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To Be Read Books

2026 Audiobook Challenge

The 2026 Audiobook Challenge is being hosted by Caffeinated Reviewer and That’s What I’m Talking About. Audiobooks are something I have only recently picked up, but eager to give it a try. I found them exceedingly useful last year for making daily chores more enjoyable.

I will probably manage a maximum of 1-5 books under “Newbie (I’ll give it a try)” status, although I am secretly aiming for “Weekend Warrior (I’m getting the hang of this)” at 5-10 audiobooks.

These are the 10 audiobooks I have shortlisted so far.

Are you signing up for the 2026 Audiobook Challenge?

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Best of List Books Memes Starred Recommendations

Best Books I Read in 2025

First Top 10 Tuesday post of 2026! Happy New Year, everyone!!!

This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt has us look at our best books of 2025, and I am eager to see what everyone has to share!

My own favorites are listed below, and reviews shared earlier by me HERE. My reading list is still heavier on the historical fantasy fiction side, but I am glad I managed to pick up on non-fiction reads as well.

So, which were your best books of 2025? Do share in the comments!

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Books Index Long Posts Recommendations

Mini-Reviews: Books in 2025 [Long List]

I was ready to write bad angsty poetry on my never-ending reading / blogging slump in the first half of 2025. But luckily, the second half got me out of slump valley in record time. Here’s a quick record of everything I read and (mostly) liked in the past year.

Wild Reverence by Rebecca Ross

Rating: 4 out of 5.

This book reminded me a lot of Madeline Miller’s Circe, as if retelling a mix of Norse and Greek/ Roman mythologies. The lead character is Matilda, a messenger god who can travel across realms. She falls in love with a mortal, and that does not sit well with a trickster crafty god who hungers for more power and dominion. The story reads like a folktale about how a puny messenger god defeated the crafty god, won a mortal’s heart, saved several people, and learnt the surprising truth of her own heritage. The plot seems strangely familiar and also sometimes a little predictable. But I am a huge fan of the exquisite writing style, intriguing characterizations and the truly stellar world-building.

Continue reading “Mini-Reviews: Books in 2025 [Long List]”
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Best of List Index Recommendations Watchlist

Watchlist 2025: Mini-Reviews [Long List]

Happy New Year 2026!

Lots of watches this past year 2025, and here’s a time capsule of everything good that I binged on.

Frankenstein (2025)

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Standout watch of the year. This movie is a spellbinding visual feast. To think it is based on a book written by 20-year old Mary Shelley during a writing contest among friends in 1818! This story remains relevant for modern times, as genius scientific inventions come perilously close to upending longstanding concepts of humanity… and you wonder, at what cost? Where are we heading towards?

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Joan of Arc is a fascinating historical figure, so I jumped to watch this French silent film, which has been restored after great damage to the original reel and is in public domain. Yes, I know, silent films are difficult to watch, especially when superstition and religion are added to the mix. But seriously, the acting by Renée Jeanne Falconetti is phenomenal. She does not need words, her facial expressions of the solemn, devout, hurting, doubting Joan convey it all. When they burn her at the stake near the end, it is an electrifying, goosebump-raising, horrifying moment that will bring tears to your eyes. An underrated masterpiece.

Conclave

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Ralph Fiennes has been my favorite actor ever since I saw him in The Constant Gardener and he shines in Conclave too. The election of the next Pope is a grand but top-secret affair, and now we look within to see how it all plays out. But what if the former Pope had been murdered? Fiennes, playing caretaker of the Papal elections, has a difficult task indeed. I am not particularly fond of the resolution, but I know I was glued to the screen throughout.

Continue reading “Watchlist 2025: Mini-Reviews [Long List]”
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Art & Illustration Best of List Index Starred Recommendations

Cool Clicks: Best of the Year 2025 Links

When the world is going grim, you take refuge in the pieces of awe and marvel around you. Sharing some art, photography and music to click for.

{Disclaimer: None of the links or images shared here belong to me in any way, and no copyright infringement or commercialization is intended by sharing them here for fair use purposes.}

[1] Feast on the photos of the Earth’s most stunning landscapes for the 2025 International Landscape Photographer of the Year contest. In case you have trouble accessing the official website, also try The Atlantic and My Modern Met. I could not take my eyes off this haunting landscape photograph from New Mexico by Karol Nienartowicz.

Source: My Modern Met
Continue reading “Cool Clicks: Best of the Year 2025 Links”
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Books Starred Recommendations

Throwback Thursday: Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie

Name(s): Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy
Author: Ann Leckie
Publisher: Orbit Books
Cover Art: John Harris
Awards: Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction Association, Arthur C. Clarke, Locus etc. etc.
Audiobooks: Recorded Books (Book 1); Hachette Audio UK (Book 2)

Ancillary Justice had (IIRC) won almost every award the SFF genre had to offer, with good reason. It’s no easy feat, world-building on this level, with a character of this level of feel-good integrity and grit, and a thrilling, convoluted, galvanizing plotline to boot. Think Star Wars, combine it with Inception, Artificial Intelligence tropes and some comedic elements, and you will still fall short of Ancillary Justice. I can give the book(s) no higher praise. Till date, Ancillary Justice is definitely one of my favorite SciFi books.

