Reading Log 2023 to 2026
Reading Log
Finished books only, by year, newest year first. No ratings, because I tried stars for a year and found I was reading toward the number. A line each instead, written within a week of finishing, which is late enough to have an opinion and early enough to still have the book in my ear. Abandoned books are not here. There are a lot of them and the list of what I could not finish says more about the month I was having than about the book.
2026 so far01.01.2026 – 01.08.2026
01.01.2026Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Third read. The chapter on blue is a different essay every time, which I think is the actual test.
01.01.2026
01.02.2026Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Lectures he did not live to give. Quickness and Exactitude are the two I keep returning to and Multiplicity I still cannot use.
01.02.2026
01.03.2026Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed. First time, embarrassingly late. The chapter structure alternating two timelines does something no summary of the book had prepared me for.
01.03.2026
01.04.2026Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams. Slow going and worth every week of it. The section on light is the best writing about light I have read.
01.04.2026
01.06.2026Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower. 200 pages that behave like 600. I finished it and immediately read the first forty again to see how she had done it.
01.06.2026
01.07.2026Robert Macfarlane, Underland. Uneven and I am glad I read it. The Paris catacombs chapter is the one everyone mentions and the Slovenian rivers chapter is the one I think about.
01.07.2026
01.08.2026Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus. Abandoned at page forty in 2024. Currently at page sixty on the third attempt and this time it is going to hold.
01.08.2026
202501.01.2025 – 01.12.2025
01.01.2025Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian. Read in January in one long cold week. The device of an old man writing to a young Marcus Aurelius earns everything.
01.01.2025
01.02.2025John McPhee, Draft No. 4. On writing, by someone who would rather show you a structure diagram than tell you to find your voice. The chapter on structure is worth the book.
01.02.2025
01.03.2025Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red. I do not fully understand what happened here and I have read it twice.
01.03.2025
01.05.2025Svetlana Alexievich, Second-hand Time. Took two months and left a mark. Hundreds of voices and almost no authorial hand and it is devastating precisely because of that.
01.05.2025
01.06.2025Georges Perec, Species of Spaces. The list of the contents of his desk changed how I look at rooms. Short and permanently useful.
01.06.2025
01.08.2025Clifford Brown biography by Nick Catalano. Read while pretending I was going to learn the trumpet. The biography is fine and the playing is the point.
01.08.2025
01.09.2025Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge. Thirteen stories that turn out to be a novel. The one about the piano player is the one I would show somebody first.
01.09.2025
01.10.2025Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees. Read for the walnut. Learned very little about my walnut and rather a lot about roots.
01.10.2025
01.12.2025Denis Johnson, Train Dreams. 116 pages. Finished it on a train, which I did not plan and cannot now separate from the book.
01.12.2025
202401.01.2024 – 01.12.2024
01.01.2024Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean. Volume one only. Defeated me in the end and I do not regret the four months.
01.01.2024
01.02.2024Tove Jansson, The Summer Book. A grandmother and a granddaughter on an island. Nothing happens with enormous precision.
01.02.2024
01.04.2024W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn. Second attempt and this time it worked. What changed was reading it in ninety-minute sittings instead of ten-minute ones.
01.04.2024
01.05.2024Kathleen Jamie, Sightlines. Essays. The one about the whale bones in a Hebridean museum is close to perfect.
01.05.2024
01.07.2024Primo Levi, The Periodic Table. Twenty-one chapters named for elements. Carbon at the end does something I have never seen another book attempt.
01.07.2024
01.08.2024Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk. Grief and a goshawk. The T H White material is the half that people argue about and I would not remove a page of it.
01.08.2024
01.09.2024Jon McGregor, Reservoir 13. Thirteen chapters, thirteen years, one village. The structure is the whole argument and it is a quiet one.
01.09.2024
01.11.2024Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I resisted this for years on the grounds that everyone recommends it. Everyone is right.
01.11.2024
01.12.2024Christmas crime, four of them, no notes kept. This is the honest entry that stops the list looking better than the year was.
01.12.2024
202301.02.2023 – 01.11.2023
01.02.2023Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Colour. Bought for one chapter and read all of it. The medieval section on dyers guilds is the best part.
01.02.2023
01.04.2023John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Reread after twenty years. Shorter and sharper than I remembered and one chapter has aged badly, which is its own lesson.
01.04.2023
01.05.2023Olivia Laing, The Lonely City. Essays about art and isolation. The David Wojnarowicz chapter is the reason to read it.
01.05.2023
01.06.2023Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines. Complicated and I am still not sure what to do with it. The notebook fragments in the second half are extraordinary regardless.
01.06.2023
01.08.2023Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us. 1951 and most of it holds. She writes a fact the way other people write an image.
01.08.2023
01.09.2023Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain. Written in the 1940s and published in 1977. Under 30,000 words and it does not waste one of them.
01.09.2023
01.11.2023Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. Fourth or fifth time. I no longer read it front to back and I am not sure I ever should have.
01.11.2023
What four years of this shows
About ninety books and the pattern is not the one I would have predicted. I reread more than I thought, five or six a year, and the rereads are almost always the entries with something to say. New books get a sentence of description. Old ones get an argument. The other pattern is the gaps. Nothing at all in March and April 2025, nothing in October 2024. Both were busy months at work and both are visible here as absence, which is more honest than a list that pretends the reading was even.
On not keeping ratings
I gave books numbers for the whole of 2022 and the effect was immediate and bad: I finished books I should have put down so they could be scored, and I found myself deciding a rating at page fifty and reading to confirm it. The sentence-per-book rule fixed it, because a sentence has to be about the book rather than about my verdict on it.