Dmytro

The Children's Crusade by Rebecca Brown is a short, quiet novel following an unnamed girl through five stages of her parents' divorce and the loss of her brother Sten. It's a difficult read — not because it's long, but because Brown explains almost nothing, leaving you to piece things together yourself. The writing is spare and sometimes hypnotic, and the final image of the girl writing a letter to her absent brother while already vowing never to let her own future children tear her apart is genuinely sad and stays with you. It's a thoughtful, honest little book, but it keeps you at a distance the whole time — and its meaning only really settles after you've sat with it a while.

I liked to see familiar names of towns. But still made me sad. The perspective of a war surgeon shows not only war from a first-person point of view but also a bit broader.

It was a bit more boring, and the plot for me was harder to follow than other books.

Inside the Company: CIA Diary by Philip Agee provides a detailed and personal account of his years working within the CIA, offering an insider’s perspective on the agency’s operations and international influence. Written as a diary, the book emphasises transparency and accountability, making complex intelligence work accessible to the general reader. I gained a lot of information from it about how the CIA functions, why it operates the way it does, and the methods it employs. However, I found the reading experience somewhat tedious: parts of it were boring and difficult to get through. At the same time, it was interesting to peek behind the curtain of such a secretive organisation. Agee’s motivations or the ethics of revealing operational details are not entirely clear to me, but the text remains a valuable historical document that illuminates the inner workings of the CIA and invites reflection on the broader implications of intelligence activity in global politics.

Witcher, who forgot everything, tried to figure out the world and herself.