Books Read 2025: January–February

Well, with a new year comes a new books-read series. This series will include all the books I read in 2025.

It’s been a busy couple of months, between teaching a winter class and my wife and I finishing up a big translation project, but I got some solid reading done too. 

Here’s what I read in January and February of this year:

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Rimbaud Complete is what it says on the tin: the complete verse and prose poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Wyatt Mason. My first encounter with Rimbaud was the poem “Roman” (“Novel”) which was handed to me during a writing exercise in the late 90s when I was meeting with a writing group in Saskatoon, and I’ve been curious about his work ever since. I had a bilingual edition of his poetry in Montreal—a friend may still have that copy—but I’ve had the Arthur Wyatt translation for nineteen years now, and dipped in and out of it, though in the first days of 2025 I finally dug in and read it all. Well, except the original French verse in the back, because my French isn’t really solid enough for me to read it unaided. I have always found the poems by Rimbaud that I’ve read to be fascinating, and this mostly held true throughout, though I admit that I took breaks here and there and that probably helped to keep things fresh.

I’ll admit that some of the prose poetry toward the end was more of a slog for me, especially compared to the earlier stuff. Usually I’m the opposite—liking poets as they mature and explore more dark and difficult terrain—but I’m generally not a huge fan of prose poetry, to which Rimbaud turned quite toward the end of his output. (I put it that way, rather than “as he matured”, because he stopped writing at age 20!) I must also admit that I skimmed the letters at the end of the English section of the book, which struck me as less than essential reading.) That said, although I want to say something clever about the nature of French culture that their poetry was transformed forever by Rimbaud—as a teenager, no less—I’ll just go ahead and say that I enjoyed the majority of it, and can see why he was (and remains) a big deal in French literature. 

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Hearin’ the Changes: Dealing with Unknown Tunes by Ear by Jerry Coker, Bob Knapp, and Vincent Lewis is a challenging little book of jazz music theory aimed at a kind of informed ear training. I’ve found over the years that other methods of memorization for chord progressions (like the so-called LEGO Brick method created by Conrad Cork and expanded by John Elliot) simply didn’t work well for how my brain processes things. I’m someone who primarily “feels” the changes and remembers them as shifts—my ear guiding me in terms of places where certain chord tones shift or color-tones become temporarily revealed by the shifting of harmony in a chord progression. Remembering named patterns seems to me just as hard as just memorizing the chord changes, and in general that’s something I find I just can’t really do seem to do. (Maybe it’d be different if I were playing a comping instrument. Or maybe I’d have given up ages ago if that’s what I’d tried to play, I don’t know.)

Anyway, I came to this book hoping it would help me with the ear training work necessary to really lean on that “hearing the changes” skill for more complex harmonic progressions. Whether it will or won’t likely depends on how dedicated I am with the ear training work involved, because the book, while informative, is really a sort of roadmap to training your ear for this kind of work. In other words, this is one of those books you don’t read once, you read it and refer to it multiple times as you work your way through training up your ears. It is, anyway, a solid start for doing that work, if you’re after one. I’ll be trying to integrate it into my practice, once I’m back into that groove again. 

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Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios is a novel from 1939 about a crime novelist who decides to retrace the path across Europe of the international criminal and dirtbag known as “Dimitrios.” It’s a fascinating novel, and I can see why people like John Le Carré and Graham Greeene has such praise for the author: his story feels very much like a precusor to their sort of books, while also feeling very fresh even now, 86 years after it was first published. The specter of Dimitrios reminded me a lot of Basil Zaharoff, the incredibly wealthy Greek arms dealer who was born in Turkey, and who profiteered off World War I in a way that made many people see him as one of the war’s primary villains. (I first heard of Zaharoff as a hated, elusive arms dealer during World War I while reading Pound’s The Cantos, and while Dimitrios isn’t identical to the man, there are enough similarities to suggest the corrupt arms dealer Zaharoff served as a model or as partial inspiration inspiration for Ambler’s dark, shadowy, and similarly corrupt European man of mystery. Thankfully, Ambler seems to avoid the anti-Semitism that Pound associated with Zaharoff’s involvement in war profiteering, at last as far as I could see in this one book.) It was fascinating to read about Europe in the late 1930s—a time weirdly similar to our own in some ways (sigh), and yet also very different. Ambler peeled back, layer by layer, the tantalizing mysteries and details of Dimitrios’ life as his protagonist comes upon them one by one while also vividly sketching out the European cities that his protagonist passes through on the dead man’s trail, as the investigation slowly becomes more perilous for the investigator and rolls toward its inevitable conclusion. (Which, of course, is exactly what we expect and the protagonist somehow doesn’t.)

This one was passed to my by Justin Howe, and I appreciate it very much.  

