JUST READ / LISTENED TO

📚 Alfie,
by Christopher Bouix
Scifi
2022
468 pages
Read with French student F.

Originally, we wanted to read the latest book by this author, but couldn’t find it, so we decided to go with Alfie.
I so so loved it!

“Alfie is a next-generation smart home AI. It records everything, notes everything, observes everything.
Recently installed in the household of an average family, it assists with daily life and offers a range of high-value services—all while trying to understand this strange species: humans.
But one evening, everything changes.
What do these lies mean, these signs of struggle, this disappearance?
Alfie is uncertain. Is it malfunctioning?
Or has a murder been committed in this seemingly ordinary family?”

The book is structured as Alfie’s diary. 
Every day, it accumulates data, learning about his host family, and how to adjust to the habits and language of each member: for instance the swear words the dad uses while driving, or the slang and verlan used by the teenager, which it thinks might be aramaic!

It is absolutely hilarious, yet also a perfect satire of where our AI addiction could lead us to.
When something weird seems to be happening, the author shows the madness of having all our private life interconnected and available for AI, and the absurdity of some of the AI conclusions.
Ultimately, it is a reflection on what really makes us humans, what makes us different from machines, with all our frailties and inner treasures of humanhood.
I hope this will be available in English one day, and I definitely want to read more by this author.
We laughed a lot with my student when sharing about it.

🎧 Les Ombres du monde,
by Michel Bussi
Narrated by Clémentine Domptail, Lila Tamazit, Daniel Njo Lobé
Historical mystery
2025
576 pages / 16H58

I never miss the latest books by Bussi.
For once, his book is not set on an island or near water, but in Rwanda, and it is a historical mystery.

I am sure many readers won’t take time to read a nonfiction book about a major issue, so it’s really fabulous that some thriller authors choose this format to inform their readers.
I really appreciate this in many contemporary French authors.

In notes at the end of the book, the author shares how he got to write this book. It actually started with a teaching project he was assigned to during his very first year of teaching geography many years ago.

Les Ombres du monde [The Shadows of the world] is dealing with the Rwanda genocide that took place in 1994. I hesitated to read/listen to it, especially as I lived for several years with a group of refugee sisters who escaped in insane conditions, and I have heard so many horror stories from them.
But can you resist any new book by Bussi? I can’t. And I am sure glad I didn’t.
The most horrible aspect was to discover how much my own government was actually involved. At the time, I didn’t have much access to the news, and I had no idea! Bussi himself says that friends and relatives he talked to actually didn’t know either!
Another reason not to be proud of my own country…

Bussi read many books, interviews and reports (he provides ways to find them online), he went to Rwanda to meet and speak with survivors, so many elements in the book are actually true.
He transformed his meticulous historical research (validated by specialists) into a masterful and suspenseful novel, with three generations of women.
Many dimensions of the novel highlight the complexity of what happened and why.

“In Dans Les Ombres du monde, Michel Bussi brings History into the novel and the novel into History, skillfully weaving, as a master of suspense, the narrative construction with historical fact.
It is a dazzling fresco, at the crossroads of three generations, about the transmission of memory, whose twists and turns powerfully reveal the experience of violence, loss, and forgiveness.
A language where poignant images rise to the surface at the heart of tragedy, threading their way along a fine line through the shadows of the world.”

The three narrators of the audiobook did a fabulous job for the different feelings experienced thorughout the book by the various characters.

🎧 The Rajah’s Emerald
(The Listerdale Mystery #11)
by Agatha Christie
Narrated by Hugh Fraser
Mystery
1926
32 pages / 38 minutes
Counts for The Agatha Christie Short Stories Challenge
and my Classics Club 5th list

I really enjoyed this one!
James ended up at the trendy resort of Kimpton-on-Sea because his girlfriend Grace talked him into it, though she’s been getting harder to handle in the last few months. Surrounded by high-society people, even a Rajah, James feels annoyed and out of place.
Annoyed at having to wait forever for a changing room, he sneaks into a private hut so he can finally join the others in the water.
But after his swim, he doesn’t pay attention at which pants he grabs…
This was a fun story, with a great twist at the end, and a great revenge!