The books are set in Imperial Radch, a highly advanced technology militaristic colonial empire which has conquered and rules most of interplanetary space. The first book, Ancillary Justice, tells us how Breq used to be a part of a sentient artificial intelligence/ ship (imagine a supercomputer hacked into pieces but still functioning, if you will) of the Radch empire, but has now been sundered and seeks revenge against the perpetrator.

Continue reading “Throwback Thursday: Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie”
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Books Recommendations

Review: The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins

I didn’t expect to enjoy The New Magdalen so much! Some minimal research pointed out that “Magdalenes” were rescue shelters for fallen women (~prostitutes/ unmarried pregnant women) back in 1800s.

The book is set in the background of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). A lady named Grace has sent out from Canada to England, to seek a home with one of her wealthier distant relatives as a paid lady’s companion after her father dies. She is also now engaged to be married to a family friend in England.

And yet within a few months of her arrival in England, another woman shows up (whom people have been mistaking as a fallen woman “Mercy” from one of the said Magdalenes) — and now she claims to be the real Grace!

So, who is the real impostor? How do we figure this out in the 1870s, with no DNA testing, photographs, photocopies, or international or electronic databases? Original handwritten letters from relatives and friends are really all you have, and if lost, you are done for.

Continue reading “Review: The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins”
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Best of List Books Memes

Books set in Ominous Places

This week’s Top 10 Tuesday prompt (ten books in special settings or time period) was so cool and could have gone a thousand different ways. Yet, what I ended up thinking of were books set in ominous places.

I was thinking of places that are remarkable and likely very dangerous, not somewhere you may want to venture — at least, not outside of a book.

1 / The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
Trapped in a castle with a wicked uncle and no way out? Crossed out.

2 / Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
Stuck at an afternoon picnic where reality and dreaming are blurred? Crossed out.

3 / The Tower at Stony Wood by Patricia McKillip
Desperate to enter a tower which won’t let you in? Crossed out.

4 / In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss
Lots of known fairy tale characters forgetting what’s important? Crossed out.

5 / Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Living in an amusement park in a swamp while wrestling alligators and fighting off rabid competitors? Crossed out.

6 / The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Raised in a library that is not really a library? Crossed out.

7 / The City in the Lake by Rachel Neumeier
Trying to figure out a mirror city that is trying to become the real city? Crossed out.

8 / Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
Packed off to a remote and dreary island for reformation? Crossed out.

9 / The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino
Feasting with weird and melodramatic people straight out of tarot decks? (Hopefully) crossed out.

10 / The Valley of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Living in fear for your life in a house surrounded by a moat, when you know Sherlock Holmes will be too late to the rescue? Crossed out.

What about you? Which ominous fictional places have stood out in your recent bookish memory?

Categories
Miscellany

The New Magdalen for Classics Club Challenge

I signed up for the Classics Club challenge last year, and I am slowly — very, very slowly — trying to finish off the items on my list. Thanks to CC Spin #41, the new “lucky” number is 11, and so I am off to read:

The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins (1873)

After much hunting around, here’s a blurb at Storytel that actually seemed interesting:

“You don’t have to put on the red light“, as Sting sings – except this female main character, Mercy Merrick, comes to that conclusion herself. Originally written as a play, “The New Magdalen” is a classic Victorian sensation novel, highlighting the prejudices against a woman of the streets in English society.
Mercy is at the frontline of the war in France when she meets Grace Roseberry, a traveller who is returning to England to connect with her wealthy English relative, Lady Roy, after being left penniless in Italy. Spotting an opportunity to change her life, Mercy cunningly takes Grace’s name. It’s a dramatic tale of a stolen identity amongst the upper classes, which would be right at home in the pages of “The Talented Mr. Ripley”.

Stolen identity, well! This one actually reminds me of Lady Audley’s Secret by M.E. Braddon. I do like them, those plot-twisty mysteries by Wilkie Collins!

Categories
Starred Recommendations Watchlist

Shogun

Shogun (Season 1 – FX/ Hulu 2024)

I watched this late last year, but only putting up a mini review now for records. First of all, I had no idea it was based on a series of books, Asian Saga series by James Clavell. Second, I had no idea there had already been other TV adaptations in the past. Third, I am waiting for Season 2, due for release in 2026!

We are in Japan in the 1600s. The Taiko, the old ruler, has died and the country is dangerously divided among competing feudal lords. Two very ambitious men from two very different worlds – an English sailor named John Blackthorne and a shrewd Japanese feudal lord Lord Toranaga – collide (and sometimes collaborate) over conflicting interests. So much is changing in the 1600s globally that Japan too is bound to change.

If you haven’t watched Shogun yet, believe me, you are in for a treat.