© Brona’s Books 2026 | Maroubra Beach As you can see below January turned out to be an amazing reading month, but not so much a blogging month. I wasn't in the zone for writing very often, so took that as a sign to just keep on reading! It has also been pretty hot this summer, so … Continue reading Book Diary | January 2026
The hands do not belong to me. Lying on the hotel bed in the sun-drenched light of a late September morning, I hold them up for study, turning them in slow circles. Brown and slender, long arms stretch above their parallel shadows on the white sheet. Tapered fingers, imprinted in darkening script, bend and extend, … Continue reading The Flower Bearers | Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Helen heaved her bag up each step, hoping the timber wouldn't break beneath her weight. The front door was dimpled glass, backed inside by a curtain of thin floral fabric her grandmother Iris had strung across plastic wires. I'm way behind in review writing at the moment, so I've made the decision to push out … Continue reading Iluka | Cassie Stroud
It would be Babel all over again. Sympathy Tower Tokyo would throw our language into disarray; it would tear the world apart. Not because, dizzy with our architectural prowess, we had reached too close to heaven and enraged the gods, but because we had begun to abuse language, to bend and stretch and break it … Continue reading Sympathy Tower Tokyo | Rie Qudan
26 Questions in 2026: When did you join The Classics Club? How many titles have you read for the club so far? Share a link to your latest classics club list. I joined The Classics Club in August 2012 not long after its inception. I completed my first list of 65 titles in April 2018. My … Continue reading The Classics Club 26 in 26
She chose September, that most excellent month, to make her move. The monsoon had receded, leaving Kerala gleaming like an emerald strip between the mountains and the sea. As the plane banked to land, and the earth rose to greet us, I couldn't believe that topography could cause such palpable, physical pain. I had never … Continue reading Mother Mary Comes to Me | Arundhati Roy
We found grandfather lying in the attic. It was a small, six-mat room, dark even during the daytime, its only window about the size of a piece of A4 paper. In the middle of the room, under the naked light bulb that dangled from the ceiling, was the futon mattress I'd left out that morning. … Continue reading The Man Who Died Seven Times | Yasuhiko Nishizawa
Tsuneo Asai was on a business trip to the Kansai region when he heard the news. The shocking news turned about to be the sudden death of his young wife, Eiko, due to a heart attack. Asai worked as section chief in the Staple Food Department of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. He was … Continue reading A Quiet Place | Seichō Matsumoto
The sun was still submerged in the wintry murk of dawn when Ba, Dadaji, and their daughter, Mina Foi, wrapping shawls closely about themselves, emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day. My first book review of the year is … Continue reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny | Kiran Desai
After a chat with Sue @Whispering Gums, I decided to run my stats to see what I could glean from the 2025 AI bot scraping event, if anything. The table below shows the stats as they were before the scraping got serious on the 23rd August plus the four month period of scraping, and now … Continue reading 2025 Stats + Bots
In previous years I have gone through my WordPress stats with a great deal of curiosity and fascination, but this year they feel absolutely meaningless thanks to the AI bot-scraping/training activity that overwhelmed my blog for a large part of the year. It is quite possible that over 13 000 people have viewed my 2023 … Continue reading 2025 in Review
Reading Non-Fiction in 2026 is a personal reading project with no plans, schedules or deadlines. There is only one simple target - to read 24 non-fiction books in one year. I am starting the year with The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a triple murder trial by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. I have also … Continue reading Reading Non-Fiction 2026: Masterpost
Happy New Year! I forgot all about taking my photo for Sheila's First Book of the Year, which is a little weird since it's something we have now been doing for thirteen years! It also means I have missed the opportunity to get a lovely sunny photo of me with my first books of the … Continue reading First books of the year 2026
December is always a weird reading month for me, this year was no exception. I had lots of good intentions, the main one being to finish all the half-read books before the end of the year. I am not going to make it. I still have about 200 pages to go in Sonia and Sunny … Continue reading Book Diary | December 2025
I have always been fascinated by history. In highschool I studied both Modern and Ancient History, then chose modern history as my major at uni. In times gone by (i.e. pre-blog) I have read/obsessed about the Ancient World - the Mesopotamians, Greeks and Egyptians in particular, the French Revolution, World War One, the Russian Revolution, … Continue reading #ReadingNonFiction2026: History
