Review: Private Rites by Julia Armfield

A square crop of the front cover of Private Rites by Julia Armfield. There is a topless woman facing away towards open door into a red void.
This cover design is from the first publishing which was in June 2024 by the publisher Fourth Estate. The edition I read is from December 2024, published by Flatiron Books and has a more subdued painterly cover. I find this cover to be more striking.

The first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.

page 84, Private Rites by Julia Armfield
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My 2025 Albums of the Year

A shot from Clipse's music video for the song So Be It. The image is in black and white with Pusha T and Malice looking at the camera with a mansion in the background.
All the music videos from Clipse’s latest album are sublime and So Be It is no different.

Your last few words in my ear still ring (Oh)
You told me that you loved me, it was all in your tone (Oh-oh)
“I love my two sons” was the code to your phone, now you’re home

Malice on verse 2 of Clipse’s The Birds Don’t Sing
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My 2025 Books of the Year

Picture showing hardcover copies of three of my books of the year sitting on a white tote bag on a wooden restaurant table.
I recently picked up hardcover copies of three of my books of the year for my collection. I read all of these either as library copies or ebooks on my Kobo ebook reader.

Books became the medium I kept returning to more this year than any other. A mix of seasonal depression and anhedonia for the first half of the year meant that other forms of media that I enjoyed like music and video games weren’t hitting like they usually do. As such this will be the first of the three “2025 media of the year” posts.

I will start this blog post with some statistics and then I will get into each book in my 2025 books of the year list. The books will be listened in ascending order of when I read and reviewed them.

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