Lists

Books 2026

1. Kate Atkinson - Cold Histories Gripping and incredibly well written. Perhaps too many shadows of 90s lad culture ?
2. Vicente Luis Mora - Centroeuropa One of the best I’ve read in a very long time. Magical realism in a muddy field in 1800s Prussia.
3. Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre Grief and isolation and the crimes of the past. Very bleak and atmospheric.
4. Oliver Burkeman - Mediations for Mortals Essentially 4000 weeks chewed over and formed into daily nuggets. Very good all the same.
5. Ben Gazur - A Feast of Folklore Nice round up of a lot of peculiar traditions and beliefs. The devil will steal your potatoes!
6. Bae Suah - Untold Night and Day Loved this. Dream-like is an overused descriptor but this deserves it. Shadows, images, symbols, collapsing in on themselves in a hot Seoul night.
7. Ray Bradbury - Dandelion Wine Very lovely but a little empty. It’s a thickly textured slice of summer as a child, full of little scenes and stories. Pleasant.
8. Richared Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America A very 60s slice of American surrealism. Little vignettes of life, only loosely connected, vaguely revolving around trout. There is some amazing imagery and very funny bits.

Books 2025

1. Richard Flanagan - Gould’s Book of Fish
   • Tasmanian penal colony. Paintings of fish. Great
2. Benjamin Myers - The Perfect Golden Circle
   • Crop circles in the 90s. Decent
3. Donna Tartt - A Secret History
   • College weirdos get weirder. Uneven. Great bits
4. John Lanchester - Mr Phillips
   • Well written but a bit hollow. Dated
5. Geraldine Brooks - Year of Wonder
   • Plague village. Beautifully written but unrelentingly horrible
6. Leonardo Sciascia - The Day of the Owl
   • Very short but totally gripping. A murder in Sicily. Does the mafia even exist?
7. Pen Vogler - Stuffed
   • Totally fascinating history of British food and politics
8. Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle
   • Well this was weird. Intense and spooky novella of two creepy sisters and their murderous past
9. Toby Litt - Corpsing
   • A decent page-turner thriller. Feels a bit early-noughties bloke-lit. Intentionally, I think.
10. Elspeth Barker - O Caledonia
    • An astonishing book. Gothic and gloomy, but funny too.
11. R.F. Kuang - Yellowface
    • Nice idea, but waaaay too much social media. Reading about Twitter is boring.
12. Kate Atkinson - Shrines of Gaiety
    • Post-war Soho drinking dens. Police, dancers, missing girls, dope. Fabulous stuff.
13. Angela Carter - Nights at the Circus
    • Utterly insane. From music hall to Siberia, with clowns, tigers and shaman.
14. Patrick Hamilton - Hangover Square
    • Fascinating slice of hard-drinking 30s life. Went on a bit too long.
15. Susanna Clarke - Piranesi
    • Possibly my favourite book. A whole world of imagination with some very dark twists.
16. Susanna Clarke - Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell
    • It’s long! Victorian novel meets magic and fantasy. Very well written.
17. JG Ballard - Cocaine Nights
    • A re-read. Is it my favourite Ballard? Dystopian Costa del Sol magic.
18. Slutty Chef - Tart
    • Pretty slight but a fun read. Did not make me want to work in a kitchen.
19. Benjamin Myers - Beastings
    • Utterly bleak frontier western in Cumbria. Compelling but horrible.
20. Ali Smith - Gliff
    • A little underwhelmed. Amazing writing (as always) but the dystopia was underdeveloped.
21. Oliver Burkeman - Four Thousand Weeks
    • Anti-productivity approach to accepting you’ll never magically get everything done.
22. Agatha Christie - The Secret of Chimneys
    • Utterly ludicrous but quite fun. Where are the Herzoslovakian crown jewels?
23. Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days
    • Really very silly and no hot air balloons at all!
24. Georges Perec - The Art of Asking Your Boss For a Raise
    • A single sentence across 80 pages of circumperbulation