Mattie > Recent Status Updates

I've finished The Magician's Nephew (Dec 2025) and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (~3-4th Jan '26) from this collection. I am taking a break from it now.

Posted my Q4 reading journal plus my tier list for 2024 over on my blog! https://panickyintheuk.wordpress.com/...

Will cross-post reviews for works by dead authors here on GR.

I've had to abandon SO MANY of my planned reads this year due to illness :| This has been a pretty terrible year for me health-wise and it's really messed with my concentration and my capacity for challenging reads (though there have been some highlights). There's always next year ig 🙏

My Q3 reading journal is up, with reviews of everything I read from July-September, plus a tier list! https://panickyintheuk.wordpress.com/...

I finally updated my reading journal for Q2! https://panickyintheuk.wordpress.com/...

I've posted my Q1 reading journal over on my blog at https://panickyintheuk.wordpress.com/...

Just have to get this off my chest: The Secret Commonwealth was a beautiful novel about the nature of consciousness and the role of the imagination and the limits of rationality and refugees and disability. The fact that some pearl-clutchers had a reaction of puritanical moral panic because a fictional man has a crush on a younger fictional woman that is never even acted upon makes me so depressed and despairing

Weird to be reading this and playing Disco Elysium at the same time

Sorry for spamming reviews. I kept writing them and not getting around to publishing them, and they just built up.

Also! Don't think I'm going to do the challenge this year. I do think it helps incentivise me to read, but I think it also sometimes disincentivises me from tackling longer or more challenging books. I'll see how I get on--I might set a lower goal for myself or I might skip the challenge completely.

So far this is as good as everyone has been saying

I've seen so many comparisons between this and 'Brideshead Revisited', but so far it feels like there's at least as much 'Wives and Daughters' to me

Borrowed this after reading The Cleaners. Was hoping to finish it before my free KU subscription ran out, but time got away from me so this will probably stay unfinished for the foreseeable. Themes around memory and identity remind me of Richard Powers, but in service to narratives of colonialism/imperialism (literal or figurative). Liu often seems reluctant to commit to a POV--admirable but sometimes frustrating.