2025

Fiction

  • The Woman in the Dunes, by Kobo Abe

  • Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino

  • O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather #

  • Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton

  • Exhalation: Stories, by Ted Chiang

  • Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

  • Fortune Smiles, by Adam Johnson

  • dem, by William Melvin Kelley

  • Two Nurses, Smoking: Stories, by David Means

  • Dengue Boy, by Michael Nieva

  • Ordinary Human Failings, by Megan Nolan

  • The Factory, by Hiroko Oyamada

  • Knockemstiff, by Donald Ray Pollock

  • Normal People, by Sally Rooney #

  • Teenager, by Bud Smith

  • The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

  • The Empusium, by Olga Tokarczuk

  • Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer

  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong #

  • On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong ##

Non-Fiction

  • The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion, by Mircea Eliade

  • Debt: The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

  • Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, by Neil Theise

  • An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong

Other

  • The Iliad, by Homer (trans. by Robert Fagles)

  • The River Twice: Poems, by Kathleen Graber

  • The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems, by Yusef Komunyakaa

  • Sixty Poems, by Charles Simic

# = re-read

2024

Fiction

  • Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

  • Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar

  • Room Temperature, by Nicholson Baker

  • A Box of Matches, by Nicholson Baker

  • Big Swiss, by Jen Beagin

  • Molloy, by Samuel Beckett

  • Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño

  • By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño #

  • The Material, by Camille Bordas

  • The New Me, by Halle Butler

  • Cecilia, by K-Ming Chang

  • My Education, by Susan Choi

  • The Bradshaw Variations, by Rachel Cusk

  • Early Sobrieties, by Michael Deagler

  • Running Dog, by Don Delillo

  • Some Trick, by Helen DeWitt

  • Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn

  • Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, by Mathias Énard

  • Getting Lost, by Annie Ernaux

  • Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

  • Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

  • Space Invaders, by Nona Fernández

  • Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert

  • Cosmos, by Witold Gombrowicz

  • Mysteries, by Knut Hamsun

  • Tinkers, by Paul Harding

  • The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer

  • Strangers on a Train, by Patricia Highsmith

  • Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

  • Fiskadoro, by Denis Johnson

  • Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson #

  • Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas

  • All Fours, by Miranda July

  • The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka

  • Foster, Claire Keegan

  • Yellowface, by R. F. Kuang

  • Red Pill, by Hari Kunzru *

  • The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut

  • When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut #

  • Us Fools, by Nora Lange

  • Luster, by Raven Leilani

  • Changing Places, by David Lodge

  • The Group, by Mary McCarthy

  • Evening, by Susan Minot

  • After Dark, by Haruki Murakami

  • Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami

  • The Bell, by Iris Murdoch

  • Ada, or Ardor, by Vladimir Nabokov

  • Acts of Desperation, by Megan Nolan

  • Weather, by Jenny Offill

  • Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara

  • The Freedom Artist, by Ben Okri

  • Alien Stories, by E.C. Osondu

  • The Moon and the Bonfires, by Cesare Pavese

  • The Garbage Times/White Ibis, by Sam Pink

  • Normal People, by Sally Rooney #

  • Glaxo, by Hernán Ronsino

  • Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth

  • Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth

  • The Dominant Animal: Stories by Kathryn Scanlan

  • Other Minds and Other Stories, by Bennett Sims

  • Adele, by Leila Slimani

  • The Blizzard, by Vladimir Sorokin

  • All Days Are Night, by Peter Stamm

  • It's Getting Dark, by Peter Stamm

  • Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout

  • The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk

  • Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte

  • Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, by Isabel Waidner

  • Apartment, by Teddy Wayne

  • Loner, by Teddy Wayne

  • The Great Man Theory, by Teddy Wayne

  • To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf #

  • Chilean Poet, by Alejandro Zambra

  • Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

Non-Fiction

  • The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram

  • The Wisdom Of The Spanish Mystics, by Stephen Clissold

  • Mysticism, by Simon Critchley

  • Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

  • Forests: The Shadow of Civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison

  • Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom, by Pam Houston

  • The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  • The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, by Daniel Mendelsohn

  • Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, by Daniel Mendelsohn

  • American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, by D.W. Pasulka #

  • Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences, by D.W. Pasulka

  • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, by Neil Postman

  • An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, by Oliver Sacks

  • Waves in the Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean, by Matt Strassler

  • The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman

  • The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, by James Wood

  • Heaven's Gate: America's UFO Religion, by Benjamin E. Zeller

Other

  • Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare

# = re-read