#7: On the Best and Weirdest Books I Read in Q1 2025, and the House of Two Finnish Designers
Great books including a graphic novel I found in England, and an architect home in Helsinki
A meagre start
Q1 wasn’t the best quarter, reading-wise. I read 37 books, but most were just ‘ok’. The best one was a graphic novel (yes, graphic novels count as books!) titled Cyberman, An On-Screen Documentary by Veronika Muchitsch.
Last January, I was browsing the graphic novel section in a Waterstones in Newcastle upon Tyne, when I spotted Cyberman, An On-Screen Documentary. There was only one copy, and it was a bit tatty, but I was intrigued and bought it.
The book is based on a real-life project by Veronika Muchitsch in which she chronicles the life of a 50-year-old man called Ari, who streams himself 24/7. Ari (a Fin) spends his days sleeping or sitting in front of his computer, chatting to his viewers, and playing music on YouTube.
Veronika watched Ari’s livestream on Cyberman.tv for over a year. Initially, Ari did not know she was drawing him, and she chatted with him using the pseudonym L.B. Jefferies – which is a reference to the protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, who watches his neighbours across the courtyard.
In her graphic novel, Veronika depicts the streaming scenes and parts of the interactions she has in the chat with Ari. At a certain point, she told Ari about her book, and she even sent him the final copy. Not a lot happens in this book, because watching someone sitting in front of a screen is very boring. But it still is fascinating! Let me show you some photos.
As one of the judges for the First Graphic Novel Competition in 2020 (which Veronika won with this book) said:
Wow. I knew this was going to be excellent and it does not disappoint. One of the most original, exciting and downright beautiful comics I have seen for ages. A truly original piece, [it] feels like an important document of twenty-first century isolation, exhibitionism and voyeurism.
I won’t tell you how the story ends. This book is honest, dark, pure. How this graphic novel from 2022 ended up on a Waterstones shelf in Newcastle I don’t know, but I am glad it found me.
Two other books worth your time
The first book is a ‘pearl from the pile’ (read my first newsletter linked below, if you don’t know what this means).
Today’s pearl is a novel called The Saving Graces by Patricia Gaffney, published in 1999. Don’t let the title put you off - it sounds like chick-lit, which it isn’t. Well, maybe a little. It is the history of a friendship between four women, each chapter narrated by another one of them. It’s nicely paced, and you keep on turning the pages. It is not a term I often use, but it is a perfect holiday read.
The second book I’m recommending is A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman, published in 2014, which I found at a second-hand bookshop in Denton, Texas, last year. This debut novel is about Slava, a struggling junior writer at a literary magazine in New York, who is asked by his grandfather, Yevgeny, to falsify a claim on his behalf for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (CJMCAG). Slava is asked to make up a Holocaust narrative for his grandfather, to get money from this fund, which Yevgeny feels he is entitled to.
The book is a fictionalized account of a real-life case (!) in which there were several millions of dollars of fraudulent Holocaust claims which the CJMCAG eventually brought to the US courts.
Long story short: Slava does what his grandfather asks him, and before he knows it, he is doing the same for many elderly Jews in the neighbourhood and gets in deeper and deeper. The subject of this novel might sound grim, however the story is delightfully light and hilarious. There’s a cast of great characters ranging from Russian immigrants to Slava’s love interest to his colleagues at the magazine to the German anti-scam investigator Otto Barber, who comes to Slava to investigate the presumed false claims. A big fat recommendation from me!
Enough about books. How about some architecture?
Remember my love for artist homes? Late 2024, I visited The Aalto house in Helsinki. This modernist home was built between 1934 and 1936 by Aino and Alvar Aalto, who were both architects and designers and who built it for themselves as a place to live and work.
You may not have heard of the Aalto’s, but I am sure you know quite a few of their designs. For example the tumbler below left, designed by Aino, which is still in production with Iittala. And on the right, the Artek stool which was designed by Alvar in 1933 and is still produced today as well.
As I walked around the house with a bunch of fellow architecture nerds and listened to the guide, I was struck by how rather small, but pleasant, the house felt. I wasn’t particularly taken by the furniture (mostly of their own design, but also some other styles and antiques) and there was not a lot of great art, but the layout was pleasant and the light was beautiful.
It wasn’t the most stylish artist home I ever visited, but it was inspiring all the same. Here’s a short video if you’d like to see a bit more.
Thanks for reading again this week, please forward this email to anyone you think might like it. See you in 2 weeks for the next one!