Academic hell, money issues and some self-help: March 2026 Reads

Book Review, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Speculative Fiction

The Harder I Fight the More I Love You: a memoir by Neko Case

I love Case’s music, which I discovered by chance around 2023 after listening to her being interviewed in The Witch Wave podcast with Pam Grossman. I’m specially fascinated by her mysterious lyrics, often based on her own personal life, so I was intrigued to read this. Interestingly enough, Case has admitted that she was more interested in writing fiction (I would actually be curious to read a novel by her!) but during the Covid-19 pandemic she, like many other musicians, found herself struggling financially because she couldn’t tour and so getting commissioned to write this memoir really helped her.

Case definitely has a story to tell that goes way beyond her experience as a musician, though. In fact, most of this memoir focuses on her unusual (and disturbing) childhood. Her parents who had her in their teens, were not prepared for children at all, which sadly meant they were not only neglectful but also abusive to her only child. For example, when Case is really young, her mother leaves the family and to do so fakes her own death. In a bizarre turn of events, her father goes along with this lie, gathering the family to have a wake for his wife who has presumably died of cancer. Case goes through mourning just to get her mother ‘back’ a year or so after the event. I mean, that alone would had made me go mad as a child.

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Strange worlds, fungi, and raw landscapes: February 2026 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Science-Fiction, Short Story Collection, Speculative Fiction, Thrutopia

Eve by Una

A gorgeously dark graphic novel. I admired this author already – having read her debut, Becoming Unbecoming, which had a great impact on me. This is her most recent work and far more complex in terms of the art’s rendition. The story is still set in the north of England (where I live). It imagines a bleak near future in which climate collapse and the spread of far-right politics dominate the country. Eve, the main character, is born in the 2020s – a decade of great upheaval – from an English mother and an immigrant father who is a refugee in the UK. The story follows Eve’s upbringing alongside that of two of her closest friends, Si and Ruby.

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New Ideas: January 2026 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Thrutopia

Spent by Alison Bechdel

I love Bechdel’s work so I saved this book as a treat and I read it all on one go during New Year. It didn’t disappoint. The art is incredible detailed as always (specially the cats, look for the cheeky cats in almost every frame!). Also, this time Bechdel treats us to a fully-coloured work which makes the small community she portrays here all the more vibrant.

There’s something distinctive about this book. Whereas a lot of Bechdel’s work is autobiographical (i.e. Fun Home, Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength) what Bechdel does here is something different. The main character is called Alison and looks exactly like her. Her partner is called Holly and looks exactly like the Holly from her other works who we know is the author’s partner. However, Bechdel classifies this work as fiction from the get go. For example, the Alison of this work became famous after publishing a graphic novel titled Death and Taxidermy about her father who was a taxidermist artist (so, no Fun Home and no father working in the funeral business). She doesn’t have two younger brothers but an older sister called Sheila. And this graphic novel is not written in the first person but in the third person.

I’m intrigued but also excited – and creatively stimulated – by observing these approaches. Coincidentally, I also read another book this month that plays with the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, Soldiers of Salamis, which I discuss below. But let’s go back to Bechdel’s new work. Spent tells the story of a small community in Vermont in which established graphic novelist Alison and her partner Holly have decided to start a pigmy goat sanctuary. Alison’s work has recently been adapted into a very popular TV series. However, life is not as easy as her friends think: it’s actually excruciating for Alison to see her own life adapted into TV. Also, the publisher who has made an offer for her new work is also involved with some far-right politics that go against everything Alison believes in so she has to decide between her career and her ideals on this next step of her professional journey.

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Best Reads of 2025

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Speculative historical fiction, Thrutopia, Weird Fiction

This was a hard year for me – I was ill for a lot of it which impacted on my reading speed. During the second half of December, however, I decided to consciously stop checking social media and make my life much more analogue. Surprising no one, this was the month I read the most – and also when I mentally felt the healthiest I’ve been in a long while. So this is something I’m hoping to embrace in 2026 – less time in the digital sphere and more time with a book in my hands…

Books that blew my mind:

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K Le Guin

Very late to the party with this one, I know, but it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Cosmic horror, philosophy and religion. Fantasy at its best. We follow a teenager who has been hailed as the high-priestess of an ancient religion. Who has been educated to believe she’s one of the most important humans on Earth – but actually, does she have any power at all to decide her own fate? The descriptions of the maze of caves under the tombs of Atuan had be dizzy with fear and wonder.

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Families are complicated: December 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Climate Fiction, Creative Non Fiction, Crime Fiction, Eco-criticism, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Horror, Literary Fiction, Nature Writing

Motherhood by Sheila Heti

I’ve wanted to read this book for a long time, so I jumped in glee when I discovered my library had the audiobook. It is narrated by the author (which is always enjoyable) so I borrowed it as quickly as I could. I listened to it in a few days (it’s a short one) through the darkness and rain of early December in the north.

I loved it and hated it – this was one book to inspire lots of feelings in me, often contradictory. I found the author’s voice annoying yet compelling. She narrates this book using, partly, the I-ching – she asks questions to it as if she was speaking to a god of sorts, or the universe, or a superior intelligence. This is amusing and strange – because, of course, she always tries to make sense of the answers she gets, which sound serene, loving, rarely random.

