The Internet Personified: April 2025 Books & Culture Recap

Here comes the suuuuun

all of berlin yesterday

Yesterday was May Day, perhaps Berlin’s most beloved holiday, which happened to coincide with a 25 degree day, one of the hottest we’ve had this year. We were invited to two parties—a picnic and a barbecue—signalling the start of outdoor party weather. (I mean, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it’s dropping back down to 16 high/8 low from Sunday onwards and will not let up for the whole week.) We decided (well, K suggested and I agreed) to ride our bikes to both parties, the first one being a mere 7 kilometres away, except we also wanted to see some of the May Day fun so we looped through a park that was so packed with bodies (heading to raves, they had open air raves all over the city yesterday) that we had to get off our bikes and walk, and when those were done, we ran into the pro-Palestine demo which was surrounded by SO MANY police cars that it would have been a good day to do a little petty theft, say, elsewhere in the city. (Here’s an Instagram reel of the crowds that built up later.) All this to say that by the end of it, the seven kilometres were more like FIFTEEN and today my butt is killing me (those seats are hard!) as is my wrist for some reason and also my back, because the bike I have is one my neighbour passed on to me and it’s lovely but a mountain bike so you have to hunch over the whole time. What I really need is an old fashioned velocipede as pictured below, but I might actually invest in my OWN bicycle and truly take steps towards being European. (I’ve been using borrowed bikes the whole time I’ve lived here, first K’s parents let me take their old folding bicycle, not very comfy, then I used a bike rental service called Swapfiez but I wasn’t really ready to be a proper cyclist then, I only just got my legs back last year, then I used an app called Nextbike as well as my neighbour’s bike alternatively until I’ve used them enough, I think, to qualify for my own, bought to my specifications—second hand, of course, bicycles being REALLY EXPENSIVE in this part of the world, and also people less likely to steal them if they’re sort of dinged up and bad looking. ) (That being said, perusing the second hand listings, K just sent me a link to a GORGEOUS hot pink bicycle which I feel like I already love because it is both so me and so girly. Just like when I used to have my pink BSA Champ when I was six.)

this could be us

For the picnic and the barbecue, I hung about 1 kilo of yogurt to make this dip which was a success, yes, but we were so late to everyone’s respective parties that no one was really hungry any more so I have in my fridge about 500 grams of leftover dip which I fully plan to make a meal out of, so no complaints.

BOOKS

I read a LOT in April, but a lot of this was also catching up on all my magazine subscriptions which is a full time job, my friends, but soon! The pile will be finished!) I started with Eligible (which I mentioned in last time’s newsletter) and ended with Stephen King’s Revival, so quite a cross-section.

• Quentins by Maeve Binchy (are you guys sick of my Maeve Binchy reviews yet? She has a GIANT backlist so just… prepare yourselves is all.) Was good, the life of people told through a restaurant, as in each person had something to do with the restaurant, except the lead character was a woman who got duped by a man which is fine, everyone makes mistakes, but she was so wishy-washy-stand-by-your-man-y about the whole thing that I just got irritated and that whole irritation carried through the book.

• Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes. My first time reading Natalie Haynes, but you know, I went to a book launch by one of K’s friends shortly after reading this and she’s heavily into Greek myths and she was namechecking Natalie and it was one of those fun coincidences, where once you hear of something the thing is everywhere. This is the story of Medusa and it is very much NOT Madeline Miller, that much you should be aware of, because I went into it thinking it might be Circe-y and then being disappointed that it wasn’t but with snappy modern language and a whole new spin on the question “who exactly is a monster?” I enjoyed it and look forward to reading the others on her backlist.

• Sunrise On The Reaping by Suzanne Collins. Now I am a huge Hunger Games fan, I’ve read the books a few times, the films ditto, but I am just not getting into the prequel series that Collins has been releasing. This one is Haymitch (who is Katniss’s drunken mentor) POV and his Hunger Games. It’s basically the same as the first Hunger Games books but with no overarching plotline (except how he becomes an alkie.) (And yet it has a near perfect rating on Goodreads, proving that ratings are rubbish.)

• Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai. I loved this book. It has some of the most evocative descriptions of Delhi I’ve ever read. It features four siblings and now they’re grown up and shit has happened to them and reminded me very strongly of another book I loved: The Parasites by Daphne Du Maurier.

• House of Glass by Sarah Pekkanen. The only interesting thing about this book (which had a twist I saw coming a mile away) is that the author is the “global ambassador” for some small Indian animal shelter that works extensively with stray dogs, which is nice. I wish she had written a book about THAT.

