Proof that snow still exists in Maryland:
And that’s a wrap on a year that objectively was total shit. Here’s the highlights: I didn’t publish my novels, I didn’t get a job to replace the one that booted me out at the end of 2024, I didn’t make my reading goal, I didn’t even manage to restrict my takeout to once a month, and according to my first-ever Spotify Wrapped I’m 71. I’m on the upswing from a months-long depressive spiral triggered by a series of increasingly unfortunate events and I don’t know if I’m technically really out of it yet, but I’m hoping. At the very least I don’t feel like breaking a window and jumping out, so that’s something, right? Part of this recovery has to do with time, but it also helps that I have a new shiny object because I’m not better than a corvid.
This is my new phone case I love it with all my heart. My customers bring me the darndest things at BN. Mostly it’s book titles I haven’t heard of, which I then download as free samples on my Kindle (have yet to read most of them, but anyway), but one woman came to the counter with the purple version of this case on her phone and I just – I mean, look at it. ;_; Anyway she let me take a picture of it and I ordered it in blue and now it’s never coming off, and I have already sold a completely different customer on it even though we obviously don’t carry Amazon products. I mostly love it. That flip-down visor is adorable, but it is also deeply annoying because it acts like sunglasses and tints your photos if you don’t take it off.
A couple more small joys for the turn of the year: putting up my brand-new calendar and the official opening of my 2026 planner, which I finally get to use.
2026 is going to be my year. We are manifesting this.
December Reading Summary
Books Finished:
- Goblins & Greatcoats – Travis Baldree
- Foul Heart Huntsman – Chloe Gong
Books Abandoned:
- Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France – Christopher C. Gorham
Total Pages Read: 703
I started December with great intentions. (Don’t I always?) But then, as ended up being typical of the final months of 2025, something happened and all that borrowed energy fizzled. In September Circe shat blood, which ate up several weeks and hundreds of dollars (which I have since recouped, bless pet insurance), and then on the heels of that there were a couple of weeks where I thought I was going to be evicted because of what seems to have been an administrative error with my September rent payment. (That has also been resolved.) October and November got poured into the bakery, which was its own special hell. And in December, after what felt like a year but was actually four months and change, I unexpectedly quit the bakery in the middle of an awful shift. This solved very few of my problems, and in fact enhanced the problems that remain. But I got Have a Nice Life’d on my way out the door and that is such a middle finger, and I’m not sorry I left. I used to think a bakery would be an amazing place to work, which seems laughably naive now. If I ever miss anything, it will be the food and the macchiatos I loved to make for myself. I will never miss the hours, the passive aggressive toxicity, the constant inspections, the unspoken sense that the inspector had instructions not to let the bakery succeed, or the needy, demanding idiots who for some reason thought anything not nailed to the floor could possibly qualify as a free sample.
As far as mementos go, I ended up keeping the uniform (mostly because I obviously was wearing it when I quit), and I have this keychain, for which I still need to find a home.
And I will always have this memory of the nail that fell out of the roll of dimes I was unwrapping, and that’s fucked up. I have no idea how a nail managed to get packaged in a roll of dimes. I don’t particularly care. One of the bakers said I must have an enemy, and I think he’s right. Can’t imagine who it might be. Maybe it’s the ghost of somebody I pissed off in a previous life.
All of which is to say that reading was not a priority in December, or indeed at any point in the final quarter of the year, though some reading did take place during my work breaks. That being said, I did manage to fulfill my one surviving goal of finishing the Secret Shanghai series before the end of the year, which gave me five series completed for 2025, and I’m not displeased. I also reread Goblins & Greatcoats in preparation for Brigands & Breadknives, which – at this point in my Brigands read – seems to have been an excellent idea. Of course I still managed to go on a secondhand book-buying spree because I sold a box of books and I was feeling uppity, and also just look at that gorgeous Eco. I have read The Name of the Rose and remember very little about it, except that they somehow burn the monastery to the ground, but I had never heard of The Island of the Day Before. And I’ve gotta admit I’m nervous because Name of the Rose was hard to get through, but I had to have this book. I also decided the time was ripe to finally try Emily St. John Mandel, and Wolf Totem (Jiang Rong) was a totally random surprise find. Which, let’s face it, is the best kind of find to have in a bookstore.
