paradise-and-cola

Introduction

I was an avid reader as a kid. Ever since the art of reading revealed itself to me when I was four, I've devoured books one after another, eager to learn new things about the world we live in or immerse myself in an entirely new fictional world. But as I grew up, I turned to books less and less, distracted by new life challenges and the rise of the Internet, that brought with itself new ways of consuming information.

Like many adults in similar situations, I lamented this decline. I am not of the opinion that books are the paramount format of media and that a person that never reads books is uneducated and dull. Visual arts, music, cinematography can enrich our lives just as much as books do. But it's a format that's been around for a while, and one I know for sure I've enjoyed in the past, so why not pick reading up again?

One goal I set for myself in the beginning of 2025 is to read 24 books - 12 fiction and 12 non-fiction. It's not a very challenging goal, given that I'm a fast reader once the initial hurdle of actually choosing and opening up a book is over, and that short stories each count as one point in the fiction counter. As of August 2025, I'm making good progress. The list is surprisingly diverse on every point - I've acquired an old second-hand e-reader to encourage myself to read more and doomscroll less, but I'm reading physical books, too - over the years I've amassed an embarassing pile of books and comics I've very enthusiastically requested as birthday gifts but never as much as opened. I've also acquired a new taste for audiobooks, often ripping them myself from thrift store CDs. I read in English as well as my native Russian, and dabble in other languages as well though at a much decreased speed. I read modern fiction and classic Russian authors everyone told me sound boring as hell as high school mandated reading but become suddenly very interesting as you reach 25 years of age (they were right on the money) and re-read some books I've enjoyed as a kid but mostly forgot.

I'm a bit conflicted as to how to organize this page. On one hand, I'd definitely like to include things like a short review of each book, a small snapshot of how I felt immediately after finishing each book. And it would be nice for archival purposes to include more information than just the title of the book: whether it was an e-book, a particular physical edition or an audiobook. If it's an audiobook, the name of the narrator. If it's a translation, the name of the translator since there can be different translations of one book. As someone who likes to collect and organize digital data, I really like this idea.

But as 1) a person with limited time and energy and 2) as someone who hates the modern trend of companies collecting as much personal data as they can, I don't want to build the next Goodreads or Amazon reviews. This is just a silly personal web page, and if the process of painstakingly logging each new book ever starts to feel too much of a chore or too corporate-like, I'm not gonna do it. Besides, I'd really like to keep the barebones Web 1.0 "aesthetic" (if you can even call it that), which will start to feel pretty cluttered if there's too much unnecessary information. So we'll see how this turns out.

Rules

(which I've made for myself only and are not set in stone, again this is just for fun)

What counts as a book

A traditionally published book with an ISBN number. For example: Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
An unpublished, self-published or otherwise distributed book that doesn't have an ISBN number but still resembles a traditionally published book. For example, if I've read Andy Weir's The Martian from his website, before it was officially published, it would still count.
Screenplays
An audiobook or radio play version of a published book, either unabridged or abridged or adapted as long as it's still clearly based on the book. For example, I recently listened to a Soviet radio adaptation of Jules Verne's 20000 leagues under the sea, and decided to include it despite it being heavily abridged and taking a lot of creative liberties.
Short stories, even those always published together, count as one entry each as long as each story can be read as a complete narrative. For example, Mikhail Bulgakov's A Young Doctor's Notebook is a collection of 6 to 8 stories (dependending on who you ask) of which I've read 7.
A text book and its associated audiobook count as one entry, not two, given that they're essentially the same book, just in different mediums.

What doesn't count as a book

Comics, both traditionally printed (for example, Art Spiegelman's Maus) and webcomics (for example, Sarah Welch's Signs of Three)
Fanfics, even ones as long as a book (for example, ErinPtah's He Says He Is An Experimental Theologian. This is not because I do not appreciate comic books or fanfics - quite on the contrary, it is precisely because I feel they are too unique to be included in this list. I read fanfics and comics for different reasons and with a different mindset that I do books. Perhaps in the future they'll get list pages of their own.
Blog posts and articles, again because the format is too different.
Podcasts and radio plays NOT based on existing books. The Welcome to Night Vale podcast doesn't count, but the Welcome to Night Vale novel, or its audiobook version narrated by Cecil Baldwin, does.

