TheBookchemist

I would put it up there with some of the male friendships that Michael Chabon talks about in his books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys and really any other of his novels.

Think Madame Bovary, even The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.

As you can probably tell, this is very much a bit of a nerdy take on Nabokov's Pale Fire.

If you're a fan of Richard Powers The Overstory, this is just as great. It's very similar in some ways, very different in others, but just as great and a must-read.

Think War and Peace.

Very much reminded me of The Black and the Red by Stendhal.

Think Madame Bovary, even The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni.

Think Middlemarch potentially.

I would put it up there with some of the male friendships that Michael Chabon talks about in his books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Wonder Boys and really any other of his novels.

Perfezione is actually a short novel about millennial life for young creatives who are trying to struggling to create this perfect lifestyle and struggling with it in different ways in their with their expat life in these big European cities. It's a very I would say a very abstract sort of universal book. It was another one of my favorite books from 2025, completely different novel.

I find that combination of twisted plot and clinical realism really engrossing and invigorating. It's also very much a book about Milan, arguably my native city.

It could have easily been just a funny kind of satirical take on, call it, nerd culture, genre culture, and still have been a great book. The thing that makes it really amazing and that made that made it resonate with me so much is that it actually takes many chances. It pushes further into its characters' stories than I thought it would.

Namesake is a fantastic family saga about a family moving from India to the US, building a life here, some of them feeling always conflicted, always split between their identities, between different countries. As somebody who lives in the UK, but is very much tied to his hometown back in Italy, I definitely could relate to some of their experiences and I found that the book talked about them in a really beautiful way. It's an It's an incredible read, warm, engrossing, hurtful in the way it plays with the characters' way lives, but that's the best kind of hurt that prepares you for the challenges of life, at least I want to hope so.

I found that some of the her takes on certain characters were, as far as I'm aware, maybe a little unjust and maybe a little unjustified considering the historical sources I'm familiar with. Definitely, her descriptions of Marat and Saint-Just seemed at times excessive and, well, unfair and calumnious. So, even though we disagree with it, sorry, on it and on those events, I still I still enjoyed it.

Of the three, The Dark Forest is definitely the one that I found most engrossing and most rewarding. It's very much a space opera set in a future where humanity and arguably the solar system at large is facing its greatest challenge yet. Really amazing.

A beautiful story about provincial life in provincial France. It follows a few teenagers growing up in this in this small town, falling in love with each other, fighting each other, finding each other in unexpected places later on in life. It's a book that captures really beautifully the feelings of great boredom and injustice and expectation and disappointment that makes up teenage life when you grow up in these types of sleepy self-complacent circumstances town.

a marvelous Russian doll of a novel, family saga spanning more than a century, following some really intriguing mystery, the development of some characters, the way their lives take all sorts of unexpected twists, all of it underneath the broader team of the theme of this family's relationship with the natural world and especially with the trees of Canada. If you're a fan of Richard Powers The Overstory, this is just as great.

If you stick with it, it becomes so stimulating, so rewarding. It's also a beautiful book about the nature of wealth and the way it shapes our world by shaping the stories we tell ourselves about our societies, the people who rule us, the people who are responsible for our wealth or our lack thereof.

It's a really stimulating reflection on the nature of success and failure, where we find value within our lives, how we can reinvent ourselves or sometimes how we can't reinvent ourselves. It's a really fun story, a bit like Paradiso, another one of those just sheer joys to experience and to read.

It's Harry Potter by way of Thomas Pynchon and Jack Kerouac and it's as engrossing as it is stimulating in its take on outlawry, on living outside the demands and the domain of society and control and power and all those things. It shouldn't be as thought-provoking and as fun at the same time, but it is.

I really liked it. I read it in the span of a couple of days and it was one again another one of those reads that was just plain fun.

If you don't mind sticking for five or six hundred pages with a book that is as grim as that, it's a really rewarding and really engrossing novel.

It's by no means a book that will mythologize this very conservative, very rigid past, especially when it comes to matters of familiar relationships, the very rigid relationship between the protagonist and his father, the youngest protagonist and his father is very much a case in point. But it also shows what was lost when this world disappeared and when whatever came after the First World War, which is mostly a lot of horror, took its place. It's got the scope and import of the great classics.

A book that's deliciously ruthless in the way it pokes holes through liberal morality and through people's attitudes to social matters especially related to immigration. It's thick with black humor.