A quick note to let everyone know that _Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 4: Payback_ is available for pre-order via all the usual book-buying places, including Bookshop.org. **Official publication day is January 27!** Also, all four books have a new and improved font for easier reading. If you haven't yet snagged copies of the earlier books, now's a great time to get the whole set. Bookshop.org

Does it feel like there are more wrap-up posts this year than usual? It seems like every magazine, blog, and newspaper I subscribe to wrapped up something. The usual best-of and worst-of lists were present, but there also seemed to be something else going on. Like the stats were intended to Say Something about the person who shared them. I think this is thanks to the Spotification of everything we consume. Spotify's Wrapped feature hands users their listening preferences over the past year along with some AI-generated personality insights. I'm not a fan when Spotify does it, and I'm really not a fan of everyone doing it for everything. And yet here I am telling you that I read 59 books in 2025, which is pretty typical for me. I did graduate from my master's program in May, but all of the reading for that had pretty much been done by the start of the year. Early 2025 was spent revising and revising and formatting and revising my thesis, which didn't require new research. Some of the books I read were for research for other things. I reread _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ by Phil Dick and _The Idiot_ by Elif Batuman for an essay I'm working on, for instance. I also read some of these books for review, like _The River Has Roots_ by Amal El-Mohtar and _There's No Turning Back_ by Alba de Céspedes. The StoryGraph, which I love and which supplied the cool graph at the top of this post, puts together a cool collage of book covers that I can see on my 2025 stats page, but it's not an image I can download and save. Each book cover is clickable, which is useful for remembering what I read, but I can't share the pretty graphic of a cascade of book covers with you. I can, however, share a text list of what I read. All of these are searchable online, so go buy them from your favorite bookstore or Bookshop.org! Or borrow them from your library! In the same way that I am experiencing wrap-up resentment, I am also suffering from affiliate link fatigue. * **The Sovereignty of Good,** Iris Murdoch * **The River Has Roots,** Amal El-Mohtar * **Midnight in Chernobyl,** Adam Higginbotham * **It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over,** Anne de Marcken * **Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem,** Michael Schmidt * **The Harder I Fight, the More I Love You,** Neko Case * **Orbital,** Samantha Harvey * **Scientist: E. O. Wilson, A Life in Nature,** Richard Rhodes * **Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism,** Sebastian Smee * **The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History,** Isaiah Berlin * **Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist,** Liz Pelly * **J'emporterai le feu,** Leïla Slimani * **Autism Is Not a Disease: The Politics of Neurodiversity,** Jodie Hare * **Woodworking,** Emily St. James * **Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel,** Yoko Tawada * **Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World,** Naomi Klein * **Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue,** Yoko Tawada * **The Wall,** Marlen Haushofer * **A Prayer for the Crown-Shy,** Becky Chambers * **Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto,** Tricia Hersey * **Practice,** Rosalind Brown * **Homework,** Geoff Dyer * **The Moëbius Book,** Catherine Lacey * **Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker,** Zachary Leader * **Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,** Sarah Wynn-Williams * **The Idiot,** Elif Batuman * **Hunchback,** Saou Ichikawa * **Either/Or,** Elif Batuman * **The Hounding,** Kenobe Purvis * **The Crucible,** Arthur Miller * **Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey,** Alberto Manguel * **Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Post-War America,** Merve Emre * **On The Calculation of Volume I,** Solvej Balle * **Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance,** Joe Dunthorne * **The Secret Within: Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England,** Wolfgang Riehle * **On Close Reading,** John Guillory * **The Reason I Jump,** Naoki Higashida * **I Am in Here: The Journey of a Child with Autism Who Cannot Speak but Finds Her Voice,** Elizabeth M. Bonker and Virginia G. Breen * **Einstein and the Quantum Revolution,** Alain Aspect * **Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,** Philip K. Dick * **A Place of Greater Safety,** Hilary Mantel * **On the Calculation of Volume II,** Solvej Balle * **The Coin,** Yasmin Zaher * **Klara and the Sun,** Kazuo Ishiguro * **The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary,** Kate Loveman * **Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets,** Svetlana Alexievitch * **Racebook,** Tochi Onyebuchi * **Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution,** Carlo Rovelli * **In the Margins,** Elena Ferrante * **Acid for the Children,** Flea * **Your Name Here,** Helen de Witt and Ilya Gridneff * **The Usual Desire to Kill,** Camilla Barnes * **On the Calculation of Volume III,** Solvej Balle * **Autobiography of Red,** Anne Carson * **Simplicity,** Mattie Lubchansky * **The Evidence of Things Not Seen,** James Baldwin * **The Book of Form and Emptiness,** Ruth Ozeki * * * Get the Wingback Workshop RSS feed here: https://wingbackworkshop.com/rss Follow the Wingback Workshop on the Fediverse (including Mastodon): @khg@wingbackworkshop.com Buy KHG's books on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/shop/khg Sign up for the Wingback Workshop email newsletter using the Subscribe button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. * * * KHG’s latest translations, _Memoirs of a French Courtesan_ _Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle,_ and _Volume 3: Luck,_ are available now. _Volume 4: Payback_ will be published January 27, 2026. Bookshop.org