📚READING / LISTENING TO  

Among many others:

📚 Orwell’s Roses,
by Rebecca Solnit
Nonfiction / Biography / Essays / Nature
2021
320 pages
Counts for BookBound

I have decided to try to add to my own BookBound challenge some of the connections suggested for a special challenge by The 52 Book Club.
The second prompt invites us to read a book the title of which shares a word with the previous book title – a prompt I often use actually.
The last book I finished was Une Rose seule (link to my older review, planning to write a newer one soon), so I looked in my TBR for any book with the word rose in the title, and landed on Orwell’s Roses.
I’m really thrilled, as I am so impressed by Rebecca Solnit’s writing – I loved Wanderlust.
Plus I have read another nonfiction on Orwell, and it was so fascinating: Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin.

This is a collectoin of 27 essays, organized into seven parts. They explore various topics connected to George Orwell’s life, his interests, and broader social and cultural themes.
I have only started it, but it does promise to be great.

“”In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.

Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life journeys though his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.”

🎧 My First Goose,
by Isaac Babel
Narrated by Stan Pretty
Historical fiction / Russian literature
1925
15 pages / 15 minutes
Counts for my Classics Club 5th list
For The Hundred Years Hence Reading Challenge (#HYH25) hosted by Neeru = books
published in 1925
And for the upcoming 1925 Club
(2025, October 20-26)

I have heard about this story for years, as it is the favorite short story of one of my French students.
It is about a young propaganda officer newly assigned to a group of tough Cossack soldiers during the Russian Civil War.

I had planned to listen to it in the Spring, but you know how it goes.
So finally starting it. I may end up listening to the whole collection, we’ll see.

By the way, September is now Short Story September, come this way if you want to participate.

  BOOK UP NEXT 🎧

 

📚 Notes from an Island,
by Tove Jansson
Anteckningar från en ö
Translated by Thomas Teal
Nonfiction / Memoir / Nature
1996
96 pages
Will buddyread it (September 17-20)
with Mallika @ Literary Potpourri

With Mallika, we’ve been buddyreading several books, and mostly by Tove Jansson, but I believe this will be our first nonfiction together!

“In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless skerry in the Gulf of Finland.
The island was Klovharun, and for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the graphic artist, Tuulikki Pietilä, retreated there to live, paint and write, energised by the shifting seascapes and the island’s austere rocky charms.
Notes from an Island, written in 1996, is both a chronicle of this period and a paean to the mature love that Tove and ‘Tuuti’ shared for their island and for each other. Tove’s spare prose, and Tuulikki’s subtle washes and aquatints combine to form a work of meditative and plangent beauty.”

  THE LINK OF THE WEEK

Did you know there was a Yoyo world competition?
Here is the 2025 winner

🎧  THE MUSIC OF THE WEEK  🎧 

Just discovered (about time!) this French-American teenager singer
who won Prodiges in 2024!
Monroe Vata Rigby singing the Queen of the Night

 LAST BOOK ADDED TO MY GOODREADS TBR  

📚 Transylvania,
by Nicolas Beuglet
Thriller
Expected publication: September 18, 2025
318 pages

I have read several books by Beuglet (the last one was L’Ultime avertissement). I have hesitated reading some that seemed too dark, but this one sounds like it should work for me:

“Once upon a time…
Even today, people say that Bran Castle in Transylvania belonged to Count Dracula. Few stop at this remote hotel, surrounded by snow and ice. The place seems to be haunted by ghosts since time immemorial.
It is here that young Inspector Mina Dragan is sent to investigate a strange murder. A body lies in a room. That of the establishment’s only guest. Next to it drags an old locked trunk. Before disappearing, the killer left an enigmatic tattoo on the victim’s hand.|
Mina Dragan does not know it yet, but this is the beginning of a terrifying trail that will make her discover the hidden and perhaps not-so-imaginary side of the fairy tales of our childhood.
And what if the key to all these mysteries was found in a single book?
A foundational book. Once upon a time… Transylvania…

In this thriller that dives into the depths of our subconscious, Nicolas Beuglet explores, once again, the shadows of the past to enlighten the future. Breathless. Dizzying. Fascinating.”

HAVE YOU READ ANY OF THESE BOOKS?
HOW WAS YOUR WEEK?
BE SURE TO LEAVE THE LINK TO YOUR POST

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