Fiction

My goal for 2025 was to read 12 fiction and 12 nonfiction books, and I've cleared the fiction goal very easily - the short story collections alone would've done it. But it was intentionally set as a simple goal, just a little extra motivator to read more. It's been a fun and diverse year of books, and I'm looking forward to read even more in 2026. In fact, I have so many books I want to read that I'm seeing the necessity to create a "to read" list for myself, just to organize at least a little bit the incredible amount of authors and topics and genres spinning around in my brain. I will probably not be publishing that list on the site, though - this section will remain about the books of my past, not my future.

(RU) Ульяна Бисерова - Таракан из Руанды (2024)
A fictionalized story based on the events of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. It's an engaging enough narrative, and if you've never heard of the genocide before, it's an okay entry point. However, I'm not sure how much research actually went into the book, parts of it read like a Wikipedia article.
(RU) Moni Nilsson - Så mycket kärlek kan inte dö (2018) | Мони Нильссон - Любовь будет всегда
Ксения Коваленко - перевод на русский язык (2021)
A short book about a mother with terminal cancer, told from the perspective of her daughter. It's a children's book, illustrated by a real cancer patient and parent who died shortly before the book was published. Clearly, real life children with sick relatives are a target audience here, and I'm glad books like this get written. It's a bittersweet narrative and also it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that the protagonist and her brother are named Leia and Luke because the family are Star Wars fans.
(RU) (AUDIO) Jules Verne - Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869-70)
(1962) USSR Radio play, adapted in two parts: Владыка морских глубин/Победители морских стихий
If you've read the original story before (like I have), you'll be dissappointed, because the monumental novel, famously heavy with descriptions of various sea life, got decimated in order to fit just 100 minutes of radio time. Only the first and last chapters, which don't even take place underwater, got any attention from the directors. The middle of the book retained only a few key scenes, with some obvious and terrifying omissions like the entire South Pole episode. But the large and talented voice cast is impressive (Rostislav Plyatt as Nemo!!!), and the classical French music is a nice accompanement.
(RU) (AUDIO) Jules Verne - Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1872)
Жюль Верн - Вокруг света в восемьдесят дней (1873)
An unabridged audiobook based on a 19th century Russian translation, which in itself was interesting to listen to as it has words and name transliterations not present in modern Russian. I've read the book before years ago, and the re-listen just made me appreciate it all that more as possibly the funniest of all Jules Verne books. The decidedly modern and sometimes annoying stock music and the fact that the narrator put up different voices for characters, especially for Inspector Fix, only assured me more in its hilarity.
(EN) Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Pie Society (2008)
A thrilling epistolary novel about the inhabitants of Guernsey and their experiences during the Nazi occupation of the island during WWII. I never thought a story told entirely through letters could be so engaging, especially given the large cast of characters you have to familiarize yourself with, but I was glued to the page. One of the characters is gay and ends up finding happiness and meeting an unexpected friend and ally - it was a pleasant addition to an already very joyful story, even though it talks about the hardships and losses of wartime. Again, it's a fictional narrative but based on real experiences of Guernsey people. I've heard there's a movie but I really doubt it's anywhere close to the book in terms of emotional impact - there are simply too many characters and stories to wrap up.
(RU) (AUDIO) Михаил Булгаков - Записки юного врача (1925-26)
1. Полотенце с петухом | The Towel with a Cockerel Motif
2. Крещение поворотом | Baptism by Version
3. Стальное горло | The Steel Throat
4. Вьюга | The Blizzard
5. Тьма египетская | Egyptian Darkness
6. Пропавший глаз | The Missing Eye
7. Звёздная сыпь | The Star Rash
8. Морфий | Morphine
Mikhail Bulgakov's short story cycle A Young Doctor's Notebook, which appeared in my earbuds very appropriately as I was binging Grey's Anatomy. Turns out fiction books about medicine are just as engaging (and occasionally scaringly graphic) as TV shows about medicine! Bulgakov is a true Master of the written word, you can't help but relate to the newly graduated protagonist who's been thrown from the warm, electrically-lit city to serve his duty in a God-forgotten countryside hospital. It's terrifying not only to watch the new doctor perform operations he'd only seen in textbooks before, but also fight the incredibly difficult battle of educating the village masses about disease, hygiene and medical care. I've just learned Morphine is based on the author's real life struggle with the drug, which makes me appreciate it all the more. The only downside I'll mention is that on my CD, different short stories were narrated by different people, which was a bit disorienting since all the stories share a protagonist and once you've gotten used to one narrator, you're met with another. Although the guy I initially disliked as narrator won me over at the end with Morphine.
(RU) (AUDIO) Антон Павлович Чехов - Палата №6 (1896)
Anton Chekhov - Ward №6
(RU) (AUDIO) Антон Павлович Чехов - Бабье царство (1894)
Anton Chekhov - The Women's Kingdom
Chekhov doesn't as much as write as he paints, the characters, locations and scenes engaging by themselves but also being part of a larger picture, a tragic picture in the Greek sense of the word. The events of the stories transpire because the characters can not change who they are, and even if they have kindness and charity in their hearts they will not change the world for the better.
(RU) (AUDIO) Антон Павлович Чехов - Рассказ неизвестного человека (1893)
Anton Chekhov - The Story of an Unknown Man
This one's novella-length, so longer than the previous two stories. It takes place in the city rather than the countryside, and is a big bigger in scope and level of drama, but is also written with the same Chekhovian principles. The ending was genuinely touching.
(RU) Terry Pratchett - Mort (1987)
Терри Пратчетт - Мор, ученик Смерти
Е.С.Петрова, З.А.Смоленская - Russian translation (2023)

