iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

Book Nos. 2025/21–24 were holiday reading: Graydon Carter, When the Going was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines (2025); Edward St Aubyn, Parallel Lines (2025); Nick Harkaway, Karla’s Choice (2024); and P. G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning (1947).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Book No. 2025/20. I’d not before heard of Mudlark, the imprint under which Adam Buxton’s I Love You, Byeee: Rambles on DIY TV, Rockstars, Kids and Mums (2025) was published. Its cover might be a tad overwrought; but otherwise the book’s a delight—and v. moving, as the crow flies.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Book No. 2025/19. Janet Todd’s Living with Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is admirably produced, and highly recommended. (Would that more modern books included pleasing typographical ornaments like the wibbly-wobbly flourishes and silhouettes that adorn this one.)

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Book No. 2025/18. Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium (H. Hamilton, 2025) is v. good—not least on acquiring a post-Brexit EU passport. I can confirm that reifying my Irish ancestry into a passport felt ‘deeply meaningful and completely dishonest at exactly the same time’ (p. 282).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Book No. 2025/17. Adam Phillips, On Giving Up (Penguin Books, 2025). ‘There may be nothing else we can do but go on inventing competing and complementary accounts of the ways in which we are and are not the authors of our lives’ (p. 56). Recommended, esp. for the discombobulated.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

Book No. 2025/16. Lucy Mangan, Bookish: How Books Shape Our Lives (London: Square Peg, 2025). I can’t get enough books about books; and LM’s contribution to the genre is bostin, and very moving. (It does, however, contain a shocking editorial error on p. 118.) Highly recommended.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Book No. 2025/15. After I’d stopped fretting about the sporadically applied demotic spellings (e.g. ‘gonna’), I couldn’t get enough of Gary Stevenson’s The Trading Game (2024). His colours are vivid (e.g. ‘Billy took me into a room and told me to stop being a cunt’ (see p. 222)).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

Book No. 2025/14. Michelle de Kretser, Theory & Practice (London: Sort Of Books, 2025). ‘My mind foamed with envy and loathing of parents who conversed in cafes about music and art’ (p. 145). V. enjoyable, not least as a reminder of some of the wonders of 1989 (e.g. index cards).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Book No. 2025/13. I thought that Will Hodgkinson’s Street-level Superstar: A Year with Lawrence (Nine Eight Books, 2024) would be fascinating. But I was not expecting it to be so poignant, and hilarious. (Nor to see references to both Walthamstow and Solihull.) Essential reading.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Book Nos. 2025/11 and 12. Julian Baggini’s How to Think Like a Philosopher: Essential Principles for Clearer Thinking (Granta Books, 2024) was closely followed by Armistead Maupin’s Mona of the Manor (Penguin, 2025)—in which 1993 seems like a long time ago. A recommended pairing.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Holiday fun! Book Nos. 2025/07–10: Emmanuel Carrère, V13: Chronicle of a Trial (Fern Press, 2024); Joanne Barchas, The Lost Books of Jane Austen (J. Hopkins, 2019); Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection (Fitzcarraldo, 2025); and P. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Dynamite [1948] (Everyman’s, 2006).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

Book Nos. 2025/05 and 2025/06 are from two of the greats: Hanif Kureishi’s Shattered (Hamish Hamilton, 2024) (‘Since I became a vegetable I have never been so busy’ (p. 24)); and Jane Austen’s Emma [1815] (No. 36 in the Everyman’s Library, 1991). Recommended for advanced readers.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 31/01/2025

Book No. 2025/04. ‘But I think that in your place I should have thought of an explanation of your presence calculated to carry more immediate conviction than that you were searching for a mouse’—P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing [1960] (Everyman’s L., 2002). Essential reading.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

Book No. 2025/03. Ben Yagoda’s Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English (Princeton, N.J. and Oxford: Princeton Univ. Press, 2024) is full of v. good stuff (e.g. some new—new to me, anyway—excerpts from The New Yorker’s eccentric style bible (see p. 250)). Recommended.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

Book No. 2025/02. Michael Farr, Tintin A–Z: An Alphabetic Anthology of Curiosities from Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin (Éditions Moulinsart, 2024). I hadn’t before realized that Snowy possessed quite so many outfits. His headgear shown on p. 26 is especially admirable. Recommended.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

