In the interests of easy navigation it makes sense to have all of my posts in one place. Here the list will simply be chronological, from the most recent to the earliest. I aim to update this page once a year. I recommend you just scroll and see if anything takes your fancy.
Last updated at the start of 2025.
2024
Carbon Credits as Literary Material
Heinrich Böll – The Lost Honour of Katerina Blum
Jane Alison – Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
Jon Fosse – Scenes from a Childhood
John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Marquis de Sade – Philosophy in the Boudoir
Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead Revisited
2023
Claire Keegan – Small Things like These / Foster
Janik and Toulmin – Wittgenstein’s Vienna
Max Weber – Science as Vocation
Andreas Malm – How to Blow up a Pipeline
W. G. Sebald – Rings of Saturn
Cormac McCarthy – Blood Meridian
Simone Weil vs George Orwell on Political Language
Simone Weil – Selected Letters
Charles Dickens – “To Be Read at Dusk”
Ottessa Moshfegh – My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Alexander Herzen – My Past and Thoughts
Daniil Kharms – “Whenever I see someone, I want to hit them in the face” (translation)
Thomas Hardy – The Mayor of Casterbridge
Friedrich Nietzsche – Ecce Homo
Joseph Conrad – Under Western Eyes
2022
Glaciers, Climate and Humility
Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain
Andrea Wulf – Magnificent Rebels
Nikos Kazantzakis – The Last Temptation
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows
Julian Barnes – The Sense of an Ending
Karl Jaspers – Die Schuldfrage
Julian Barnes – Flaubert’s Parrot
Richard Holmes – The Age of Wonder
Cormac McCarthy – The Crossing
Mara van der Lugt – Dark Matters
Exile and Emigration – an East Slavic Destiny
Ivan Bunin – Cold Autumn (Translation)
Ivan Turgenev and Peter Singer – Fathers and Children
Three Years of Mostly About Stories
Leo Tolstoy – Sevastopol Sketches
Gustave Flaubert – Sentimental Education
2021
John Stuart Mill – Autobiography
Alexander Herzen – Aileen Kelly’s biography of him
Isaiah Berlin – The Crooked Timber of Humanity
Cormac McCarthy – All the Pretty Horses
A. S. Byatt – Angels and Insects
Simone de Beauvoir – The Ethics of Ambiguity
Ray Monk – Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
Soren Kierkegaard – The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air
Machado de Assis – Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Lytton Strachey – Eminent Victorians
Soren Kierkegaard – Repetition
Big or Small? A Note on Book Sizes
Fyodor Dostoevsky – A Gentle Creature
Thomas Carlyle – “Signs of the Times” and “Chartism”
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
Richard Holmes – This Long Pursuit
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – The Sorrows of Young Werther
Alexander Pushkin – The Tales of Belkin
Nikolai Leskov – Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
Gustave Flaubert – Three Tales
Eduard von Keyserling – Waves / Wellen
Two Years of Mostly About Stories
Thomas Mann – Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow
Nikolai Ogarev – “The Wanderer” (translation)
2020
Many Books or Few Books (essay)
Anton Chekhov – Misery/Toska (translation)
Edward St Aubyn – The Patrick Melrose novels
Boris Vian – Mood Indigo/Frother on the Daydream
The Author as Prophet: the Problem with Late Tolstoy (essay)
Evgeniy Baratynsky – “My talent’s poor, my voice has little weight…” (translation)
Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya – “The Boarding School Girl”
Joseph Roth – The Radetzky March
Richard Holmes – Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
Evgeniy Baratynsky – Poetry (translations)
Karolina Pavlova – A Double Life
Graham Greene – The Power and the Glory
What Does it Mean to Hate God? – Misotheism and Literature (Essay)
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
Robert Musil – Posthumous Papers of a Living Author
Theodor Fontane – On Tangled Paths / Confusions, Delusions
Arthur Schnitzler – Fräulein Else
John Williams – Butcher’s Crossing
Joseph Roth – Job: The Story of a Simple Man
Alfred Döblin – The Murder of a Buttercup and Other Stories
Stefan Zweig – The Fowler Snared
Georg Trakl – Poetry (translations)
Gerald Murnane – Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs
One Year of Mostly About Stories (Anniversary Post)
Theodor Fontane – Irretrievable / No Way Back
Sally Rooney – Conversations with Friends
2019
Kazuo Ishiguro – The Remains of the Day
Svetlana Alexievich – Second-hand Time
Theodor Storm – Poetry (translations)
Nikos Kazantzakis – Report to Greco
Vladimir Rasputin – Money for Maria
Joseph von Eichendorff – Life of a Good-for-nothing
Mark Fisher – Capitalist Realism
Theodor Storm – Aquis Submersus
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Double
Literature in the Face of Death and Mourning (Personal)
Hugo von Hofmannsthal – Poetry (translations)
Nikolai Gogol – Petersburg Tales (Nevsky Prospekt, Notes of a Madman)
Conrad Meyer – The Marriage of the Monk
Isaac Babel – Crossing the Zbruch (translation)
Isaac Babel – Red Army Cavalry
Theodor Adorno – The Meaning of Working Through the Past
Franz Kafka – Before the Law (translation)
Andrei Platonov – Soul and other stories
Salvatore Satta – The Day of Judgement
László Krasznahorkai – Satantango
Vladimir Nabokov – Strong Opinions
Nikolai Leskov – A Righteous Man (translation)
Nikos Kazantzakis – Zorba the Greek
Walter Benjamin – The Storyteller
Leo Tolstoy – “I just couldn’t help myself” (translation)