The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening – 2025
by Holly Wade Matter
Viewed
Hoopla, courtesy of the Seattle Public Library, has been a boon. I was able to re-watch the 2002 production of The Forsyte Saga on a Binge Pass. Damian Lewis as Soames Forsyte is a wonder – impossible to like, impossible to ignore.
On Netflix, 2025 was the Year of the Subtitle. I greatly enjoyed The Empress, a fictionalized series about the early years of Empress Elizabeth of Austria; The Lady’s Companion, about a chaperone in 19th- century Spain and her trio of troublesome charges; and The Law According to Lidia Poët, a highly-fictionalized but terribly fun and sexy series about Italy’s first woman attorney.
Very recently I’ve been entertained and impressed by several Nordic noirs – The Glass Dome, The Are Murders, and Deadwind.
Late in the game, I finally got around to watching KPop Demon Hunters. You don’t have to be a fan of K-Pop and K-Drama to enjoy this, but it sure does help.
Listened
KPop Demon Hunters inspired me to revisit several South Korean girl bands whose music I particularly enjoy: SNSD (Girls’ Generation), 2NE1, and f(x). SNSD is pure pop, whereas 2NE1 is grittier and f(x) more introspective.
Read
Standouts for me this year are The Blue Castle, a remarkably mature novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, about a young woman who, given to understand that she only has a year to live, persuades the town eccentric to marry her.
Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold, about a master magician, feels like magic realism, especially the descriptions of Carter’s illusions. Cameos in the novel include Houdini, Warren G. Harding, and the Marx Brothers.
The Botanical Shakespeare by Gerit Quealy, beautifully illustrated by Sumie Hasegawa-Collins, is a chocolate-box book filled with all the plants that appear in Shakespeare’s work.
Other chocolate-box books are Perfumes: The A-Z Guide and Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. The authors review and rate a prodigious number of perfumes – 1,200 scents in the first volume alone. The cumulative page count is over 800. The authors are not only engaging and informative, but they’re funny as hell, too.
And, to return to the beginning, I am currently reading The Man of Property, the first volume of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels.
Holly Wade Matter's debut novel, Damned Pretty Things, was released in 2020 by Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Aqueduct will be publishing her novella "The Circus, the Garden, (and Mario Lanza)" in 2026. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits.
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