Hugin & Munin Journal

With 2025 just behind me, it feels like a good moment to look back at what I read. As usual, the list is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, comfort rereads and long-overdue titles finally crossed off the list. Nothing this year was truly life-changing, but several books were quietly excellent—and a few were notable for less flattering reasons. The most interesting pattern was not any single winner. It was the number of books that led directly to other books, reopening old interests or sending me down an entirely new line of inquiry. Counting every separately listed work, including novellas and graphic albums, I read 40 titles in 2025 : Fiction: 21 Non-fiction: 19 The balance was close, although the non-fiction left the strongest overall impression. Highlights and Lowlights Best Non-Fiction Andy Greenberg — Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers This was the standout book of the year. Sandworm is both gripping a...

Most of the reading I do for the children happens during the school year. Once summer arrives, routines dissolve and bedtime becomes more of a suggestion than a rule. During term time, however, reading is firmly embedded in the evening ritual. These days, that ritual mainly involves the two youngest. The oldest reads independently now—something I had recently begun to reflect on when writing about the difference between reading together and learning to read alone . Finding one book that would genuinely work for all three children would be a Herculean task. It is difficult enough to find something that both a soon-to-be-six-year-old and a nine-year-old will enjoy. Reading aloud is therefore less a matter of selecting the best children’s books than of matching a particular story to particular listeners. Age matters, but so do mood, attention, tiredness and the complicated politics of bedtime. Reading for Two Different Listeners There is the constant stream of questions. Some ar...

I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 with my oldest son today, mostly because he was not quite ready to watch it alone. Sitting in the cinema, half following the film and half watching his reactions, my mind drifted towards several broader trends I have been noticing. To keep this post from turning into a book of its own, I will focus on one of them: children and reading. Promotional poster for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 , released by Universal Pictures and produced by Blumhouse. Used here for purposes of commentary. Growing Up with Books and Screens We put considerable emphasis on encouraging our children to read. Luxembourgish schools expose them to several languages, so we do not restrict reading to one. At home, English has become the main family language, although neither my wife nor I is a native speaker. Unsurprisingly, it has also become the language in which most of their voluntary reading happens. When I was young, it was difficult to pry a book...

I have not actually finished any of the books from my January reading update , but I have made good progress on most of them. Ben Elton’s Time and Time Again really went off the rails once I picked it up again, so I am especially curious to see where it ends. I am about two-thirds of the way through The Last Wish and am still enjoying it. In the meantime, I finished the first season of The Witcher , and parts of the television series follow the book remarkably closely—for better or worse. The stories are full of references to classical fairy tales. These can be entertaining, but they also introduce a certain silliness that makes the material difficult to take entirely seriously. In many ways, the stories remind me of classic pulp adventures. That, too, can be either a strength or a weakness, depending on what you expect from them. Cover image: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, published by Tor Books. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. ...

When commuting, I generally read or work through a language course. Walking with a stroller or folding laundry is different: my hands and eyes are occupied, but my mind is free. Podcasts became a way to reclaim time that would otherwise disappear. Actual-play podcasts eventually offered something more—a way back into tabletop roleplaying when I no longer had enough time to play regularly. Since having children, and especially since moving to Luxembourg, I have found myself walking much more. Initially, this was mostly with a stroller, because walking is an excellent way to put a child to sleep—and, with some children, the only way to manage it without a great deal of screaming and resistance. Over time, I began to enjoy walking for its own sake: the nature, the quiet and the temporary absence of demands. I must be getting old. As a child, I found walks with my parents dreadfully boring, particularly when they developed into hikes during family holidays. It is strange how differentl...

I attended my first Worldcon, Interaction in Glasgow, in 2005. It was both interesting and enjoyable, although fairly expensive on a student budget. I had known about Worldcon for some time, but its return to Europe was what finally made attending seem feasible. I would dearly have liked to follow it with Nippon 2007 in Yokohama, combining two of my greatest interests: Japan and books. Instead, fourteen years passed before I returned to a Worldcon. I had my sights set on Loncon 3 in London in 2014, but it came too soon after the birth of my first son. The birth of my second son then ended any realistic hope of attending Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in 2017. Baby number three almost prevented Dublin 2019 as well. We had initially planned to make it a family holiday. In the end, my wife was halfway through the pregnancy and felt that Dublin would be too much on top of the other travel we had already arranged, so I went alone. Thursday Because of work and the available flights, I di...

I have always found it interesting to see what other people are reading and to hear their thoughts on books, especially when I have read the books myself—or when I am looking for recommendations. Not that I really need more books to read. The to-be-read pile is not exactly shrinking. I have a bad habit of reading several books at once, so this first current-reading post will be a mixture of early impressions and random musings about the books currently competing for my attention. Cover images: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski, published by Orbit, and Time and Time Again by Ben Elton, published by Black Swan. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. I started reading The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski after watching a couple of episodes of The Witcher on Netflix. The show did not immediately capture my interest. Part of the problem may simply have been misplaced expectations: I knew the series largely through the reputation o...

I think most readers have at least a few books that matter more than others: books that inspired them, opened new interests, or otherwise helped shape who they became. Mine mostly come from childhood and adolescence, when a book could still redraw the boundaries of the world. My mother used to read to my brother and me when we were young. I loved it, but I also found it frustratingly slow; I always wanted to know what happened next. I obviously do not remember that time perfectly, but I suspect that impatience helped spur me to learn to read, so that I could devour books on my own. I do not know exactly when I moved from children’s books into books aimed at older readers. I do remember reading The Hobbit on my own in second or third grade, after my mother had already read it to us. It was probably one of the first books to carry me beyond the children’s books I had been reading and into a much wider literary world. My mother later read The Lord of the Rings to us. I cannot plac...