In January, instead of finishing my thesis, I read six novels.
At the end of 2025, amid the pressures of holding down a job until I could quit it, being a teaching assistant at a university one-hour-and-a-half away, writing a PhD thesis, and life in general, I felt a real need to go back to my love of reading, something I had never truly given up on but had to temper to accomodate the rest. You probably know the feeling of having bookshelves overflowing with unread books, so many that you walk past them with your head down lest you meet eyes with their judgemental spines.
So, just after Christmas, I pushed back what I had to do and chose instead to read one of the books that my in-laws had gifted me. I sat down in my cushy armchair with some coffee (probably, I don’t actually remember) and I read for hours, finishing it in a few seatings, and I felt immensily better. So I picked up another one. Then another one. Then ano… you get it. I do not think I had sat down and read that much since I had been a teenager procrastinating going to sleep.
This is probably due to the fact that this was a fantastic start of the year. Out of six books, there was only one that I can say I thoroughly disliked (sadly, this was also the only one that I really, really could not DNR, as it was my token thesis-book of the month…), and the rest were either absolute treasures or at least managed to tickle my interest. I hope they will bring the same feelings to you and maybe inspire you to get back into reading as well!
Paris in the Twentieth Century (1860;1994)
I picked up this one first for no particularly exciting reason, only that it was on the shorter side and that I know I usually enjoy Jules Verne’s novels ever since I discovered that they were very accessible despite their « classic » status. The language is not difficult to get into and the stories are always so interesting and so well-researched. A lot are even quite funny! I have laughed out loud at some of the lines in From the Earth to the Moon and The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.
However, unless you are a fangirl like me, I would not recommend reading Paris in the Twentieth Century… The story is interesting, don’t get me wrong, but the backstory is a clue into its issues. Written before any of the Extraordinary Voyages series, never published, a copy of the manuscript was thought to be lost to time when it was miraculously discovered in the family safe in 1989, more than eighty years after Verne’s death!
But why was it lost and unpublished? Did he lose his notes and forget that he had another copy stashed somewhere? Did he have other stories that he was more excited about, and as time went on it got relegated to the bottom of the pile? Well no, Hetzel (Verne’s publisher) though enamoured with his client, thought that it was absolute shite.
To be fair, he also thought that it was too dark, so there’s that.
So, the story. It takes place in Verne’s projection for 1960s Paris and follows a young man who is sort of an « old-soul » and misunderstood by all because he is a poet and a classicist, and no cares about literature anymore. Seriously, there are book shops and libraries full of books, but they are of the technical sort and no one even knows who that dude Victor Hugo is anymore.
We follow him as he is forced to take a job at this uncle’s bank, is fired from his position because he sucks too bad, and that cycle repeats until he is put in a nice corner where he can’t make too much trouble. He meets like-minded people, he falls in love with a girl, he meanders, he gets engaged with the girl, he gets depressed, he abandons his fiancée, he gives in to the meaninglessness of existence and collapses, the end. Not exactly riveting, right?
However, the saving grace of this book is its setting. Verne’s vision of Paris in the 1960s is dim, but it is also chokefull of details that would come to be synonymous with steampunk! There are computers-but-not-computers, a network of elevated subway, hydrogen-powered cars, and it’s impressive how close some aspects are to Paris in the actual 60s. It is also fascinating to be able to get a glimpse at a writer honing his skills. The writing is a bit rough, sure, because this is between a first and a second draft, but you can actually see Verne’s style peeking through the not-so-good bits: the biting observations, the humour, the scientific poetry…
In short, I am probably making it sound worse than it was. It was an easy and interesting read, just not quite up to the quality I am used to from Jules Verne. Instead, if you are interesting in dipping your toes into French proto-sci-fi (what’s not to love?), I would instead recommend From the Earth to the Moon for a good time or The Begum’s Fortune for a fascinating take on utopianism.