• Crossbones Yard by Kate Rhodes. Another meh mystery with a lead character everyone wanted to fuck and who ate a lot and always stayed perfectly thin. Plus she was a psychologist but seemed to have zero insight into people. I’m surprised I finished it.

• The Favorites by Layne Fargo. Speaking of did not finish, I did not finish this one which was so promising, Wuthering Heights set in competitive skating but sadly Heathcliff DOES NOT TRANSLATE to the modern era and just comes off as creepy and controlling so why should we root for him? Listen to the song Wuthering Heights instead.

• Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe. This was SO GOOD, I think definitely making my best books list this year. Margo is a 20 year old single mother with a baby and no job so she turns to Only Fans to make money while her ex-WWF father moves in to help out with the baby. It’s funny and sad and about chosen and blood family in all the best ways. (I placed a hold for this at my library which means I had to pay 1 euro for it, totally worth it.)

• Her by Harriet Lane. A creepy two person perspective of two women, one a successful artist, the other a new mother, and there’s a relationship between them but you don’t know what it is till the end. It also ends on a cliffhanger if you enjoy that sort of thing (I do sometimes.)

• The Survivors by Jane Harper. Normally a fan of Harper’s evocative writing about Australia, but this one was not great, except for the small town by the beach vibes, for someone who has only lived in big cities, I love small town everyone-knows-each-other stories.

• The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue. Another book I ordered specially from the library and while it was nice (a train full of people and their stories except one of them has a bomb!) it wasn’t great. It read like something she had written for someone else, you know what I mean? Like she was commissioned to write it by the Paris Railway Authority or something.

• Funny Story by Emily Henry. You guys keep writing to me about Emily Henry and I liked Book Lovers a lot, but romance in general is not MY genre fiction (that’s gory crime stories, usually a whydunnit instead of a whodunnit or straight up horror). Still I read this in literally five hours of bringing it home from the library and it was still ringing in my ears so loudly that my fiction writing for the day got all romance novel-y which is a compliment for the book (which was really good) but a pain for me, because now I have to go back and undo all of that chapter.

• My Documents by Alejandro Zambra. A pick for my book club which is reading books set around the world. (This was Chile, we’re approaching it randomly, but no continent gets revisited twice in a row.) This was excellent, but really a more writer’s book than a reader’s. It’s a grouped together collection of documents, some short stories, some essays, some lists, too short for a novel but all super evocative. The translation was extremely well done too, by Megan McDowell. I believe it’s a Fitzcarraldo book, which explains it, I’ve never not liked one of their books.

Revival by Stephen King. Only really scary by the end, so you felt like the slow foreshadowing wasn’t really worth it. I love King though, so I’m not disappointed by the rest of the book which is about how this young boy discovered music.

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OTHER STUFF

• My Abundo subscription restarted (remember I told you about it? It’s a subscription model for culture, flat fee and you have tickets for all sorts of things) this month so we did a bunch of things, including:

• The Anna B Savage concert at Franzz Club which was a really nice venue, part beer garden, part concert hall, complete with soaring ceilings and a nice sound system. I’d never heard of Anna B Savage before, but she’s kinda amazing, especially her song “The Orange” which I loved so much I went out the next day and played it for my friend. Online, that is. I’m no musician, although if you live in Berlin and want to karaoke, can we talk? I have no one to go with. :(

• The Yoko Ono exhibition at Gropius Bau which I really enjoy as a gallery, they do such huge installations and lots of touchy-touchy things which is nice. But would Yoko really be this famous if it wasn’t for John Lennon AND do we actually like her art or have we just heard of her?

• Ooh Coen Brothers retrospective at one of our favourite independent cinemas (which made me think of my pal Niyati who loves the Coen Brothers madly and basically sang the praises of O Brother Where Art Thou till I caved and watched it.) We saw The Big Lebowski, a first for me, and we took along a thermos of oat milk White Russians on a friend’s advice but turns out they were also selling them at the cinema! So we drank a lot of White Russians, which was nice, as was the film. Fun. (My favourite Coen Bros movie is True Grit which is also a favourite novel.)

• A one man show about nuclear disarmament at the English Theatre Berlin. Called Talking About The Fire, it got rave reviews in Time Out London and a terrible one in The Guardian. What was interesting is how personalised he made it, talking to people in the audience, asking their names and favourite places and somehow tying it all together in a story about nuclear war. Which is to say, not a story, but more like a call to action. I enjoyed it. It was weird, but I love weird, that’s the one thing humans have that can’t be (easily) replicated by AI.

That’s my month! What have you been up to?

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Have a great week!

xx

m

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of eight books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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