by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Blog
I read many books when I was little. I got books for Christmas and for my birthday. I read children’s books and adult books, and I loved them all. I could get through a whole book in a day or two, reading under my blanket in the dark with my flickering nightlight on. In books, I met with sex, and violence, and love, and friendship, and dreams. So many dreams.
I could read anywhere, any time. At the dinner table before being scolded, at night, at school, in the morning before breakfast, in the middle of the day at the weekend. I read at all of these times, and I thought nothing of it.
When I read now, I read almost exclusively at night. I sit alone in my room, and I read for as long as I can keep my eyes open. It is good at that time, because the night brings silence on its wing, and I can hear the words gently stirring about my skull. It is also good for me to read at that time, because when I read at other times, I feel restless, or somehow guilty, as though I were wasting my time. As if it is ever a waste of time to read. As if wasting time were a bad thing! The hours I’ve spent wasting time, in numerous ways, have been some of the happiest hours of my life!
When I read in my room at night, I feel that I am rebelling against the world. Nobody can see what I am doing, I am in another world, lightyears away, I am held in the hands of Philip K. Dick, of Yukio Mishima, of Knut Hamsun, and I refuse to be anywhere other than here, you cannot draw me in to your quick cycle of online content, because I am contented, I am contented here in this world that moves slowly up to the final page.
This year, I have been drawn into many worlds, and it has been marvellous. I forget how good it is, sometimes. But it is so good, it is so good to read. I am loathe to put it in more academic or verbose terms. It is just that reading is so good, and it makes me dream.
Here are my reads of this year, in time for you to find (or avoid) one or two at a second-hand bookshop before Christmas
1. Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi (2015)
I am starting off on a bad foot. I did not finish this book.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold tells the story of a Tokyo cafe which permits its customers to travel back in time, provided they return before their coffee goes cold. It’s a nice premise, and perhaps my qualms with the novel were a direct result of a lacklustre translation, but I found that Kawaguchi’s constant need to qualify each action of her characters with uninspired similes deeply irritating.
2. Butter – Asako Yuzuki (2017)
Another surprisingly odious read for me was Butter, the New York Times Best Seller, which my mother played on audiobook CDs in the car while we drove to see family this summer.
Butter is based on a real series of crimes that occurred in Japan, and the story follows journalist Rika Machida as she conducts a series of meetings in the Tokyo Detention Center with Manako Kajii, a gourmet cook who is accused of seducing men through her cooking in order to kill them.
I can’t express my distaste for this book enough. There was something so repetitively greasy about the descriptions of food; everything was milky, Machida’s lips were consistently wet, all was soft and gooey. I hit breaking point with the text when Machida begins to gain weight from all the gourmet food she’d been eating, and decides to go on a date with someone. During the date, Machida suddenly realises that her breast is touching her date’s arm, and she owes her initial obliviousness to this touch to the fact that she’d gained weight so quickly that she wasn’t conscious of how big her breasts had gotten.
Ridiculous.
3. Rabbit, Run – John Updike (1960)
This is an unbelievable novel. It scratches and cuts at you, at all your life, all the things you do day to day, all the things you feel, all the things you know. It asks you to look right into yourself and asks you if you like what you see. It makes magical, and devastating, the mundanities of life, and then it gets serious, and it cuts your heart clean in two.
Rabbit, Run captures three months in the life of Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a 26-year-old man in a loveless marriage who was a previously a talented high-school basketball player, but now works selling vegetable peelers. The book opens with Rabbit watching a group of kids playing basketball. He’s still in his suit, having come from work, but he joins in anyway. The kids don’t talk to him as they play. Rabbit wishes they would. He doesn’t want their respect, he wants to tell them ‘there’s nothing to getting old, it takes nothing.’
Rabbit, Run is an unwaveringly honest portrait of a young man confronted with mortality and morality, and I really, really loved it.
4. Devil in the Flesh – Raymond Radiguet (1923)
This one’s hot off the press; I just finished it. Le Diable au Corps, or Devil in the Flesh was written just after WWI, and caused enormous scandal as a result of its depiction of a young married woman having an affair while her husband is off fighting on the front. It was Radiguet’s first novel, and he was only twenty when he wrote it. He died the same year.
Make no mistake; this is no Jane Austen period drama romance (which I love too, but that’s beside the point). This is a painfully accurate depiction of the violence of teenage emotions, the sudden selfish passions, the jealousies, the callousness, the desperation of young love, bright as a snowdrop in February, and as quick to wither away. A masterpiece.
5. Victoria – Knut Hamsun (1898)
We’re all perhaps aware by now of my love for Hamsun, and this simple, tiny little book was one of the most memorable I read this year.
It is a love story. The Miller’s son falls in love with a rich landowner’s daughter. Over the years that pass, from childhood to adulthood, the pair fail to fully consummate, or even really admit, their love for one another. The landowner’s daughter, Victoria, becomes engaged and eventually marries Otto, a lieutenant, and the miller’s son, Johannes, becomes a famous author.
I cannot tell you more. It is a simple story, and it broke my heart. I cried in my lover’s arms as I turned the last page, real big tears, a full cry, how wonderful it is that we can feel such things from a few words on a page.
6. The Magus – John Fowles (1965)
This is my father’s favourite book. I think he has read it many times. It is a long book, too, some 650 pages.
I haven’t loved all I have read by Fowles. He has a preoccupation with psychology, and his twists and turns land a little flatter these days – now that we’re all armchair psychiatrists – in comparison to back then.
Anyhow: Here we are, in the fifties, on a Greek Island, where dwells a strange expat with a strange history, where we fall in love, where we fall out of love, where we leave England behind, where we meet with suicide, with surveillance, and with devious psychological games. It’s an inexplicable novel, and I think it better that I don’t tell you too much.