The Gods are Athirst (1912)
Next, I read The Gods are Athirst by Anatole France because I wanted to continue on my classics run. To be honest, I mainly asked for that book for Christmas because I thought it had a really cool title. I did not even know that « athirst » was a word, and I sure did not know that it was about the period that followed the French Revolution! The French edition just has a pretty non-descript painting as cover so I had no clue – I would like to think that if it had had this painting of Mara, I would have been a bit quicker to realise it. While Anatole France is quite famous, I had never read anything by him, and I only knew him as the author of my favourite maxim (if such a thing exists):
« The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.«Â
The story begins in the years that follow the French Revolution, during the period called the Reign of Terror during which the republican regime devoured itself and its people in the process. It follows Evariste Gamelin, a poet and enthusiast Jacobin (Marat’s and Robespierre’s faction). As the events of these years unfold, we see go from a penniless artist to a juror in his quarter’s revolutionary tribunal, an institution created to try those accused of political offenses.
The novel is quite fascinating in its depiction of political righteousness and mass hysteria (though I am not certain it is the proper term… folie à 500,000 maybe?). It reminded me a lot of 1984 by George Orwell in those regards, the way a crowd can be feeble in its passions, directing it with murderous intent at one person and then at another at the drop of a hat if the public perception of the situation changes, if the rightful target changes, never being wrong, always readjusting. It sent shivers down my spine at many moments.
There were so many moments of cognitive dissonence in the republican characters that you wanted to shake them up while fully knowing that this would get you a one-way trip to the revolutionary tribunal if you had done so in that time. The protagonist is part of those that seem to have been brainwashed and see enemies of the revolution everywhere, even among those closest to them. The cast of characters shows the many varying reactions to the Terror: those that think that it is a necessary evil, those that think that it went to war, or that it only repeating the errors of the old regime, and those are fully convinced that it is a glorious endeavour without fault and that each person that emits doubts or criticism is a royalist, enemy of the people and of the republic.
Anatole France was a socialist, so his depiction of these events surprises the literary and political world when the novel came out in 1912. However, I do not see in it a criticism of the abolition of monarchy, only of fanatism, no matter where it comes from and how noble the ideals at its roots are. It was suspenseful and beautifully-written, I recomment it if you have any interest in those themes or in French history!
Snow Crash (1992)
We arrive at the only dud of the month… Which is the only one that I absolutely had to read, as it is part of the corpus of novels that I need to analyse for my thesis! It’s a bummer, because of the ten SF novels that make up this corpus, I read six and disliked five… I really hope the next ones will be better because this is getting a bit tiring and making me lose faith in science fiction.
What to even say… This is a MESS, girl. I have not read many books that are as all-over-the-place as this one. I guess the premise is straightforward enough so let’s start there: this is SF so it takes place in the future in what used to be the USA but has devolved into corporation-shredded tiny territories where Hiro Protagonist (not a joke, this is his real name) is a samurai/pizza delivery guy for the Italian mafia (again, not a joke). But this is only his day job, by night he is a jobless samurai/hacker who spends his free time on the Street, a virtual world.
photocredit: Bookworm Hanoi
Fun fact: term « Metaverse » was created by Neal Stephenson and first used in this novel! It’s where a good chunk of the story takes place, in a cyberspace called « The Street ». It is there that Hiro realises that someone has been spreading a virtual virus to netizens, and hackers in particuler. The issue is that it makes you crash not only online but also in real life – in the sense that your brain crashes, not your car, which is a bit more of an inconvenience.
In his quest, he is helped by a skateboarding courier called Y.T. (for Yours Truly, still not a joke). As you might have devised from my overwhelming enthusiasm, I did not like this book. I make fun of the names and characters, sure, but as silly as I find them, they did not turn off the story. No no, the story did it all by itself. Just like the USA did, it devolves into what we the French call « du grand n’importe quoi » and could be translated into « absolute total nonsense ».
There are pedophilic hired gunmen (knifemen?), a whole lot of skateboards, religious cults, glossolalia, and much more (derogatory). Prepare yourself for MANY history/cultural/theology lessons about Sumer,which were unexpected but might have been retrospectively my favourite parts. There were a lot of really interesting concepts and I appreciate it for that, but its YOLO nature lost me about halfway through, maybe three-quarters if I am being generous.
However, I do think that my dislike is mainly due to taste, probably not to the inherent quality of the novel, and I would still recommend it if you are looking for classic, genre-founding SF with cool concepts.
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