I've tried multiple times to delve into Discworld but it never quite stuck. I think this time's the charm, though - the English humour definitely hits better once you're older and understand, for example, why taxes are so horrifying. Fantastic story - I'm always a sucker for time and reality-bending shenanigans. Mort is a great protagonist. Death is hilarious, as expected from Sir Terry. The only criticisms from me are 1) there's a dissappointingly racist segment about Discworld's "Japanchina" region, and 2) I don't know if I like how the romance subplots got resolved at the end? Honestly they were probably not very necessary, as romance subplots often are.
(RU) Terry Pratchett - Equal Rites (1987)
Терри Пратчетт - Творцы заклинаний
И.Кравцова - Russian translation (2025)

Another banger from Sir Terry. Little Esk, with her cunningness and boldness, reminds me of Lyra Belacqua, although of course His Dark Materials would only be published almost a decade later. Granny Weatherwax is a wonderfully complex and relatable character, apparently this is her first appearance in the Discworld novels. Bonus points for Lovecraftian horrors.
(RU) Robert Chambers - The King in Yellow (1895)
Роберт Чамберс - Король в Жёлтом
Катарина Воронцова - Russian translation (2021)

Реставратор репутаций | The Repairer of Reputations
Маска | The Mask
Во дворе Дракона | In the Court of the Dragon
Жёлтый Знак | The Yellow Sign
Мадемуазель д'Ис | The Demoiselle d'Ys
Рай пророков | The Prophets' Paradise
Улица Четырёх Ветров | The Street of the Four Winds
Улица Первого Снаряда | The Street of the First Shell
Улица Богоматери Полей | The Street of Our Lady of the Fields
Рю Баррэ | Rue Barrée

This book was already on my (metaphorical and non-existant) to-read list when I unexpectedly saw a cheap paperbook copy in a convenience store. The preface implies that this is the first complete Russian translation of the entire short story cycle, and I'm inclined to believe it - I was surprised to see such niche literature in a convenience store at all.

Like many in the last few years, I first learned of the King in Yellow as a character in the Lovecraftian podcast Malevolent. It took me a while to learn that the King is not a creation of Howard Lovecraft himself, but a different author who was an inspiration for Lovecraft. I also learned that Chambers' King is not as obvious or powerful as the King from Malevolent. And yet I wasn't quite ready for what this book actually is.

The ten stories were intended for the author to be published as a collection. However, some stories are more connected to each other than others. The first four stories are the only ones where the King in Yellow himself, and the mind-corrupting play he stars in, are actually mentioned. The last four stories share a setting, characters, even the naming scheme. The Demoiselle d'Ys takes place in a different time altogether, and The Prophets' Paradise is all mystical and allegorical.

Yet there are more connections between the stories, and it's implied that the King's influence is there even when not mentioned explicitly. Some stories which I thought would have a tragic end ended happily, and others where I thought a satisfactory conclusion was possible ended in tragedy. My favourite of the cycle is The Mask, because I love science fiction and mad scientists and "talented sculptor discovers a formula which turns living matter into marble" is so fitting in there.

(EN) (AUDIO) Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn Era 1
Graphic Audio full cast dramatized audiobooks

The Final Empire
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
Mistborn: Secret History

As evidenced by previous entries, I like short stories. I like literature from previous decades and centures, books that stood the test of time. I like books that have profound messages and have made generations of people think and search for meaning.

However, sometimes one just needs to envelop oneself in an extremely long and extremely convoluted fantasy series for the sake of one's mental health. The Mistborn books have served me that purpose once, and I felt it was time to return to them.

