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2009: Some Favourite Books
This is the first year I maintained a list of the books that I read (more on that in a 10 days time). Keeping a record of what I have read has been fascinating. It is an exercise I shall certainly...
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A Year of Reading Blogs
This quintessential Anecdotal Evidence post entitled ‘A Crutch Posing a Mission’ is why Patrick Kurp’s web site has been the book blog of choice for me this year. The content is frequently gruff and...
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Thoughts on 2010 and 2011 Reading
Before this year is over I have a week on business in New York, and a fortnight’s trip to the Far East. That’s almost forty hours of reading time. I’m looking forward to the periods of sustained...
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A Year of Reading: 2010
It’s been a memorable year in my reading life, more concentrated than most years. The high points have been extraordinary, the lows few and forgettable. The unexpected revelation of my year are the...
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A Year of Reading: 2011
I have read so many exceptional books this year. Samuel Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) left me breathless, as did the first two volumes of Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs (Memoirs...
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A Year of Reading: 2012
When I posted last year’s edition of this post, I had no idea I was a few weeks away from being selected as 3:AM Magazine’s Blog of the Year 2011. A thrilling way to end the year; the charge continued...
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Some Well-Intentioned Reading Ideas for 2013
So, in my review of this year’s reading I vowed to make no reading resolutions for 2013, not because I don’t have some ideas, but writing about them pretty much guarantees serendipity will lead me in a...
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A Year of Reading: 2013
It was an exceptional year of reading that began with Benoît Peeters’ prodigious Derrida biography. I also finally got around to Knowlson’s respectful but no less captivating Beckett biography. 2013...
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A Year in Reading: 2014
A sense of despondency settled on me as I totted up the number of books I completed this year. Sixty-four read to date in 2014, a hefty reduction from the eighty-five to a hundred I used to consider my...
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Denton Welch’s last work stands at the head of a list that marks a fine year’s reading with the discovery of three writers whose work has changed me: Brigid Brophy, Tomas Espedal and Welch Denton...
View ArticleMy Year of Reading: 2016
I bear no guilt for reading fewer books this year than any other in recent memory – I regret only my morbid fascination with the sulphurous news, as the worst aspects of human nature become manifest....
View ArticleMy Year in Reading: 2017
Seldom does a writer absorb as much of my year as Dorothy Richardson has done this year. Eight books into Pilgrimage, her thirteen book sequence of semi-autobiographical novels, and I took pause, as...
View ArticleMy Year in Reading: 2018
This may seem an unyielding impression, but reflecting on my year’s reading is somewhat disheartening. Much of what I read this year amused, entertained and perhaps at the time even excited me. Little...
View ArticleDivine Lizards: A Year of Reading
Ambitious readers must, despite carefully acquired insouciance, weigh up their stacks of dusty unread books with the time available before they return to dust themselves. They have surely roughly...
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A Year, no, Decade of Reading
Yes, yes, it is of course too early for one of my year in reading posts, but I wasn’t going to write one any way. A year is too arbitrary in a lifetime of reading. The phases and disjunctures of my...
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A Year End Post of Sorts
Mircea Cărtărescu’s Nostalgia is a world in miniature, and also, a people. In fervent minds such as Maria Gabriela Llansol’s and his, ideas come together from will to achievement to produce an...
View ArticleMy Year in Reading: 2021
If any writer could be said to have exerted an influence on my reading this year, it would be Gabriel Josipovici. One influence does not preclude another and the claim might equally apply to Gerald...
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My Year in Reading: 2022
The voice remains. It somehow survives that cataclysmic leap from oral epic to self-consciousness fiction. The inimical voice of writers like Beckett, Woolf and Bernhard. This isn’t the first year I...
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