Turin Horse (2011), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) - classic movies worth your time. 4/5

Montaigne by Stefan Zweig: short, to the point and distilled biography by a master. 4.5/5

Everything Is Out Of Water - should a philosopher have sayings? Beautifully constructed meandering essay.

What you are looking for is in the library by Michiko Aoyama. Motivational but with a tinge of cliche, naivitte and similar storylines across 5 stories. 3/5

How to Win an Information War - The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, (AB). More about the subject of the subtitle than the main title but you can gleen some nuggets of wisdom about the latter as well. Well written biography of a fascinating subject, WWII propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer. Gives you pause, 4/5.

Writers adrift - Essays by foreign bornwriters in Iceland, Something about this collection of essays tugs at you. Alien yet personal and always touching. 4/5

Speaking In Tongues: A Letter To 3rd World Women Writers by Gloria E. Anzaldúa (PDF). Powerful.

Gogmagog: The First Chronicle of Ludwich, some interesting bits but it could not draw me in fully. Reserving judgment for later books in series. 3.5/5

Moonbound by Robin Sloan - a bit of interesting thoughts here and there but mostly “meh”. 3/5

Any Person Is the Only Self: Essays by Elisa Gabbert - starts off well but becomes a dragging read that I had to skip entire chapters of, to finish. 2.5/5

Hunger, Drops of God, Toscana: nice movies / limited series on the theme of food, wine.

Arooj Aftab is queen of the night. An intereting interview with Aftab, the first-ever Pakistani artist to win a Grammy Award.

California Burning, beautiful.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, 2006 version (with an introduction by Amos Elon). Heavy, lengthy but nuanced and scholarly coverage of the trials, the moral dilemmas, the defintion of guilt and more. Magisterial and thought provoking, not shying away from asking the hard questions and voicing the hard conclusions. Do read the Epilogue and Postscript. 4.5/5

Collective, 2019 Romanian film that follows a team of journalists as they uncover layers upon layers of shocking corruption in the Romanian national healthcare system. Gritty, shocking and real. 4/5

The Untold Story of SQLite With Richard Hipp. Fascinating.

The Devil’s Best Trick: How the Face of Evil Disappeared. “Part true crime story, part religious and literary history,” I would have preferred if the majority of “true crime story” was just struck off completely and the part on Catemaco, Mexico too. Why Mexico, why not India, why not Japan, why not somewhere in Europe. Came across strongly as intellectual laziness and opportunistic. But the parts that shone through was the ones around “religious and literary history”. 3.5/5

Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey (AB). This is how audiobooks should be narrated. The story is equally good! Wise and entertaining. 5/5

A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé. Love poem to good literature and a whodannit mystery. Not bad. 3.5/5

In Praise of Slow Horses’ Old Horses. One of the better series on streaming services these days.

The Number by John Lanchester from the Washington Post series - “Who is Government”. A great explanatory article on the Consumer Price Index used by the US govenrment in various places to shape their policies. If only all articles on such important topics were so good!

In praise of shadows, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Lyrical (more so for the older translation than the newer 2017 one) meditation on the aesthetics of shadows and light. Borderline racist and misogynistic in places but the beauty of the core thoughts seeps through. A suitable continuing read to the wabi-sabi books from Leonard Koren. 4/5.

The design of everyday things, new edition of trailblazing book. Still relevant for those new to the subject. Chapter seven can be skipped, does not have much to do with design as much as business of building products and unfortunately that is not a strong point of this book. 4/5.

Hi Ren by Ren and its origin story.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Chain of Light” - a new album from Real World Records, released 27 years after his death at the age of 48 in 1997. How it all came about.

Outline, by Rachel Cusk. Interesting narrative. Nothing much happens but at the same time a lot does too. Short yet expansive. 3.5/5.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, by Wes Anderson. Based on “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” by Roald Dahl. beautifully produced and acted.

The Blue and the White, nice New Yorker profile of Fitzcarraldo Editions and its founder Jacques Testard (“Nobel whisperer”). First came across the now-iconic International Klein Blue covers when Jon Fosse’s books gathered publicityy after the Nobel Prize.

The Man from the Future - The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. Delightful biography of von Neuman. Loved the AB version. 4/5.

81 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2023. “When you look at a tattoo, you’re seeing ink shining in the “belly” of an immune cell that has gobbled up the ink and failed to digest it.”

52 things I learned in 2023. “Languages are louder in the tropics because the extra moisture warmer air can hold allows for more flexibility and range for vocal chords.”

Blackouts: A Novel, by Justin Torres. 2023 National Book Award for Fiction. Hmm, that was… interesting. Literal blackouts, film scripts, story inside story, queer history and flowing yet jerky writing. Not my usual read and not sure I want to read a similar one but still 3.5/5

What the Dying Teach the Living by Frank Ostaseski, Humbling, deeply thought provoking.

Identity Crisis (DC Comics) – “So many superhero comics look at things through a telescope trying to find giant monsters and whole worlds to punch. Identity Crisis is designed to look at these characters through a microscope, pulling in so tight, we can see all their flaws and imperfections.” – Brad Meltzer. Digital format. I am not a comics fan but this was worth the digression. Yup, I realise this is a much maligned mini-series, but hey, it was a 4.5/5 for me.

Courtney Dauwalter: Step inside the ‘pain cave’, where rules are remade. “sparked questions, debate and research into whether ultra-endurance distances might be among the only sporting arenas where the playing field between the sexes is effectively levelled.” Fascinating.

Unusual units – Dirac Due to his laconic style, the Cambridge colleagues of Nobel-prize winning physicist Paul Dirac are said to have defined one Dirac as a rate of speaking equal to one word per hour.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, by Salman Rushdie (AB). Courageous, personal and honest. Elegant as always. 4.5/5