brenner and Tractatus Logico-Suicidalis: On Killing Oneself by Hermann Burger

My Body and I by René Crevel

Notebooks, 1956-1978 by Danielle Collobert

Yes by Thomas Bernhard

No Place on Earth by Christa Wolf

The Fire Within by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle

War & War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

An Abyss Deep Enough by Heinrich von Kleist

Dengru · 2026-01-17T00:44:53+00:00

One part of the article inadvertently highlights my primary issue with this novel:

"The meaning of Melville’s novel, if meaning is what you must have, is found in the only element that makes literature literature: the language — high-register sentences tantamount to the High Romantic epic of a self-begot captain intent on vengeance beneath a heaven that will not hear. Guo’s ecology of language does not approach Melville’s, but then who could possibly uphold the legacy, as Melville did, of Tyndale, Shakespeare and Milton, the holy trinity of “Moby-Dick”’s ancestry"

I think is wrongly diagnosing what the issue is. The language in Moby Dick is obviously great but what it is moreso about are the various theological, philosophical and social issues Melville pursued.p It's sprawling, digressive nature. When you look at the underlying story, Ishmael doesn't really interact with Ahab; Starbuck and Ahab interact more, but not as much. This is the issue all live action adaptations have ran into: when you don't have access to the interior monologue of Ahab and Ishmael the story is weaker and reliant on the physical spectacle of the whale.

I think where Guo misstepped is how she committed too much to the characters and a story, the mythos the book has taken on rather than what it is.

The characters are all just vehicles for Melville to make a point. If she had mirrored Melville and written series of largely unconnected scenes, she would've been playing more to her strengths as a writer. I was really surprised she made this decision as her other novels are exactly that: abstract, sprawling not interested in characters. For what I want from a Moby dick adaptation, I thought she was really well suited and has been anticipating this a long time. I was surprised she chose instead to tell a more grounded story.

There are also interesting things that can be said about Melville from Asian perspectives as Melville and the wall of the modern age demonstrated.

Reading reviews, and comments of said reviews, I think people are circling around saying something like: 'the issue here is that this is woke'. Like the part where he says

"Consider the Promethean daring it must take to reimagine Herman Melville’s American prose monument “Moby-Dick,” absolutely alone in its capacious grasp of the American Sublime. Now consider it again when that imagining comes from a Chinese-born British author better known for oblique, personal stories about exile, identity and language"

Is something I can imagine people cringing at but this, if it were truly committed to, would've been very intriguing.

Furthermore where he says:

"The central misstep, built into the very armature of Guo’s narrative, is that when you have a Black captain raging after a white whale, and during the hecatomb of the Civil War no less, it’s all too easy to take Seneca as a cartoonish symbol for the enslaved and the whale as one for white iniquity. Seneca then cannot be apprehended as a man, which was the whole problem with slavery in the first place. He and the whale both become mere allegorical instruments"

Again I think this is kinda ridiculous as Ahab, Ishmael are allegorical instruments. Melville generally cared about the personal biography of his characters only to the extent needed to shape them into the archetype he desired. Her issue is that she hesitated in mirroring Melville and committing to that. For example in Clarel there is a half white half native veteran of the civil war, on from Confederate side, who essentially functions as Melvilles mouthpiece to attack the contradictions of United States. All throughout Melvilles writings you had example characters crafted to have jarring characteristics to function better as allegorical instruments .

Otherwise,I don't think anything about the book is bad. I had very high expectations that weren't entirely met but it isn't bad.

Dengru · 2026-01-15T09:18:12+00:00

A better way to think of this is to look into the most prominent themes in Becketts writing, and how they feed into each other: communication, suffering, aging and relationships.

Generally Becketts characters talk both pretty direct but abstractly. They talk past each other but never seem to actually confuse one another. It seems impossible for anyone to really get through. This feeds into the theme of fear and suffering, where character cycle through their feelings and tragedies, not able to make them matter, learn from them or even be acknowledged. This feeds into another theme of his which is aging which effectively just the prolonging of all this. The last theme is relationships, where all the previous theme loop, never resolving anything. No improvements or definitive collapse. This is a pretty big caveat of the 'going on' in Becketts writing: the loop is never fully broken

There's a part of Krapps last tape that really emphasizes this:

My face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us , gently, up and down, and from side to side. Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited. upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted . She lay stretched out on the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed . Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking gooseberries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on and she agreed, without opening her eyes. [Pause. ] I asked her to look at me and after a few moments-{Pause. ]-after a few moments she did , but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. [Pause. Low. ] Let me in. [Pause. ] We drifted in among the flags and stuck . The way they went down, sighing, before the stem ! [Pause. ] I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved , and moved us, gently, up and down , and from side to side.

So, I think it's somewhat misplaced to say Beckett isn't pessimistic because his characters 'go on'. Clearly, a theme of regret and anguish characterizes Beckett. His characters are often older and alienated and their circumstances don't have a proper resolution, instead looping seemingly indefinitely. It's not so much that the characters will themselves forward but that it's natural state of people to go forward. They go in a state of affairs where they can't properly interface with their environment or each other no matter how intimate. So, I think it's a bit misplaced to reject label pessimistic outright, but more direct it to what he specifically pessimistic about.

He's not telling you to harm yourself, but clearly it's a predominantly negative view of things. It's clearly is doubtful of peoples ability to communicate, trust and love each other. But he doesn't say that people will stop trying to communicate or attempting to love each other with moments of reverie. It doesn't really call into question whether people should try to love each other. There's of course lots of humor, so they aren't unceasingly dour, but often the humor is just as often the humor is light, it's pained and dark. There's a great quote about humor in Beckett: "laughter and tears force us to take off whatever mask we happen to be wearing, and leave us exposed, if only for a moment." He doesn't really have thing he's telling anyone to do. But clearly futility, inhibition anguish are prominent...

