Weekly Readings #204 (12/29/25-01/04/26)

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

Welcome to 2026 here at Grand Hotel Abyss and to all my many new readers! I can’t take credit for the influx, which appears due to my association with the journal Romanticon in the wake of Samara’s hit viral piece “Happy New Year?” Samara provides a calendrical history of solar bureaucracy’s imperial war on the lunar local gods; however necessary accurate imperial record-keeping may prove, we are, it turns out, not wrong, either, if we sleepily resist the New Year’s urging toward cyclical self-renewal when there’s an inch of ice out on the sidewalk and the sky at noon is slate-gray. We’ll self-renew, I’m sure, “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,” or, in other words, when April, “the cruelest month,” breeds “[l]ilacs out of the dead land” and mixes “memory and desire.”1 Consider that my apologia for proceeding today with the usual business in these electronic pages: we start here at the top with self-promotions and updates, continue in the middle with a little and sometimes perfunctory essay, and conclude with footnotes of a diversely intriguing nature.

Updates and self-promotions, then. First, there’s The Invisible College, my literature podcast for paid subscribers to this Substack. This week saw the release of “The Divine Justice,” the final episode of 2025, a casual late-night-DJ New Year’s Eve episode “for the fans” about Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Shadow Ticket with some remarks on One Battle After Another.2 Then, on New Year’s Day, I released the 2026 schedule. It consists of a winter-and-spring “Great Books bootcamp”3 (from Virgil and Dante to Mann and Proust, though not in that order), a more exploratory summer of modern and contemporary writing from the New World (historical novels by Vidal and Sontag; generically hybrid and cross-national North and South American writing4 by Bishop, Carson, and Lispector; and classic Latin American novels by García Márquez and Bolaño), and a fall tour of the English novel from Mary Shelley’s monster to Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone that climaxes with Dickens’s combustible Bleak House. The College re-convenes on January 16 for the first of four episodes on The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. A paid subscription to Grand Hotel Abyss buys you access to The Invisible College’s ever-expanding archive, with almost 100 ...