reading list

2024

February – April

• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

• Women and Power by Mary Beard

• Medea by Euripides

• Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides

• The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan

January

• Chapters from The New Roman Empire by Anthony Kaldellis

• Chapters from Warrior Queens by Antonia Fraser

• Chaucer’s The Monk’s Tale

• For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie

• Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

• Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, trns. Susan Bernofsky

2023

December

• The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

• Hecuba by Euripides

• Strolling Through Istanbul by John Freely, Hilary Sumner Boyd

• Les Iles des Princes by Gustave Schlumberger

• Buyukada: a Guide to the Monuments by Jak Deleon

November

• Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, & Race in the Middle Ages by Roland Betancourt

• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

• De Ceremoniis by Constantine Porphyrogennetos

• Re-read Antigone by Sophocles, Little Penguin Classic

• The Iliad by Homer trns. Emily Wilson

October

• The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

• Re-reading chapters from Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

• Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis

September

• Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk

• Read half of Zadie Smith’s new book The Fraud but had to stop. It’s boring, but also her voice is so strong that I started to see it in what I’m writing and that was unsettling. I just want to read about Constantinople!

• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, trns. Michael Hofmann

• Circe by Madeline Miller—why!!! Why is this so long? 30% shorter and it could be perfect. The ending is very good but there are about 100 pages leading up to it that become a total drag

August

• Bellies by Nicola Dinan

• Daphnis and Chloe by Longus

• On Beauty by Zadie Smith

• Shy by Max Porter

• Bird by Bird by Annie Lamott

• The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine—not brilliantly written but interesting story about trans women volunteering with refugees on Lesbos

February – July

• This Other Eden by Paul Harding—heartbreaking

• Byzantium: The Early Centuries by John Julius Norwich

• Tastes of Byzantium by Andrew Dalby

• Chronicles of Theophanes the Confessor

• Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth to Twelfth-Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball

• Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes

• A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

• The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo

• After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

• Unrivalled Influence by Judith Herrin

• The Belt of Gold by Cecilia Holland

• Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin—loved it

• Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

• Medieval Bodies by Jack Hartnell

• The Byzantine Revival, 780-842 by Warren Treadgold

September 2022 – January 2023

• Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell—absolute joy from start to finish

• Byzantium by Judith Herrin

• Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium by Judith Herrin

• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

• Parts of Beowulf

• Calamities by Renee Gladman

2022

April – August

• My Hollywood and Other Poems by Boris Dralyuk

• Selected Poems by Adrienne Rich

• If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho translated by Anne Carson

• Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones

• Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

• Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin

• Rookie by Caroline Bird

• Sylvia Plath: a Critical Guide by Tim Kendall

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

2021 – 2022

November 2021 – March 2022

• On Freedom by Maggie Nelson

• The Greeks by Roderick Beaton

• C+nto & Othered Poems by Joelle Taylor

• The Promise by Damon Galgut

2021

October

• Manifesto by Bernardine Evaristo

• Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams

• Beautiful World, Where Are you? by Sally Rooney

• The Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy

• Began and then abandoned Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner

September

• Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey by Frances Wilson

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

• Luster by Raven Leilani

August

• Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

• Second Place by Rachel Cusk

July

• Square Haunting by Francesca Wade

• I must be living twice by Eileen Myles

June

• Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams

• Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath

• Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton by Gail Crowther

• Selected Poems by Walt Whitman

• A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

May

• The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer

• Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk

April

• The Private Life of the Diary: From Pepys to Tweets – a History of the Diary as an Art Form by Sally Bayley

• Stories from Cosmogony by Lucy Ives

• Beloved by Toni Morrison

• Re-read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

• Human Compatible by Stuart J. Russell

• Re-read The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

March

• Re-read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

• Comic Timing by Holly Pester

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

February

• Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler

• The Law of Genre by Derrida

• no one is talking about this by Patricia Lockwood

• Memorial by Bryan Washington

• Little Scratch by Rebecca Watson

• Because Internet: Understanding how language is changing by Gretchen McCulloch

January

• The Penguin Book of Oulipo—brilliant and mystifying, even the introduction by Philip Terry is written in alphabetical order, in glossary form

• Just Us by Claudia Rankine

• Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

• Margery Kempe by Robert Gluck

• The Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill

• Weather by Jenny Offill—beautiful

• The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

• The Topeka School by Ben Lerner—unbelievable. If it had been more of a story it would be my favourite book. It’s definitely up there. More poetry than novel, which makes sense, he is a poet. The kind of book that constantly reminds you of people you know. And that’s how you know it’s a sensitive study of modern masculinity—it’s real!