In other news, my Jurassic World catch-up project came to an end when I finally watched Jurassic World: Rebirth. I’m glad I didn’t spend money to see that. It was terrible. Only five people got eaten. Two stars. >:(
In My Bookselling Era
Work isn’t all bad. I love working at Barnes & Noble. I love books and I love being surrounded by books and I love talking to people about books, and BN fulfills all three. I might have brought shame on my ancestors the other day because I think I accidentally explained Dungeon Crawler Carl (Matt Dinniman) to somebody who had already read it, but that is what happens when you activate my unskippable dialogue. :’) Another benefit of what I sincerely hope will be a long career at BN (or at least last longer than a handful of months): free ARCs in the break room. I took full advantage last year, and this year I’m at it again. I particularly bless the coworker who told me about The Poet Empress (Shen Tao). I am looking forward to all of these.
Last year I had the full power of my savings account behind me, and I ended up trading labor for books because I was not nearly as careful as I should’ve been. This year I don’t have that luxury, so I’ve instituted a new rule. If I see a book that I want and it wasn’t written by an auto-buy author, or it doesn’t belong to an auto-buy series, I have to download the free Kindle sample and read it before I start to think about buying it. This strategy has been extremely effective in Getting Me To Not Buy The Damn Book, and so far has prevented me from impulse-buying perhaps twenty books. If this sounds like an exaggeration, it is not. I now compulsively download Kindle samples. I have so many unread samples stacking up in my Kindle library instead of unread books stacking up on my living room floor next to overcrowded bookshelves. It’s a thing of beauty. I am sorely tempted by that gorgeous new edition of I Am a Cat (Sōseki Natsume), but I realized upon picking it up that it was quite a bit thinner than it’s supposed to be, and from there I learned that it is in fact only the first volume. I already have a copy including every volume, so I will have to admire this new one from afar. I am proud of how little I have managed to buy for myself this holiday season, aside from a few treats, and slightly shocked. As for that screaming paper clip cat, it looked so much like a yelling Circe that I had to buy it.
My current list of auto-buy authors, for accountability’s sake and in alphabetical order by surname:
- Yangsze Choo
- Nikita Gill (based on the beauty of that special edition of Hekate, holy shit)
- Alexis Henderson
- Zeyn Joukhadar
- Madeline Miller
- Tamsyn Muir
- Maggie O’Farrell (historical fiction only)
Provisional authors (pending my reaction to their other books, as yet unwritten and/or unread):
Auto-buy series, in order by series title:
- The Celestial Kingdom – Sue Lynn Tan
- The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
- Impossible Creatures – Katherine Rundell
- Legends & Lattes – Travis Baldree
- The Locked Tomb – Tamsyn Muir
- Shady Hollow even though IT’S ENDING T_T – Juneau Black
- Spellshop – Sarah Beth Durst
- The Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman
I am currently considering adding Emilia Hart to the provisional authors list, but that will depend upon my feelings towards The Sirens. That being said, I went into Weyward thinking I was going to DNF it but then bought The Sirens after page 35. I expect long-time friends will be surprised that Margaret Atwood is not on the list, but that is because I already have most of her fiction books and the latest book I read by her was a spectacular miss.
Yearly Challenge Stats
2023
Books Pledged: 72, later extended to 84
Books Finished: 80
Total Pages Read: 27,379
2024
Books Pledged: 30
Books Finished: 63
Total Pages Read: 19,062
2025
Books Pledged: 60
Books Finished: 44
Total Pages Read: 14,309
2025 Book List
Asterisk Key
* recommended
** highly recommended
*** my love for this book knows no bounds and YOU WILL READ IT
Assume that all the mangas/comic books are recommended, because I haven’t bothered asterisking them. Hyperlinked titles lead to reviews.
