A running list of the books (fiction and non-fiction) that I’ve been reading (updated January 2026):

• Aqua, by Chiara Barzini

• Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, by Claire-Louise Bennett

• Girl, 1983, by Linn Ullmann

• So Long, See You Tomorrow, by William Maxwell, with an introduction by Ann Patchett (h/t John Naughton)

• Greyhound, by Joanna Pocock

• Brian, by Jeremy Cooper

• The Latehomecomer, by Mavis Gallant, short stories selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley

  2025

• Lessons for Young Artists, by David Gentleman

• No Straight Road Takes You There, by Rebecca Solnit

• Bread of Angels, by Patti Smith

• Elizabeth Harrower: the woman in the watch tower, by Susan Wyndham

• The Salt Stones, by Helen Whybrow

• Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s, by Thant Myint-U

• The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing

• The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, by Maggie Nelson

• The Uproar, by Karim Dimechkie

• The Seven Rules of Trust, by Jimmy Wales

• Joyride, by Susan Orlean

• A Guardian and a Thief, by Megha Majumdar

• On Friendship, by Andrew O’Hagan

• The Accidentals, by Guadalupe Nettel

• The Möbius Book, by Catherine Lacey

• The Hour of the Predator, by Giuliano da Empoli, translated by Sam Taylor

• Indignity, by Lea Ypi

• A Great Act of Love, by Heather Rose

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, by Kiran Desai

• Moderation, by Elaine Castillo

• The South, by Tash Aw

• The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), by Rabih Alameddine

• Mother Mary Comes to Me, by Arundhati Roy

• Gertrude Stein: an afterlife, by Francesca Wade

• Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away, by David Gelles

• A Truce That Is Not Peace, by Miriam Toews

• Bad Friend, by Tiffany Watt Smith

• Dear Writer, by Maggie Smith

• Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq

• Broken: Universities, Politics & the Public Good, by Graeme Turner

• Saraswati, by Gurnaik Johal

• Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane

• Kataraina, by Becky Manawatu

• Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, by Elaine Feeney

• Abundance: How We Build a Better Future, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

• Parallel Lines, by Edward St Aubyn

• I Regret Almost Everything, by Keith McNally

• Raising Hare, by Chloe Dalton

• What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, by Brian Eno and Bette Adriaanse

• Things in Nature Merely Grow, by Yiyun Li

• Pathemata Or, The Story of My Mouth, by Maggie Nelson

• Love Letter to a Garden, by Debbie Millman (with Roxane Gay)

• Changing My Mind, by Julian Barnes

• The Wizard of the Kremlin, by Giuliano da Empoli

• Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You, by Candice Chung

• We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, by Raja Shehadeh

• Still Born, by Guadalupe Nettel

• When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, by Graydon Carter

• Always Home, Always Homesick, by Hannah Kent

• 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia, by Philippe Sands

• On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters, by Bonnie Tsui

• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad

• Out of the Woods, by Gretchen Shirm

• Careless People: A story of where I used to work, by Sarah Wynn-Williams

• Audition, by Katie Kitamura

• Universality, by Natasha Brown

• Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts

• The Dream Hotel, by Laila Lalami

• Dream Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Show Don't Tell, by Curtis Sittenfeld

• Memorial Days, by Geraldine Brooks

• The Swimmer: The Wild Life of Roger Deakin, by Patrick Barkham

• Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

• Twist, by Colum McCann

• Unfinished Business, by Shankari Chandran

• Perfection, by Vincent Latronica

• A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson, by Camille Peri

• The Sirens’ Call, by Chris Hayes

• The Magnificent Ruins, by Nayantara Roy

• Shattered, by Hanif Kureishi

• Wild Green Wonders: a life in nature, by Patrick Barkham

• Time of the Child, by Niall Williams

• Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett

• The Hypocrite, by Jo Hamya

• The Season, by Helen Garner

• Brightly Shining, by Ingvild Rishoi, translated by Caroline Waight

• The Party, by Tessa Hadley

• Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier, by Patrick Grant

• For Life, by Ailsa Piper

• Didion & Babitz, by Lili Anolik

• A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy ... A Memoir of Sorts, by Nigel Slater

• English Houses, by Ben Penreath

• Gathering of Strangers: Why Museums Matter, by Maria Balshaw

• The Position of Spoons And other intimacies, by Deborah Levy

• Lifehouse:Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire, by Adam Greenfield

• The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• About Face: Contemporary portrait painting in Australia and New Zealand, by Amber Creswell Bell

• What I Ate in One Year (And related thoughts), by Stanley Tucci

• The Place of Tides, by James Rebanks

• A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin

• My Brother Jaz, by Gideon Haigh

• A Very Private Eye, by Barbara Pym

• Cairn, by Kathleen Jamie

• Jane And Prudence, by Barbara Pym

• Quartet in Autumn, by Barbara Pym

• Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI, by James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant

• The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism, by Sebastian Smee

• Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner & Rosamond Lehman, by Harriet Baker

• Uses for Obsession: A Chef's Memoir, by Ben Shewry

• Territory of Light, by Yuko Tsushima

• Bad Taste: Or the Politics of Ugliness, by Nathalie Olah

• Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, by Catherine Liu

• Fi, by Alexandra Fuller

• Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout

• Turning to Stone, by Marcia Bjornerud

• The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 - 1992, by Tina Brown

• Seeing Like A State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott (1936 - 2024)

• My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir, by Sarah Moss

• There are rivers in the sky, by Elif Shafak

• History for Tomorrow, by Roman Krznaric

• The Middlepause, by Marina Benjamin

• Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

• Scaffolding, by Lauren Elkin

• How Infrastructure Works: transforming our shared systems for a changing world, by Deb Chachra

• Sandwich, by Catherine Newman

• Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (with a new introduction by Sheila Heti), by Phyllis Rose

• Splinters: another kind of love story, by Leslie Jamison

• The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing

• Blue Sisters, by Coco Mellors

• The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing, by Adam Moss

• There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, by Hanif Abdurraqib

• A Kind of Magic: The Kaleidoscopic World of Luke Edward Hall, by Luke Edward Hall

• Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, by Isabella Tree

• Parade, by Rachel Cusk

• A Vision of the World (stories), by John Cheever

• The Coast Road, by Alan Murrin

• Affinities, by Brian Dillon

• Deep Water: the world in the ocean, by James Bradley

• You Are Here, by David Nicholls

• Great Expectations, by Vinson Cunningham

• A Flat Place, by Noreen Masud

• The Vast Extent, by Lavinia Greenlaw

• Hagstone, by Sinead Gleeson

• Hazzard and Harrower: the letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham,

• Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood, by Ed Zwick

• The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd (introduction by Robert Macfarlane, afterword by Jeanette Winterson)

• The Britannias: An Island Quest, by Alice Albinia

• Like Love: essays and conversations, by Maggie Nelson

• Grief is for People, by Sloane Crosley

• Caledonian Road, by Andrew O'Hagan

• The End of the Morning, by Charmian Clift, edited by Nadia Wheatley

• Broken Girl: A true story, by Bradley Trevor Greive and Caroline Laner Breure

• Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, by Anahid Nersessian

• Clear, by Carys Davies

• Limitarianism: the case against extreme wealth, by Ingrid Robeyns

• Piglet, by Lottie Hazell

• 300 Arguments, by Sarah Manguso

• 1000 Words: A Writer's Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round, by Jami Attenberg

• Private Equity, by Carrie Sun

• Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti

• World Within A Song, by Jeff Tweedy

• Western Lane, by Chetna Maroo

• We All Lived in Bondi Then, by Georgia Blain

• Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, by Kyle Chayka

• In Praise of Shadows, by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

• My Friends, by Hisham Matar

• The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, by Grace Paley

• Midnight Chicken: & Other Recipes Worth Living For, by Ella Risbridger

• Our Strangers, by Lydia Davis

• The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

• The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading, by Dwight Garner

• Forbidden Notebook, by Alba de Cespedes

• A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr

• The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen

• A Man of Two Faces, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

• So Late in The Day, by Claire Keegan

• Day, by Michael Cunningham

• Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, by Charlie Porter

• The Farmer’s Wife, by Helen Rebanks

• Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart

• Blood in the Machine, by Brian Merchant

• The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, by Sara Ahmed

• Ways of Curating, by Hans Ulrich Obrist

• Index, A History of The, by Dennis Duncan

• The Creative Act: a way of being, by Rick Rubin

• Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, by Janet Malcolm

• The Story of Art without Men, by Katy Hessel

• Friendaholic: confessions of a friendship addict, by Elizabeth Day

• Small Fires: an epic in the kitchen, by Rebecca May Johnson

• Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, by Michael Ausiello

• How to Build a Boat, by Elaine Feeney

• Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton

• The English Understand Wool, by Helen Dewitt

• August Blue, by Deborah Levy

• Thunderclap, by Laura Cumming

• Arrangements in Blue, by Amy Key

• A Line in the World, by Dorthe Nors

• Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne, by Katherine Rundell

• The Red Tenda of Bologna, by John Berger

• Cacophony of Bone, by Kerri ni Dochartaigh

• Also a Poet, by Ada Calhoun

• Stay True, by Hua Hsu

• God is an Octopus, by Ben Goldsmith

• The Ragged Grace, by Octavia Bright