I enjoyed The Magus. I felt I understood my father better after I read it, somehow.
7. The Scent of Almonds – Camilla Läckberg (2006)
A Swedish crime mystery novel that I borrowed from my French grandmother, so I read in French.
I get the impression that people who live in small towns, such as where my grandmother lives and where my parents live, tend to become fixated on the crime/thriller/mystery genre. It seems to come with the territory. The quiet old streets, the neighbourhood watch, the history in the walls…
This is the story of Martin Molin, a young police officer who accompanies his girlfriend to her grand family home for Christmas. The house is situated on an isolated island, caked in snow, only accessible by boat. At dinner, the very night that Molin arrives, things start to take a turn for the worse…
Listen. It was a fun read, but not much more than that. I’ve never read Agatha Christie, but in my mind The Scent of Almonds must be the Swedish equivalent.
8. Tokyo Express – Seichō Matsumoto (1958)
I’ve already discussed this novella at length in another article, but it’s a killer, it really is. Another mystery/crime genre novel which follows a duo of experienced detective, Torigai Jutaro, and Kiichi Mihara, a young detective from Tokyo, as they investigate a supposed ‘Lover’s Suicide’ in coastal Japan.
It’s everything you want, the kind of delicious, intelligent intrigue that sees you running to keep up. Matsumoto ingeniously deploys Japan’s travel network, particularly train timetables, to produce an insatiably moody, sophisticated noir that I’m still obsessed with, months after reading it.
9. The Ice Palace – Tarjei Vesaas (1963)
I almost feel that it’s crass to write about this book, so exquisite it is. I feel that I should keep it for myself.
This is the story of Siss, an eleven-year-old girl from rural Norway who strikes up a friendship with Unn, the new girl at school. A day after their first private meeting together, Unn disappears. And thus, it begins.
It’s not a mystery, not really. The Ice Palace is an eye, placed in the centre of a little girl’s forehead as she looks out at the world, as she tries to understand this life, with its pain and its dark winters and its magic.
It’s one of the best books I have ever read.
10. Some Prefer Nettles – Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1929)
Tanizaki’s semi-autobiographical novel is a slowly-paced, considered meditation on marriage, parenthood, and family, themes propped up by the the central motif of performance; the performance of marriage, of traditional Japanese performance art, particularly Bunraku and traditional music such as the playing of the samisen, and the performance of the aesthetics of East versus West.
I read this book quite slowly. It’s highly character-focused, and you spend a lot of time just observing your surroundings, and travelling through Japan with protagonist Kaname, whose marriage is falling apart. It is not a dramatic novel, rather, it rolls gently up and down the slopes of adult life, with all its familial difficulties and joys, and you just follow alongside.
11. Une mort très douce – Simone de Beauvoir (1963)
A novella about de Beauvoir’s mother’s death, and the months preceding it.
I think often about death, but how does one reason with one’s mother’s death? How is it possible to think on such a thing? How can one apply the lessons of impermanence onto a bond so strong?
De Beauvoir had a difficult relationship with her mother, and I do not. And, yet, this novella struck me cold, confronted me with human fragility, with what it means to be a woman, a mother. It’s a poignant read.
12. Où on va, papa ? – Jean-Louis Fournier (2008)
This is Fournier’s autobiographical account of life with two disabled sons. The highs, the plunging lows, and the inherent comedy of it all, which he makes a point of emphasising. It is beautiful to read a text of such seemingly effortless honesty. Through short chapters, sometimes only a page long, Fournier chronicles the short lives of his sons, his ‘little birds’; laments society’s inability to include disabled children in jokes; and rejoices at the free American cars that his having disabled children permits him to own. It’s dry, at times brutally affecting, and deeply memorable.
I’ve never read anything like it.
13. An Actor Adrift – Yoshi Oida (1992)
I have been taking the time to study acting again. I train my fingers to play better on the piano, I write consistently in order to become a better writer, and I practice drawing techniques to create better tableaus. So why wouldn’t I train further to become a better actor?
I think it’s something to do with the ‘supernatural’ nature of acting talent. It’s impalpable, ephemeral; you either have it or you don’t. It’s something to do with the idea that training such a skill might dampen one’s natural ability, or dull the impulses that one finds in performance.
But I’m a whole lot better at acting since I went to drama school, and if I just put my ego to the side for a moment, I will see that I have a long way to go to achieve the openness, flexibility, and generosity in my acting that Oida speaks of in his autobiographical novel. And, then, I am a firm believer in discipline in the arts, in a rigorous routine of practice that exposes oneself to all the weaknesses that one has in their craft.
And if, indeed, ‘I didn’t waste time thinking whether or not the role I had been given was important, or if I looked good on stage’ (pp. 22-23), then I would surely be a better actor.
This is a lovely, enlightening book about Yoshi Oida’s time spent working with Peter Brook in his international theatre company in Paris in the late 60s, and about just what it takes to become a true artist.
14. The Dhammapada
Let’s finish strong on The Dhammapada, which, for a time, I read before bed every night. It’s a doctrine of Buddhism, a collection of aphorisms in verse to dwell upon. The Dhammapada has brought me much solace, and much spiritual challenge, as it has accompanied me over this year.
“If you speak or act with clear mind, happiness follows you, like a shadow that does not depart.”
Happy holidays, and a joyful new year. I hope 2026 is a year of blessings for you.
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The Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Hazel include: Growing Older, Go Read A Book, and When Did We Stop Criticizing Art?
Carl Kruse is also on Goodreads.