• Radical Attention by Julia Bell—this is everything I have been thinking about for the past five years. Return to this. And return to it again.

2020

December

• Susan Sontag: Her Life by Benjamin Moser—something to get my teeth into!!!

November

• Crazy for Vincent by Herve Guibert—this novel is told backwards. Quite disturbing but difficult to put down in a funny kind of way. Also watched his film about living with AIDS in which he records his daily life down to tiny details—having a bath, going to the doctor, napping in a chair—as his body gets weaker and weaker.

• Purge by Trisha Low—Strange reading for me. Content re: mental health at elite UK private schools and mentions of the Libertines and lots of teenage discussion of Sylvia Plath but then it’s also very American in its earnestness

• 24/7 by John Crary

• Mucus in my Pinneal Gland by Juliana Huxtable—totally bonkers but worth reading, got a bit lost in it…

January-October

• Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hoschilde—this will stay with me forever, I keep returning to the image of Bayou Corne Sinkhole and the subterranean salt domes

• Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic

• An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

• Funny Weather by Olivia Laing

• Lonely City by Olivia Laing

• Taipei by Tao Lin—in my quest to find good recent novels about social media and the internet.

• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo Lodge

• Bluets by Maggie Nelson

• A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth—sort of hated this. I don’t know why I persevered until the end. I think I thought it would get better, maybe it was optimism or I was trying to prove a point. 

• Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag (revisiting this)

• The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

• Nadja by Andre Breton

• Re-read Disgrace by Coetzee

• Almost Dead by Gavron

• The Assault by Mulisch

• Go Tell it On the Mountain by James Baldwin

• Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (didn’t finish but want to)

• Species of Spaces by Georges Perec—a new favourite

• Exercises in Style by Queneau—brilliant. bonkers. 

• The Book of Daniel by Doctorow

• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

• The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy—bit silly, but enjoyable

• My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

• Naming Names by Navasky

• Paris Metro by Wendell Steavenson

• The Art of Memory by Francis Yates 

• The Book of Memory by Carruthers 

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn

• Wolf Hall by Mantel—had to give up after 400 pages, not for me

• The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

• Citizen by Rankine—incredible. I think I read it in a day, couldn’t put down. Can’t wait to read Just Us in 2021

• Kindred by Octavia Butler

• Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmine El Rashidi

2019

November/December

• Sidewalk by Mitchell Dunier

• Righteous Dopefiend by Jeff Schonberg

• Between Vengeance and Forgiveness by Minnow

• The Graves by Gilles Peress

• Fraternity Gang Rape by Peggy Reeves Sanday 

• The Mobilisation of Shame by Drinan

• Object Oriented Ontology by Graham Harmon

• Why the World Does Not Exist by Markus Gabriel

October

• Triangle David von Drehle—made a real impression, as did… 

• Disposable People—exposes the truth about modern day slavery

June

• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara—Oh my god. The other day Mark woke up to find me weeping beside him. Gripping, joyful, tearful, angry. Somehow it’s a page turner, but so detailed and patient. It’s far too much at times. Egregiously violent. Indulgent. But—I was explaining this to Mark the other day—you don’t really mind because it feels like a vomit. Like it all came rushing out of her. Not fussy or polished, just a story that could only be told like this. This is both a terrible and a wonderful book. 

April

• The Argonauts—incredible. I want to write like this. She is almost annoying but it feels honest and so avoids it. Interesting. Memoir, criticism and essay all in one.

• Started Vanity Fair—I felt like reading a chunky classic and loved the beginning but then got bored

• On Beauty by Elaine Scarry

• On Bullshit essay

2018 

November

• Started Milkman 

• Started Hot Milk

• Ghost Wall by Sarah Mosse—really sweet and sad, quick read. Captured Mark’s imagination, he said it would make a great film. Beautiful nature writing and a very subtle and convincing portrayal of power dynamics. 

• The Idiot by Elif Batuman

October

• Normal People Sally Rooney