First of all, the Graphic Audio dramas are fantastic quality! Each audiobook starts with their motto: "Graphic Audio - A Movie... In Your Mind!" I laughed out loud when I first heard it, it sounds so cheesy, especially narrated in that Voice that you usually hear in movie trailers. But they really did deliver! The voice cast is large and very talented (David Jourdan is now THE Kelsier for me), the sound effects are detailed and envolving (there's a whooshing effect that plays every time someone uses allomancy, it really adds another dimension to the magic system), the music can sound cheesy sometimes but it's definitely fitting. Also the full cast audio drama format makes it easier to make sense of the many characters and storylines that develop and intertwine in this complex narrative.

I remembered a lot about this world from my previous read, but forgot a lot of the more minor plots. The things that stuck the most in my mind were the main character deaths, and somewhat to my surprise I ended up looking forward to them, to the point of wondering whether the voice actors would be able to deliver dramatic enough screams of agony. (They usually did.) It's one of those stories you don't enjoy less if you're spoiled.

I've seen other people complain that Brandon Sanderson's language is not descriptive enough, characters too bland and clicheed, and magic systems more developed than other aspects of the world to the point that it feels more like a video game than a book. I agree with all of these points generally, though they're not necessarily weak points. I haven't delved into Brandon Sanderson's other books outside the Mistborn series, but to me his works feel like Marvel movies or Game of Thrones. Cheesy, bland, full of stereotypes and repeated storylines, but there's still quality in it that impresses you. Sanderson has his strengths and failures, but if you don't take the books too seriously, they're an enjoyable - and very long-lasting - sources of escapism.

(EN) (AUDIO) Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn Era 2 (Wax and Wayne)
Graphic Audio full cast dramatized audiobooks
1. The Alloy of Law
2. Shadows of Self
3. The Bands of Mourning
4. The Lost Metal
I've learned during my read-through that Brandon Sanderson did not originally intend to write much about this era of Mistborn. He wrote Alloy of Law as a fun little side story and then got carried away. This explains a lot, actually.
The Wax and Wayne books are much, much less cool than the original Mistborn trilogy. Era 1 at least has a cool dystopian atmosphere. Era 2 could be technically called "gaslamp fantasy", which is one of my favourite genres - I love when 19th and 20th century aesthetics get mixed with magic. So I'm supposed to like it. I really wanted to. But it's done so blandly, so unoriginally. I can't bring myself to care.
The characters on their own are not that bad, I like them all individually. Wax is a fine enough broody protagonist. Wayne is... I loved everything Wayne brings in, he's incredible. I wish Steris had more screentime and plot relevance, she's great. Marasi, I feel, got the most satisfying character arc overall (thank goodness she's not a cop anymore!) But the relationships between them are much less believable. There's much more telling than showing. Most of the bonding happens in flashbacks or timeskips between books, and we're just supposed to accept the new status quo in each new book. Era 1 had this problem too, but to a lesser degree.
The plot is getting too confusing and convoluted for me. The Lost Metal is especially heavy with references and plotlines from other Brandon Sanderson books, which is probably fun if you're a super invested Cosmere fan but to someone who's only read Mistborn just reiterates how weak era 2 is on its own. I did like the references to era 1 and I was very happy to see Marsh appear again, even if just for a short while.

Nonfiction

My goal for 2025 was to read 12 fiction and 12 nonfiction books, and while reaching the fiction goal was easy, I fell a bit short on the nonfiction side. Perhaps that's just due to how I've rigged the game for myself: many fiction books I've read this year were either 1) rereads of material already familiar to me, 2) fiction in genres I enjoy and can consume in large quantities (e.g fantasy) or 3) short stories and children's literature. Meanwhile, with nonfiction I challenged myself with thicker books about unfamiliar or disturbing topics, so I read much slower through them.

There are several books that haven't made the 2025 list because I have started, but haven't yet finished them. I could power through them before 2025 is over to meet the 12 book goal, but like... these are books I read for my enjoyment, not a finals exam or an Olympic event. I'm okay with missing this mark. There's no punishment.

I will be making adjustments to my reading habits in 2026, both in the choice of reading material (I clearly need to read more nonfiction books that are not about depressing topics like WWII or modern late stage capitalism...) and in terms of how often I read and when and why. I've been trying to waste less time doomscrolling, and reading has been a good replacement for that. It's more engaging for the brain, it's less likely to keep you up late all night since it's not coming from a loud, animated lit-up screen, and finishing a good book feels much more like an accomplishment. I do still occasionally get sucked up in the traps of social media, though, so there's room for improvement.