As the year turned my reading took on a Gothic hue—Laurie Penny’s Everything Belongs to the Future (Tom Doherty Associates, 2016) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ in Everyman’s Library No. 63 (1992) (Book Nos. 2024/51 and 2025/01 respectively).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Picture books are perfect Xmas reading. I consumed (as Book Nos. 2024/47, 48, 49, and 50) Raymond Briggs’s Father Christmas [1973] (Puffin, 2013); and a trio of Posy Simmonds’s major works published by Mr Cape: Gemma Bovery (1999); Cassandra Darke (2018); and Tamara Drewe (2007).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Book Nos. 2024/45 and 46. Two (overlapping) collections by Saki (pseud. of the mysterious H. H. Munro (1870–1916)): Reginald’s Christmas Revel (Penguin Little Clothbound Classics, 2022); and Selected Stories, ed. Diana Secker Tesdell (Everyman’s Pocket Classics, 2017). Essential.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Book No. 2024/44. E. M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay [first published in French in 1949 as Précis de décomposition] (Penguin Classics, 2010). (‘The universe begins and ends with each individual, whether he be Shakespeare or Hodge’ (p. 153).) Recommended for advanced readers.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Book No. 2024/43. Although Alan Bennett’s Killing Time (London: Faber & Faber and Profile, 2024) is of modest dimensions it’s an ideal Xmas read. (Spoiler: ‘Miss Rathbone dies … with her fingers still cradling an errant piece of an uncompleted jigsaw’ (p. 103). What a way to go!)

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Book No. 2024/42. Judi Dench, with Brendan O’Hea, Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent (2024). Mr Wm. Shakespeare’s work usually goes over my noodle. But—after screwing my courage to the sticking place—I found much to enjoy in this duologue. The illustrations are also charming.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Book No. 2024/41. Jonathan Coe, The Proof of My Innocence (Viking, 2024). This is the third time that one of Mr Coe’s masterpieces has been my 41st read of a year (cf. 2018/41 (Middle England) and 2020/41 (Mr Wilder and Me); see also 2015/53 (Number 11) and 2022/39 (Bournville)).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Book No. 2024/40. I must confess to feelings of mild disappointment for I was led to believe that Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present, ed. Carson Welch (London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2024) would contain more amusing anecdotes and gossip.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 06/11/2024

Book No. 2024/39. Eley Williams’s Attrib. and Other Stories (Green Lanes, London, N16: Influx Press, 2017). ‘I consider favourite letters to be a better indicator of personality than star signs’ (vide ‘The Alphabet’, op. cit., p. 16). Recommended, especially for advanced readers.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 05/11/2024

Book No. 2024/38. Jeremy Black’s George III (Allen Lane, 2020) includes a reproduction of John Nixon’s ‘Royal Dipping’ (1789). The good King is shown being ‘dipped’ by a bathing woman. His wife, Mrs King, and one of the princesses watch from a bathing machine. Highly recommended.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 30/10/2024

Book No. 2024/37. Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (London: Faber & Faber, 2024) is bound with bostin endpapers. And it also includes an intriguing reference (see p. 233) to ‘orange dilute’. Presumably this is the Irish counterpart of our orange squash (of blessed memory)? Mind-blowing!

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 16/10/2024

Book No. 2024/36. Frank Kermode: Pieces from the London Review of Books (LRB Selections: 1, 2019). I’m now worried that I’m doing it all wrong because—for me—reading rarely involves ‘the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones’ (ibid., p. 101).

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 07/10/2024

Book No. 2024/35. Martin Amis’s London Fields (No. 362 in Everyman’s Library, 2014). (An inky note on its bastard-title page reminds me that I bought my Jonathan Cape edition—in Brighton—exactly 35 years ago. Ooof! Of course, since then, time has gone about its immemorial work …)

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 17/09/2024

Book No. 2024/34. Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen (4th Estate, 2024) is, of course, a delight. (Just one minuscule criticism: Mr Meat Loaf would have been saddened—but perhaps not very surprised?—to see his moniker once again misspelled on e.g. p. 651.) Essential reading.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 08/09/2024

Book No. 2024/33. The Diary of Samuel Pepys [1660–69] (Everyman’s Library (No. 379), 2018). Hurrah! I’ve finally tackled Mr Pepys’s admirable diary—or, sensu stricto, a c. 700-page selection thereof. Recommended, not least for its half a dozen thrilling references to Walthamstow.

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Dominic Shryane @sootyshryane.bsky.social · 15/08/2024

Book No. 2024/32. According to the verso of its title page, my copy of Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow (Windmill Books, 2017) is part of its 40th(!) impression. I’ve never before seen a number that high in a modern novel’s prelims—save perhaps in DT’s The Secret History? Oof!

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