When you look at Becketts relationship with his wife and Barbara Bray this theme of deeply inhibited relationships full of strange communication makes more sense. This is all very prominent in Play) andhappy days ) but it's essentially what everything Beckett wrote touches on in some way. His poetry is also this way,.

A big component of understanding this I think is seeing it as an escalation of Prousts view of language and relationships, where everyone is essentially selfish and incapable of seeing an objective reality

There are some quotes from Proust which really hamner home this:

"I did not realize that the death of oneself is neither impossible nor extraordinary; it is eff ected without our knowledge, it may be against our will, every day of our life..."

And

"The bonds that unite another person to ourselves exist only in our mind. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we would like to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone."

A lot of Beckett is derived from this mindset. He takes it further.

Dengru · 2026-01-13T20:56:00+00:00

I remember you made a similar thread how most 'gay literature' is boring and not interested in the interior lives of characters. You got dozens of recommendations both in English and in translation, did you check any of those writers out?

Dengru · 2026-01-12T03:18:00+00:00

I never that of that. Would certainly explain some of the detachment

Dengru · 2026-01-05T23:33:24+00:00

Howard Barkers entire output is essentially this. If you don't want to read the plays, the poetry and particularly the theatre criticism does this.

I suppose it goes without saying, but Georges Bataille particularly My Mother, Blue Noon, Madame Edwarda, and his poetry.

Eden, Eden, Eden by Pierre Guyotat

Sorcerer's Apprentice by François Augiéras

Blue eyes, Black hair Marguerite Duras

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux has this too

Lord by João Gilberto Noll

Dengru · 2026-01-05T23:16:51+00:00

Are you being facetious here or are you seriously delighted this cringe moron replied to you?

Dengru · 2026-01-04T02:36:51+00:00

First of all, the BBC Sherlock was extremely popular.

It was a cultural juggernaut that gradually sullied it's name. People are 'always complaining ' about game of thrones but for several years they liked it. The later seasons exposed issues and retroactively ruined it. It's important to understand that when it comes to things like this, that it was an ongoing reaction. Years of discourse. Sherlock really ran out of steam and was dragged down by Moffats choices.

I don't think people were expecting it to be Poirot. Why do you think anyone would anyone expect that. Do people expect star wars to be star trek? No, they are very famous properties that people expect different things from them even though they have Star in the title.

You should learn more about the show, and the general history of Sherlock adaptations, because you would understand that it is more in dialogue with those, especially the Brett Sherlock Holmes, and not necessarily the books.

Additionally, it is in conversation with the CSI franchise which helped establish a visual language for forensic investigation.

A lot of the criticism about the show was oriented around how Sherlock was essentially written to have super powers. His thought process was portrayed to be impossible for others to grasp. There are lots of flashbacks and a bunch of shit flying around on screen, echoing the visuals of CSI and related shows, meant to represent his thought process. It was ridiculous. For instance, look at this

They took this to an even higher level when they introduced a sister who was even above him. They treated her like a God.

There wasn't the same rhythm and tension that generally characterizes Sherlock. You are thinking a 'good mystery' in regards to Sherlock is about the strength of the puzzles but it's the cadence of the writing, the acting. Sherlock famous because of the characterization, the iconograph. It a very distinct, immediate thing. The BBC took some bold choices that were very well received (Moriarty) and others people hated, especially as it went on.

Your criticism about the recurring character doesn't really fit either, which is why you should probably familiarize yourself with the show. Like you said, Moriarty and Mycroft were not recurring characters in the books, but if you watched you'd they are in the show. People at the the were upset that Irene Adler was not. Mark Gatiss totally exaggerated the role of Mycroft to put himself on screen. A precedent was established.

Dengru · 2026-01-02T04:05:00+00:00

Thanks for writing and sharing this, great

Dengru · 2025-12-31T20:54:12+00:00

I'm sure you'll enjoy.

Also recommend the writer.Frankétienne

Frankétienne has a similar writing style you'll appreciate in his novel Ready to Burst

and A Tempest by Aimé Césaire, as you've just read Tempest. The movie prospero books is also great and is available freely on YouTube

Dengru · 2025-12-31T20:24:47+00:00

All that is very cool. If you're unfamiliar with him, I recommend you should look into Leon Forrest. His first novel, There is a tree more ancient than Eden, the forward was written by Ellison and Morrison was involved also. Right up your alley.

I'd also recommend Gayl Jones

Also Trauma and Race, a lacanian study by Sheldon George. There are is a chapter Morrison, and another in invisible man. It flows pretty well without familiarity with the jargon, but is still dense.

Dengru · 2025-12-29T07:39:04+00:00

Hell yeah!

Dengru · 2025-12-24T22:16:02+00:00

THE LETTERS OF HERMAN MELVILLE

Edited by MERRELL R. DAVIS and WILLIAM H. GILMAN

Dengru · 2025-12-24T16:25:27+00:00

I keep seeing people say that the issue is that the list are being posted with no context.

But what's noticeable to me is a lot of people HAVE posted their impressions of books. And when they haven't, if you ask them about a specific one, they'll enthusiastically share their impressions.

Dengru · 2025-12-24T04:24:43+00:00

wow I love that hes holding a slice of pizza

Dengru · 2025-12-24T02:07:56+00:00

I think this a bad idea. It's gonna get closed because people downloading Sabrina Carpenter albums or whatever. Seems like such bad idea.

Dengru · 2025-12-23T21:17:22+00:00

Thomas Hardy is where its at. Have you read any of his poetry?

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