Awesome finds - autumn 2025

Read a lot of books, listened to a lot of music, collected some cool links. What's new? Ah well... At least something is stable.

Books

[India 🇮🇳] The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: As much as I liked the 'similar' type of family saga (The Covenant of Water), I properly hated everything about this one. It tries to confuse you while foreshadowing pretty much everything that's going to happen, but it doesn't quite reveal everything in the end, leaving you to pick up the pieces, a common trick, but not executed well here imo. Plus, there's an ugly "twist" at the end that doesn't really twist the story, but makes you do a 180 about EVERYTHING: the story, the characters and the author.

[Russia 🇷🇺] Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: still one of the best books ever written, but boy I've forgotten how to read Russian. After so many years of not re-reading it, I had also forgotten how gory it is, aside from the main story. But it's fascinating to see how different our present-day language is compared to what Pasternak imagined it to be when he wrote this whole book and its dialogues.

[New Zealand 🇳🇿] Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield: old world, old money stories of women living in huge homes with absent cheating husbands and nothing to do.

[France 🇫🇷] The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire: I read it in English obv, and even so, it was just English lessons. It also happened to be on my reading list during one of the most difficult months of the year, when my comprehension levels were close to zero I'd say, so I struggled to understand it more times than I can admit.

[Chile 🇨🇱] The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende: honestly, one of the best books I've read this year. On the one hand, it's your typical family saga, on the other, there's a lot going on: actual historical events and political turmoil, magical realism, blood, love and sex.

[Egypt 🇪🇬] The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany: It's quite unexpected in terms of where it leads you and its characters (it starts so innocently...), but it's actually an exceptionally good pick for this challenge in how it provides very condensed portraits of Egyptians, both young and old, gay and radically religious, savage and dejected. A very good read.

Something I didn't like: I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch [Switzerland 🇨🇭], The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat [Iran 🇮🇷], The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna [Finland 🇫🇮] - I'm so happy I didn't read those in sequence, because (insert a very best David Lynch impression) CAN YOU BELIEVE IT, but all three of them be like "men would rather go to total psychosis, lie to their friends and governments, AND kill their wives than admit they're depressed and deal with it".

Not a challenge but still read:

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar: I absolutely love reading letters, so I think the format is great and the idea is rather original as well. However, it's very easy reading with very little depth, and it even leaves the impression that you're just reading it just to tweet about it, tis the vibe here. I also had SO many questions for the authors. Like I don't think it's explicitly stated that the characters are human-like, and it's supposedly a very different world, so idk - just thinking out loud - but in any case, why give your characters any sex? It's all letters, goddamit, it would be much cooler to leave it ambiguous!

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie: re-listened to it while recovering from anaesthesia in hospital and afterwards, because the Poirot series is my ultimate comfort read. I absolutely love both the Poirot and Miss Marple to bits and hope to read them all over and over again.

Music

• The Summer That Saved Me by Odeal: the chokehold it had on me for a moment, boy oh boy. absolutely filthy afrobeats-style RnB that feels amazing to vibe to. London Summers, My Heart, Miami, Patience - they're all so, so good. I felt like I was partying in Brazil somewhere, definitely NOT the summer feels of London or Gdańsk.

• The Art of Loving by Olivia Dean: she's just a perfect, perfect girl. I do like her previous album slightly better, only because of how classically academic it was, such sophisticated beauty. This one is much more pop-like, but the production is still immaculate, and with just the right amount of self-love. I can completely understand why The Art of Loving was so successful, and personally, I'm very happy to include it in my top ten albums of the year, just as Messy several years ago.

• Dracula by Tame Impala: haters will say it is just one more song Kevin Parker wrote for Dua Lipa but released in his own name. Haters will probably be correct but I DONT CARE I LOVE THEM BOTH AND HOUDINI TOO AND I'M FINE WITH ONE MORE SHADE OF THE SAME SONG LEAVE ME BE

• mangetout by Wet Leg: sooo cheeky and fun. I've actually grown to like Wet Leg a bit, despite previously disliking them for no specific reason (I hate Chaise Lounge, for example, and with passion...). This is just one good song from moisturiser, but i dunno really, there's just something special about this song.

• Niesamowita Trupa Pana Hiroszimy by Lordofon: it is not that I've listened to many Polish albums but in either case this one is THE polish album of the year for me. It is funny, it is ironic and self-deprecating; it is angry and supportive... It is everything, really. I do feel like I know STARBOY by heart, which never happens with songs in Polish, so that says something I guess

• SHISH by Portugal. The Man: a new, exceptionally angry era of Portugal. The Man. Knowing what they stand for, no fucking shit they are THIS angry. For me, it was definitely not a love on the first listen, but I got used to SHISH and started to hear more than just blind rage.

• Welcome to the Mood by LEISURE: still ultimate vibessss from aspiring New Zealand's greatest. I liked Sunsetter better (what an album title also, wow), but this is a decent one as well. Welcome to the Mood, indeed, and quite a specific one. You'll need to check this one for yourself tho.

Podcasts

• Apparently, lungs do not preserve well over time, so we have no identifiable dinosaur specimens. This means that their lungs and breathing apparatus could be pretty much anything (like birds lungs doing some weird sh9t to keep them alive) - The Evolution of Lungs by In Our Time

• It's no secret that history is told very differently in different countries. That's why I'm personally interested in checking out how the descriptions of anything related to Russian history differ in Russian books (note: not modern, heavily censored and polished ones, but rather my school textbooks, which may also have been rewritten, but you get the point) vs. in American, British or other sources. In my opinion, this is a good, concise history of the Romanovs - The Romanovs by Short History Of…

• [PL] It's been eight years and god knows how many more to go, of learning the Polish way of life. So I dearly appreciate reflective things like this episode, which hopefully will help me to understand the people around me better: why do Poles work so much and so hard? And do they really? O Zmierzchu

And a note on podcasts section: after 26 years and 1000+ episodes, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from hosting the In Our Time radio series. Not to say I'm devastated, but I'm certainly an avid listener of In Our Time, so I'm very curious how it is going to look like in the near future.

Cool links

Know a lot of animals?: Games! Animals! My brain gets properly paralysed and I instantly forget every creature on earth but basic ones like bear (which one? 😿) or ant but you'll do better i'm sure

pic.twitter.com/Yw8zmdbNkP

— Michael Nielsen (@michael_nielsen) January 31, 2024

Lidl is taking on AWS: During this fall, we had at least a couple of serious AWS outages. I hope in my great imaginative strong european future we'll all use Lidl cloud (just for the lols at least! Please?)

Doomscrolling?: I know you do. Try this instead

We don't need animations!: It's been a couple of months of liquid glass. Which reminds me (every freaking day honestly, it's been exhausting) - we! don't! need! animations! PLEASE! Whether it's Apple or not, I agree with every word in this article. Honestly, I'm even worse than that, I passionately hate pointless animations.

Turns out, there's a <time> HTML tag: But alas, it doesn't really work

Point Cloud Garden: For some reason, I absolutely adore this. SO BEAUTIFUL!

And one more pretty thing:

Have a snowiest winter ❄️