What I read in Feb, March, April of 2025, with notes
Reading time lately feels like ocean time: quiet, dreamlike, restorative. Please bear with my sporadic, scattered and inconsistent notes.
Gemma with roses. Dunedin Botanic Gardens, March 2025.
February 2025
The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (beautiful nonfiction book recommended to me by my aunt and purchased for me by my mom, all about the octopus)
The Amphibious Soul by Craig Foster (a beautiful book by the maker of the film My Octopus Teacher, about creative drive, tracking, primal human practices and memory)
The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (an extremely beautiful memoir about getting sober, set in London and the remote Orkney Islands, recently made into an excellent film)
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (gorgeous novel about relationships and communication, the best of her books so far in my opinion, very difficult to put down, had me very invested in the characters)
March 2025
Girlhood by Melissa Febos (reread)
Abandon Me by Melissa Febos (reread)
Body Work by Melissa Febos (reread)
Unwilding by Marina Kemp (fantastic, fiction, finished in less than 24 hours)
Pet by Catherine Chidgey (really good nz fiction)
April 2025
Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru (Novel about art school, performance art, conceptual art, art fame, art bullshit elitism, art poverty, washed up art, washed up artists, set in covid lockdown. Some satisfying commentary on class, race and social themes. I really enjoyed this. A huge amount of ‘telling’ which I love stumbling across examples of because they are such readable, enjoyable books, in opposite to the moniker ‘show don’t tell’ which is a good guideline but there are exceptions like this beautiful book. First of his I’ve read, looking forward to reading more).
Held by Anne Michaels (Short, punchy, poetic and devastating. I wish she’d have given us more time to settle into the passages I liked before the character dies, or we move on to the next one, but it was a gorgeous book).
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (French. Beautiful. Another quiet novel that is really anything but quiet, like Tasmania, this one centred on women, therapy, marriage and infidelity.)
Tasmania by Paolo Giordano (Italian. White Lotus meets Black Rain and some other quiet, mundane, everyday element I can’t think of a comparison to. Beautiful and quiet. Captures the madness of the last decade. Came out in 2022 so doesn’t quite encapsulate the global madness of 2025 but captures the leadup to it very well).
Heartwood by Amity Gaige (a lovely, easy, read, not as rich as her last book Sea Wife which I’ve read multiple times and will read again but it was a good story).
Trust by Hernan Diaz (hard to stick with but I did. The world seems overly saturated with finance bros and billionaires so I struggled with this a bit but it was worthwhile to read for sure).
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff (finally reading this and it is searingly rich. Like her last book Matrix this must be read slowly).