- The Wild Robot – Peter Brown
- Mirror Mirror – Gregory Maguire
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
- My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me*** – Caleb Carr
- Spy x Family 13 – Tatsuya Endo
- Night of the Living Cat 1 – Hawkman
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling
- Foul Lady Fortune*** – Chloe Gong
- 1984 – George Orwell
- Twilight Falls*** – Juneau Black
- Cat + Gamer 7 – Wataru Nadatani
- The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes* – Suzanne Collins
- Last Violent Call*** – Chloe Gong
- The Fox Wife*** – Yangsze Choo
- The Bullet That Missed*** – Richard Osman
- Summers End*** – Juneau Black
- Sunrise on the Reaping*** – Suzanne Collins
- The Last Devil to Die** – Richard Osman
- Jurassic Park* – Michael Crichton
- The Treasure in the Royal Tower (Nancy Drew #128) – Carolyn Keene
- The Hunger Games* – Suzanne Collins
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – J.K. Rowling
- The Lost World* – Michael Crichton
- Island of the Blue Dolphins – Scott O’Dell
- The Midnight Library* – Matt Haig
- Puccini’s Ghosts – Morag Joss
- Mirrored Heavens** – Rebecca Roanhorse
- Orbital* – Samantha Harvey
- James** – Percival Everett
- Stone Mattress*** – Margaret Atwood
- Cat + Gamer 8 – Wataru Nadatani
- Impossible Creatures*** – Katherine Rundell
- The Hallowed Hunt – Lois McMaster Bujold
- Hamnet*** – Maggie O’Farrell
- Salt Slow – Julia Armfield
- The Unworthy** – Agustina Bazterrica
- The Poisoned King*** – Katherine Rundell
- Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu** – Junji Ito
- When You Love a Cat** – M.H. Clark
- The Spellshop*** – Sarah Beth Durst
- Slashed Beauties – A. Rushby
- Goblins & Greatcoats*** – Travis Baldree
- Foul Heart Huntsman*** – Chloe Gong
DNF
- The Stardust Thief (Chelsea Abdullah) – Reread DNF’d 5/31/25 on page 222, so wow, I actually got farther than I thought. :’) This DNF was really a surprise when I loved the book the first time I read it, but I ran out of steam for unemployment-related reasons, and I got a little bored. This isn’t a fault of the book, it was just a matter of the wrong place at the wrong time. I’ll pick this up again later because I do still want to finish the trilogy, and I definitely have book 2 on my shelf.
- Her Lost Words (Stephanie Marie Thornton) – DNF’d 9/7/25 on page 43. I thought I’d love it, but it never grabbed me, and the chapters are way too damn long. It’s fine otherwise.
- Sansei and Sensibility (Karen Tei Yamashita) – DNF’d 9/8/25 on page 57. I really tried. Unfortunately, I am super bored and I just have no idea what she’s talking about. After the first two stories it stopped reading like a short story collection and turned into a memoir interspersed with a Who’s Who of Japanese settlers in the Americas, and I don’t even know if that was the intention.
- I Who Have Never Known Men (Jacqueline Harpman) – DNF’d 10/22/25 on page 25. I thought I could hop into this one right after The Unworthy, but it just didn’t do it for me. The narrator is a snotty teenager who gives the same “I am surrounded by morons” vibe as Mary MacLane, and I see no reason to waste my time.
- The Curse of Chalion (Lois McMaster Bujold) – Reread DNF’d 11/2/25 on page 33. I love this book SO MUCH, but I just lost steam during this reread and wanted to read something else.
- Matisse at War: Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France (Christopher C. Gorham) – Temporarily DNF’d 12/2/25 on page 31. It’s not the book, it’s the reading slumps. I will try again this year.
2025 Favorites and Least Favorites
This list only covers books I read for the first time this year, and does not include rereads.
