Read in 2020

  • Sombrero Fallout by Richard Brautigan (Recommended!)
  • The Trojan Women by Euripides (trans. Richard Lattimore)
  • Stories We Tell Ourselves by Richard Holloway
  • Tory Heaven or Thunder on the Right by Marghanita Laski
  • Hard Times by Charles Dickens
  • Sick Souls, Healthy Minds by John Kaag (Not keen on the self-helpy, autobiographical bits. I’d assumed it was going to be primarily about William James’ ideas and thinking.)
  • Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz (Sadly, less about the pleasures of reading and thinking, more about the pitfalls of high-powered academia. The author and I are so utterly different in our outlook that it was quite thought provoking. Blew my fantasies of an academic life right out of the water, though.)
  • The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
  • The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells
  • The Ingenious Language by Andrea Marcolongo (disappointing)
  • Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  • Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World by Laura Spinney (When I bought it last year, I would have been incapable of imagining that I’d soon be reading it for tips.)
  • Expiation by Elizabeth von Arnim (published by Persephone Books)
  • Furnace of This World by Ed Simon (abandoned halfway through — no new or interesting thoughts on the subject provided. Was drawn to it by the title, which is taken from the poem, by the brilliant Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense”)
  • The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray
  • Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Didn’t do much with the very interesting subject matter. Fifty-six pages of rambling, ruminating postscripts could have been shortened to less than five. Disappointing.)
  • The Darkest of Nights by Charles Eric Maine (published by British Library) [Read this at the beginning of January, 2020. Seriously wish I hadn’t — it’s a post-apocalyptic, virus-wipes-out-civilization-and-all-traces-of-human-decency book.]
  • The Wall by John Lanchester
  • Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi (Recommended.)