Culture Commentary and Miscellaneous Musings
Simran was warm in her arms, her lips soft. Her hair under Vina’s hands was silk. She smelled of smoke and sweat and of herself–of skin, heat, the promise of velvet under Vina’s mouth. Simran gasped against her mouth as their lips parted for a brief heartbeat. They met again like the tide touching the shore.
page 204, Chapter Sixteen: Vina, The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri
The background of the recording was just sections of monster shifting past one another, but in the foreground was the best view yet of a single creature as it reached for the drone. That blind spiral face opening out like a fractal, always with more and smaller arms unfolding from its heart. To a human eye there should have been some commonality there. They were not so infinitely alien, surely. And yet the blindness of them, the weird asymmetry of their bodies, the bizarre intricacies of their construction, like mechanisms, like toys, all spoke of a queasy wrongness.
page 62, 1.5 Light, Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.
page 84, Private Rites by Julia Armfield
It was a fine cry–loud and long–but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
page 174, Sula by Toni Morrison
Books became the medium I kept returning to more this year than any other. A mix of seasonal depression and anhedonia for the first half of the year meant that other forms of media that I enjoyed like music and video games weren’t hitting like they usually do. As such this will be the first of the three “2025 media of the year” posts.
I will start this blog post with some statistics and then I will get into each book in my 2025 books of the year list. The books will be listened in ascending order of when I read and reviewed them.