Favorites
- My Beloved Monster – Caleb Carr
- Last Violent Call – Chloe Gong
- The Bullet That Missed – Richard Osman
- Sunrise on the Reaping – Suzanne Collins
- James – Percival Everett
- The Poisoned King – Katherine Rundell
- The Spellshop – Sarah Beth Durst
- Foul Heart Huntsman – Chloe Gong
Least Favorites
- Mirror Mirror – Gregory Maguire
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
- Salt Slow – Julia Armfield
2025 Holidays + Eats
Holidays
If there is anyone who can look at this blog and say I look like I’m doing great, I want whatever you’re smoking. To say I have been unwell is correct in its essentials, but it misses the broader point, which is that I am not so much unhinged as almost completely detached from my frame. As I say, I have been recovering; leaving the bakery knocked me off my rails in a way I did not anticipate, and it took me a while to get onto a more even keel. There are also, I suspect, general health-related problems in the mix, but that’s something for me to figure out if and when I ever get health insurance again. More to the point, I almost didn’t make it home for Christmas because I was a level of unwell that didn’t want to go out or stay in, and I almost canceled my one holiday engagement several times. From the photos, of course, we can see that I made it to both. I don’t feel like enumerating them, so suffice it to say that there was a lot of food and I piloted a new recipe, and I am now a devoted fan of Moribyan. (A note for myself: plating and presentation still need work. The Moribyan chicken was messier than I intended, and those mashed potato cakes fell completely apart when I was trying to flip them. Those will need some work. :’D) I will be trying more of her recipes, especially as I see she has a sparkling new post about French-style hot chocolate. Her Buldak-inspired chicken is one of the best things I’ve made this year, if not the best, and I was very sad to finish the last of the spicy broth. It was so good I made it twice in one week, once for Christmas dinner and once for holiday potluck. Another Christmas happening: I brought Weyward (Emilia Hart) home, thinking I would probably DNF it (because I’d heard some mixed things about it after I’d already bought it) and then unhaul it, and I was very annoyed when I got sucked into it. I just finished the review for it this afternoon.
After the holiday potluck there was new year’s, which I spent alone for the first time in my life. I do not think there was ever a year I wasn’t home for the new year. This year my work schedule staggered itself in a way that made a home visit both unrealistic and inconvenient because I had exactly one day off that week, and that day happened to be New Year’s Eve. Therefore I actually did manage to go all out with my new year’s cleaning, which in previous years has been quietly skipped due to sheer exhaustion (honestly don’t remember if I managed it last year). On New Year’s Adam I went to H Mart to buy a mikan for my usual okasane and I swear that’s all I went in for but all that other stuff jumped into my cart and wouldn’t get out and I had to adopt them all okay. And actually H Mart did not have any satisfactory mikans, as theirs were all completely lacking in any sort of stem or leaf, so I ended up at Lotte where a bunch of extra stuff hopped into my arms again goddammit how does this keep HAPPENING. ;o; Anyway I showed more restraint at Lotte, where I left with only the mikan, a refill on my favorite dumplings, and a bottle of mango juice to toast the new year. My dad always makes special cocktails for the ball drop – entirely juice-based in my case – so I figured I’d continue the tradition even if I couldn’t be home. I’ve also never had to find the ball drop for myself, so there was some confusion with me trying to get DIRECTV and finding out I needed an account before I realized AP was streaming it for free on YouTube.
As for that picture where I’m holding a napa, I am very pleased. On the first of every year my mom makes ozoni (the soup pictured at the bottom), and it is the first thing we have to eat in the new year, before we take any other food. This is supposed to be good luck. I don’t know if this is a regional thing. I have never seen a comparable recipe online, and the recipes I’ve seen for ozoni have looked more like what she calls nimono, a chicken stew she also makes on new year’s, but for general eating purposes. I was thinking I’d skip the napa that goes into the ozoni if I couldn’t find a small enough napa – there’s only so much I can do with one giant napa – but H Mart, bless their souls, was selling those mini napas for $1.99. My first pot of ozoni was serviceable, and the cat and I had a nice quiet NYE with salmon teriyaki made with the leftover sauce from Moribyan’s chicken, and miso soup made with red miso for once. I’ve been using exclusively white miso the last few years and I don’t know why, because the red was delicious. It was so delicious I had to make a little ochazuke after I’d finished most of the salmon. I still have some leftover salmon, which is going into a bibimbap tonight.
Closed out the year with a bowl of rice and shoyu because I couldn’t get all the leftover rice to fit in the pyrex and I was hungry again. Circe got a smidge of oat milk vanilla ice cream and loved it. 2026 will be better for us. I hope.