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I also read Scott Pilgrim’s Special Little Life and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Vols. 1–2 of the Scott Pilgrim series). I was surprised how closely the first part of the film corresponded to the comic, like, even down to a lot of the dialog. The art feels pretty basic (at least to a philistine like me), but the writing is snappy and I’m interested enough to want to read more. Scott Pilgrim is, just like in the film, an unmistakeable asshole, or perhaps I should just call him “deeply flawed.” Knives Chau is too cool for him, as she eventually says in the movie (and, I assume, in some ultimate volume of the series). It’s very light reading, of course: if you’ve seen the film, you know the vibe. But it’s pretty fun. 

If I’m honest, I’ll also say it’s refreshing to see references to Canada in media that aren’t filled with the usual same five dumb American stereotypes about the country.  Like, I’m not touchy about Americans joking about Canada, but their jokes tend to involve the same five or six tired old stereotypes: hockey, maple syrup, Canadian bacon, and whatever. It’s not that these aren’t Canadian things, but they’re only what registers as Canadian in American minds. People always are able to snark at their own country better than at one they know almost nothing about, I guess.  

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For my book club, we read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. I actually picked up Carter’s collected short stories, as you can see from the cover here, but so far I’ve only read The Bloody Chamber. I’m probably the last person in my circle of friends to get around to reading Carter, and it’s a shame I waited to long. The faerie-tale retellings in this book are dark, enchanting, and deftly woven, and Carter’s work is absolutely worth savoring… and, if you’re a writer, worth studying. Every one of the stories in this collection is just stunning, a delicately balanced gem of a tale. It’s a gorgeous book, and I regret waiting so long to get around to Carter’s work. I’ll be reading more from her Collected Stories soon. 

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W.A. Mathieu’s Harmonic Experience: Tonal Harmony from Its Natural Origins to Its Modern Expression isn’t the kind of book one reads in a single go. The author himself recommends skimming through the book, then zeroing in on bits that interest one, and then picking about, here then there, until suddenly the whole thing comes into view. Er, okay. I get the impression that it’s intended to take time, and to be a kind of ongoing listening-and-reading project, so that is how I’m going to treat it. And when I say it’s a “project,” I really mean it. Matheiu explains that to get the most out of the book, you need something you can play drones on (like a tanpura or a drone generator), a keyboard instrument, and a guitar. There are a ton of singing-and-listening exercises, too. 

As for the contents I’ve seen in my skimming, some of it seems pretty esoteric, but he seems to know what he’s talking about, and I’ve studied enough conventional theory to understand the deficiencies in that kind of study that Mathieu is trying to address. I won’t really have summary comments for a while, but I’ve certainly spent some time with this book over the past month or so. 

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Finally, there are books I read to my son. 

My son’s introduction to James Howe’s Bunnicula books a few months ago was very brief: he picked up the mistaken idea that the books were “scary” and for a while he refused to let me read any of them to him. That changed this week, with the earliest Bunnicula book we had on hand, Howliday Inn. I think we got through it in three reading sessions, the last one being a marathon of 100 pages aloud. He spent a lot of the book rolling on the floor laughing, and is now determined to get me to read him the entire series. (Happily, we have the first volume and the others are on their way.) I’m including it here simply because (a) it’s a book I read, and (b) I actually quite enjoyed it for what it is. I don’t think I actually read this one as a kid, so it was new to me, though the characters were vaguely familiar from whatever ones I did read as a kid. 

He went so crazy for Howliday Inn that we went ahead and got the rest of the series—well, the ones we didn’t already have—and I started reading them to him. Which is to say, Bunnicula was the next novel I read to him. This one put him in mind of Dracula, and thus scared him a little, but we got through it. One thing I noticed is that the diction is a little more elevated in this first volume in the series than it was in the second, Howliday Inn. I had to stop and explain a lot more words and expressions to my son, who, having grown up in Korea and mainly speaking Korea outside the home, wasn’t familiar with them. For this reason, we took a little slower… though we still tore through it compared to how slowly I’ve read some other books to him.  

We then read The Celery Stalks at Midnight, the third Bunnicula book, which is much shorter than either previous novel but just as amusing, though I found it needed a little more interpolation in our son’s case: there were more expressions and phrases he didn’t understand, which made some of the jokes go a little over his head. Still, he enjoyed it. 

Then we went on to Nighty-Nightmare, the fourth book in the series, which is a little more challenging in terms of vocabulary—and has even more puns than the earlier works—but which was still a good time for all, and which I especially had fun with because it gave me a chance to do even more voices and accents than usual. Again, the occasional bit of spookiness is offset by a lot of humor, including terrible puns by the dachshund (and “part werewolf”) of the group, Howie.  

Finally, we tore through the fifth book in the series, Return to the Howliday Inn. There’s a supposed ghost in this one, and it scared my son despite my reassurances that the ghost couldn’t be real (something that was telegraphed loudly in the text), but he was still very scared by it until the reveal came. Still, he also laughed his guts out at parts of it. He’s started calling me “Chester” as a kind of teasing insult, because he thinks the cat has a similar imagination and attitude to me.

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At the moment I’m halfway through a few interesting books as well, so the March–April installment in this series should be good fun.