The Mandelbear's Reading

I’ll start out by saying that I’m not a big fan of any of the books read recording platforms. Setting a number of books to read for the year feels to me like a competitive activity, which…reading has never been that for me. Though I’ve tried. For a couple of years I set reading goals in Goodreads and…ick. I didn’t enjoy the process of needing to chronicle everything I read, especially since I am one of those voracious readers who prefers to curl up with a book rather than watch TV. It's just my thing.

But reading goals, reviewing everything I’ve read, just feels like a chore. That said, by not recording my thoughts about some of my reading, I somewhat miss out on dialogue about what people are reading, the impact of my reading on what I’m thinking, and the like. I end up scratching my head and going “I know I read that book, I know I found it impactful, but I can’t remember why.”

So what the heck. I’ll give talking about what I’m reading a try, but…unlike in past years, I’m not going to capture it all. Nor am I going to tie myself down to a mandatory, you must post about this schedule. That gets back into making posts about what I read into a chore. I’m also limiting these posts to Dreamwidth and Substack, because that’s where most of the dialogue about reading seems to be happening in my circles these days.

With that, here goes, a brief look at what I was reading in mid-January, 2026.

I finished Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting last night. It was one of those books that, once I started reading, I kept on going until I finished it. What also helped was that I started reading fairly early in the evening.

As for the book? What a ride. A mixture of Faerie and time travel, with commentary on power. But there were some interesting twists along the way, including how the two powerful women in the story interact and what their actual relationship is. Add in the male scholar who at first observes but then gets drawn into the story and that throws in some more power dynamics. Ultimately, though, this is a story about how national myths get made and twisted to serve the powerful. It’s well-written, with the voice of fairy tale.

I admire it—and yet. There’s something distancing about the voice. I can’t explain it, but perhaps that’s because it’s about deconstructing a national myth more than it is about the individual characters—at least that’s how it reads to me. I like it, but something about it niggles at me.

The night before, I read Desert Cabal, by Amy Irvine—a meditation on and dialogue with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Irvine engages with Abbey’s problematic aspects and the fruit of his popularity—as shown by the hordes descending upon Moab and Arches National Park. Ironically, by writing as he did about the desert, Abbey inadvertently unleashed the very same national park industrial complex he rails against in his work. Irvine illustrates some of these tensions using the method of a very Abbey-esque dialogue.

I came across a recommendation for this work in a Substack post about unrecognized literary outdoorswomen which…echoed a feeling I had fifteen years ago that I was tired of just reading about the guys in the outdoors. The guy interaction with the outdoors. The guy experience. I’ve been seeing more outdoorswomen writing over on Substack and decided it was time to blow the dust off of my own attempts to write about the outdoors. Reading Irvine was just one start, enough that I might write about my own reflections on Abbey.

And, finally, I read Glen Cook’s latest Black Company book, Lies Weeping. I like Cook and I love the Black Company, but damn. Cook has this habit of ending books on cliffhangers and this one is no exception. That plus, along with Croaker, there are references to the origins and history of Lady and Soulcatcher that I know I’ve read before. I went digging through my Black Company books to discover that I’m missing one—and it appears that’s the one which may hold the sequence Cook describes repeatedly that gives us clues as to which Senjak sisters those two are. All the same, I’ll keep on reading each Black Company book as they come out.

I have some other books I’ve been reading slowly. I just finished rereading Anthony Trollope’s An Editor’s Tales and may pair it with Dorothy Parker in reflecting how in spite of computers, social media, and what-have-you, the more that publishing changes, the more it remains the same. I’ve also been wading through the revised and expanded Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien and, well, there’s some interesting stuff in there. No surprises that Tolkien was a rather conservative Catholic and it shows in his correspondence. But the other piece that shows up is the impact of health and the day job on his work. Interestingly, in responding to a request about Gollum, he expounds on inheritance and family dynamics in the Shire with some surprising egalitarian notions about heads of family (for example, the married heads are viewed as equal with equal authority, and if the man passes first, the title does not pass down to the next male heir but is assumed by his wife until her death).

I do have a winter tradition of rereading Discworld until I get sick of it (I like Discworld but can only take so much of it) and Earthsea in the big pretty book. I’ve finished Discworld and will be picking up Earthsea in the coming week. I just need to sort through the pile of to-be-read books so that I have a good place to put it.

Besides Earthsea, there are several other book-related blogs I want to write, and keep putting off because of perceived time constraints. I’m almost finished with a deep dive into the Mitford sisters, inspired by starting a reread of Jo Walton’s Small Changes trilogy because they play a role in those books, under a different name. I’ve read some primary work by Nancy and Jessica, a biography of all six sisters, and have a couple more books to go (all through library loan). And then there’s the book about the blending of French classical dressage with the vaquero tradition.

See why I don’t want to record what I’ve read? It becomes a chore, and these occasional blogs are not meant to be a chore. Rather, they are reflections on what I’ve been reading and thinking about, and might even want to…discuss.