Miscellaneous Foodenings
A recent discovery: Safeway carries the Cleveland kimchi. I have taken quite a liking to this kimchi, which is wonderfully garlicky and exceptionally good with Japanese curry, and am pleased to know I do not have to worry about running out. Other food happenings from the past month: another stuffing casserole, made with leftover Thanksgiving turkey; the return of the pikelets which apparently I haven’t made since 2023?!?!?! because I happened to be craving pancakes for some reason; stroganoff, another random craving, with macaroni and cheese; oatmeal chocolate chip cookies; my favorite Fujianese peanut noodles; red lentil chicken curry; Trader Joe’s cranberry & white chocolate oatmeal cookies, they are addicting; yet another bowl of Japanese curry, because I was going to make Moribyan’s chicken but then my plans got changed and the chicken got pushed back, but I still had this chicken defrosted, so it went into a pot of curry; and the revival of my taste for iced caramel macchiatos with vanilla sweet cream cold foam.
Re: lentil curry, I was right last month. It was quite good with ground chicken. The only thing I will need to remember for next time is that ground chicken does not release juice the way ground beef and pork do, so it needed to be cooked with oil. It still turned out amazing. I will be making this again. I still got a lotta lentils.
2026 Resolution Recap + 2027 Goals
2025 resolutions went about as well as the 2024 resolutions did. Cooking habits continue excellent; likewise my goal of not getting DoorDash or fast food every week. Exercise went down the drain, as did any art-related goals, in spite of the Cat a Day project (currently in stasis). In terms of reading, the series challenge went moderately well, so I will be continuing it, with one major revision: with the exception of the Flesh and False Gods trilogy, every series on the 2026 TBR has already been started, i.e., I’ve already started reading and/or reviewing it. I have also entered the StoryGraph January reading challenge for the second year running, because I really want that Kobo. I’m currently at 100% with my January reading. I’ve had to modify the dates every day because StoryGraph counts time differently than I do, but it’s been going well; likewise the 2026 Overeducated Women with Cats challenge, for which I have already completed one book.
As far as blogging goes, that also went down the drain alongside my mental health, and I am working on building up a stock of posts again, having run through last year’s entire content backlog before we even got to December. The burst of energy I always get at the beginning of the year is entirely psychosomatic and don’t I know it, but I am taking advantage of it as long as I can because I have no idea how long it will last. I should really keep track of this sort of thing. Currently I have reviews finished for Slashed Beauties (A. Rushby), The Spellshop (Sarah Beth Durst), and Weyward (Emilia Hart), the second of which I have been putting off ever since I finished the book in November, and which I finally just wrote in its entirety yesterday. Thank gods I hadn’t yet forgotten everything. Next on my list: The Poisoned King (Katherine Rundell) and the Jurassic Universe movies.
This achievement is balanced out by some slight badness: I procrastinated on this frankly horrifying monster of a post, which was supposed to be published last Saturday but wasn’t even started at that point, and this made me decide good and all to move my publication day to Wednesday. I was toying with this idea because I currently have Tuesdays and Wednesdays pretty consistently off while Saturdays are heavily scheduled, and the procrastination sealed the deal. This is only an experiment; we’ll see how well it sticks. Right now the main goal is to post once a week, as it was last year. On the positive side, I am proud that I did consistently review what I read in 2025. We’re not looking to leave anybody behind, with a handful of exceptions for genres I don’t typically review. Along with the non-fiction books and the mangas, I will not be reviewing Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O’Dell), mostly because I read it out of nostalgia and don’t have anything much to say about it, and my feedback on When You Love a Cat (M.H. Clark) is limited to OOOOOOOHLOOKATTHELITTLEKITTY because even I can’t be articulate 100% of the time.
What hasn’t been going well at all is the reading journaling, as I have finished neither of the two reading journals I started. I might start a new journal for 2026; then again I might not. It’s not as if I kept up with the other two particularly well, and I’ve got a million other things I want to be doing. I still want to finish the journals for 2024 and 2025; we’ll see if that happens this year, or at all.
Kitty Corner
EOY kitty dump