It has been a while since I added any words to this project. I did some research, I made some notes, I thought and thought and thought. But I did not add any words to the actual manuscript. In the meantime, I read "Bach Is a Strange Loop" by Denise S. Robbins, an essay on Bach and math and other things. I found the structure of the essay helpful for my own project. You probably don't think you want to read about Bach or math, but trust me. This is a good essay. More fun than you think. (https://romanticon.substack.com/p/bach-is-a-strange-loop) I realized that I was writing and thinking _around_ the project, not within the project, or on the project, or whatever preposition might be most appropriate here. I needed to open up the file and type words into the project. So I did, and it went surprisingly well. I felt good about the words, I knew where I was going ... and my laptop battery died. The place where it sits to recharge is not convenient to any writing surface. So I left the project hanging, which isn't bad. It's the advice Hemingway supposedly gave anyway, to leave off writing on a high note, even midsentence, so you know where to pick up the next day. Today is the next day, and I did know where to pick up, so I did add a few hundred words to the project. And I will again tomorrow. Maybe the mantra now is "Every day in the project" to keep myself from dancing around it again with tangential work. Onward.

Everything old is new again. History repeats itself. I'm sure you have your own favorite aphorism or bumper sticker for the cyclical nature of time. I'm reading Dante's _Divine Comedy_ for the third (I think?) time, pencil in hand as usual. Today I read Canto XVII in _Purgatory_. It turns out you can't climb the mountain of Purgatory at night, but Dante and Virgil aren't sleepy yet. Virgil takes the opportunity to explain the sins of Purgatory to Dante so their time isn't wasted. Apropos of nothing and no one in particular, certainly, here is a passage from the Dorothy Sayers's 1955 translation that I ended up reading several times this afternoon: > Some hope their neighbor's ruin may divert > His glory to themselves, and this sole hope > Prompts them to drag his greatness in the dirt; > Some, in their fear to lose fame, favour, scope, > And honour, should another rise to power, > Wishing the worst, sit glumly there and mope; > And some there are whose wrongs have turned them sour, > So that they thirst for vengeance, and this passion > Fits them to plot some mischief any hour. (lines 115-123) For what it's worth, I like this translation for being complete—all three books of the _Divine Comedy_ , not just _Inferno_. I also like that Sayers made the effort to do the entire thing in terza rima, that intertwined poetic structure that you can see above. They rhyme scheme is ABA BCB CDC ... etc. for a hundred cantos. Challenging enough in vernacular 14th-century Italian, ridiculously difficult in English, a language that has always like alliteration far more than it likes rhyme. * * * Get the Wingback Workshop RSS feed here: https://wingbackworkshop.com/rss Follow the Wingback Workshop on the Fediverse (including Mastodon): @khg@wingbackworkshop.com Buy KHG's books on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/shop/khg Sign up for the Wingback Workshop email newsletter using the Subscribe button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.

Everything old is new again. History repeats itself. I'm sure you have your own favorite aphorism or bumper sticker for the cyclical nature of time. I'm reading Dante's _Divine Comedy_ for the third (I think?) time, pencil in hand as usual. Today I read Canto XVII in _Purgatory_. It turns out you can't climb the mountain of Purgatory at night, but Dante and Virgil aren't sleepy yet. Virgil takes the opportunity to explain the sins of Purgatory to Dante so their time isn't wasted. Apropos of nothing and no one in particular, certainly, here is a passage from the Dorothy Sayers's 1955 translation that I ended up reading several times this afternoon: > Some hope their neighbor's ruin may divert > His glory to themselves, and this sole hope > Prompts them to drag his greatness in the dirt; > Some, in their fear to lose fame, favour, scope, > And honour, should another rise to power, > Wishing the worst, sit glumly there and mope; > And some there are whose wrongs have turned them sour, > So that they thirst for vengeance, and this passion > Fits them to plot some mischief any hour. (lines 115-123) For what it's worth, I like this translation for being complete—all three books of the _Divine Comedy_ , not just _Inferno_. I also like that Sayers made the effort to do the entire thing in terza rima, that intertwined poetic structure that you can see above. They rhyme scheme is ABA BCB CDC ... etc. for a hundred cantos. Challenging enough in vernacular 14th-century Italian, ridiculously difficult in English, a language that has always like alliteration far more than it likes rhyme. * * * Get the Wingback Workshop RSS feed here: https://wingbackworkshop.com/rss Follow the Wingback Workshop on the Fediverse (including Mastodon): @khg@wingbackworkshop.com Buy KHG's books on Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/shop/khg Sign up for the Wingback Workshop email newsletter using the Subscribe button in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.

I have Simon Okotie's _The Future of the Novel_ waiting for me to read it, and his Twenty Questions entry in the TLS is a good enough reminder to push it toward the top of the TBR pile. As a freelance editor and writer who also has a nonfiction book proposal making the rounds of potential agents and a fiction writer with a novel draft in its early stages, I am fascinated by how other culture workers get everything done every day. Here is Okotie's answer, which seems so appealingly tidy, relatable, and doable: > **What does a writing day look like for you?** > I write fiction on Wednesday and Sunday mornings between March 1 and October 31 (inclusive). Pre-pandemic I would mostly have written on the first floor of cafés in central London (and I am always on the lookout for new multistorey cafés in the city); now it is more likely to be at home. I write non-fiction or edit my novel-in-progress on the other days of the week (and during the winter), which is something I do at home or even in a ground-floor café. All of this is done around the edges of my (freelance) day job. I have devoted certain hours of every day to creative work, admin work, and freelance work, but I have not devoted days to different types of creative work. I may give it a whirl. If you've made a shift in your creative practice, share! I love a quirky practice.