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A quiet wintering: November 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Horror, Korean fiction, Literary Fiction

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

I adored this book. The written style is lyrical and contains lots of imagery. In this character-driven novel, the plot is secondary. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with Ocean Vuong (he’s so wise when it comes to the craft of storytelling) in which he discusses the importance of ‘pause’ and ’emptiness’ at plot level. And this work is a perfect example of that.

The novel follows nineteen-year-old Hai, loosely based on Vuong himself. Hai is depressed after losing the man he loved during his first year at university. As a Vietnamese immigrant in the States, he doesn’t dare to confess this to his mother (he hasn’t even told her that he is gay). So instead he pretends that his breakdown and poor mental health are a direct consequence of his drug abuse. When his desperation takes him close to dying by suicide, he’s unexpectedly saved by Grazina, a woman in her eighties, and also an immigrant herself after the Second World War.

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Surrounded by Ghosts: October 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Spanish

El Celo by Sabina Urraca

The writing of this book is frenetic, visceral and full of detail that is sometimes luscious and other times absolutely disgusting. It took me a while to finish this book because its themes – societal misogyny, sexism, abuse. It follows a female character – ‘The Human’ – who finds a female dog in the streets of Madrid and becomes her owner almost against her will. Taking care of another creature becomes a mammoth task, but The Human, who can barely take of herself as it is, is willing. What she’s not prepared for is her dog in heat – which comes with its own set of complications and pressures for her to handle this wild side of her animal.

As the book advances – often mixing different timelines, The Human as a child growing up in Tenerife, and also as a young woman trying to make life work in Madrid – a few things are revealed. First, that The Human is addicted to anti-anxiety pills she takes to numb a traumatic experience. Her doctor recognises her as a someone who’s suffered from the abuse of an ex-partner so he sends her to group therapy where she meets other women that are nothing like her (they are much older, much younger, they come from complete different places and classes) but that can understand her experience of being hurt by someone they love. The Human bonds with one of the members of this group – Mecha (is interesting to see that other characters are given actual names) – who becomes a friend, a bad influence, and a saviour.

I really enjoyed this story and thought the writing (in Spanish) was really good. It was an uncomfortable, claustrophobic read – which makes sense, considering the narrator is constantly surrounded by many ghosts, the ghost of her grandmother, who she adored when she was a child, but who died of dementia, the ghost of her ex partner, still controlling and frightening her even though they are not together anymore, the ghost of a still birth in the family which was never discussed or acknowledged, the ghost of her grandfather, who dies during the book right after confessing an unsettling truth, the ghost of the career she’s left behind in marketing, the money and the stability, as she tries to become a writer and recover from trauma, the ghosts of all the abusive lovers of the women from her group therapy sessions… and so on.

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Dystopias and Introspection: September 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Literary Fiction, Short Story Collection, Weird Fiction

The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K Le Guin

This is the second book in the Earthsea series that I started reading in August this year. I loved this second instalment even more than the first one, if that is even possible. Whereas A Wizard of Earthsea was more classical fantasy, this book had some horror and weird fiction features intertwined that I particularly enjoyed.

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Travels through space and time: August 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Fantasy, Graphic Novels, Horror, Literary Fiction, Queer Literature, Science-Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Weird Fiction
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Here by Richard McGuire

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When I worked at the bookshop, we had a graphic novel that I would check on occasion. Its concept fascinated me. If you don’t know it yet, Here tells a story through double-page illustrations of the same space – a room in a house – spanning years, centuries, and millennia. For example, if you are watching the space millennia ago, there is only plants, maybe some strange prehistoric animal lurking in the background. In the future, water floods everywhere. Or we may get glimpses of a futuristic society. The present time focuses mainly on the twentieth century, allowing you to see the same family grow and evolve in the same space.

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Turbulent Books: July 2025 Reading Log

Book Review, Books, Creative Non Fiction, Graphic Novels, Historical Fiction

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls

This is one of the best graphic novels I have ever read – and also, one of the hardest. Ever. Pretty much like Palestine by Joe Sacco and Maus by Art Spiegel (which I wholeheartedly recommend), I found myself having to put the book down to process it. This couldn’t be done in one sitting. But it is extremely good, a thought-provoking, and it encompasses a lot, from family dynamics to mental health to art and purpose to very complex (and often terrifying) historical events from twentieth-century China.

This is also a graphic novel I was eagerly waiting for from the moment I heard it had won a Pulitzer award. I’m also very interested in historical memory and familial and collective memory – how we inherit the stories from our ancestors, sometimes even without knowing them first hand, as it is the case in this particular graphic novel.

This is also Hull’s first long-form work (although she has excellent short comics published in different places, you can see all those listed in her website). It is, of course, pretty impressive. I have listened to a lot of interviews with the author in which she swears this will be the only graphic novel she’ll ever draw. She says it’s done. I’m saddened, because I’d read every graphic novel she’d produce – but also, I sort of understand. I can see why working on this story would take an extraordinary amount of energy – both physically and mentally.

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