I’ve crossed a few items off this list, and have read several books that I encountered through happenstance. Best to check out my Goodreads to see what I’ve actually been reading. At the end of the year, I will change this page to reflect a log of what I actually read during the year. Items not crossed off will be passed on to a list for 2024.

2025

This is mostly just novels, short story collections, or otherwise literary works. Most of my non-fiction reading is around writing and design.

  1. Three Novels: Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
  2. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
  3. Hunger, Knut Hamsun
  4. Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
  5. Tales of Henry James, Henry James
  6. Vineland, Thomas Pynchon
  7. The Ambassadors, Henry James
  8. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
  9. Endgame & Act Without Words, Samuel Beckett
  10. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
  11. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
  12. The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
  13. Satantango, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
  14. Mood Swings, Frankie Barnet
  15. Frost, Thomas Bernhard
  16. My Struggle 1, Karl Ove Knausgard (Re-read)
  17. No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
  18. Bird by Bird: Instruction on Writing and Life
  19. House of Light, Mary Oliver
  20. In the Cafe of Lost Youth, Patrick Modiano
  21. The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories, Dino Buzzati
  22. Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata

Fiction

Britain

  • Emily Brontë (30 July 1818–19 December 1848)
    • Wuthering Heights (1847)
  • Henry James (15 April 1843–28 February 1916)
    • The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
    • The Turn of the Screw (1898)
    • Selected Tales (2001)

Denmark

  • Karl Ove Knausgård (6 December 1968– )
    • My Struggle 1
    • My Struggle 2
    • My Struggle 3
    • My Struggle 4
    • My Struggle 5
    • My Struggle 6

France

  • Gustave Flaubert (12 December 1821–8 May 1880)
    • Sentimental Education (1869)
  • Émile Zola (2 April 1840–29 September 1902)
    • Germinal (1885)
    • The Masterpiece (1886)
  • Marcel Proust (10 July 1871–18 November 1922)
    • Swann’s Way (1913)

Germany

  • Thomas Mann (6 June 1875–12 August 1955)
    • Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns (1939/1940)
    • Doctor Faustus (1947)
  • Alfred Döblin (10 August 1878–26 June 1957)
    • Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929/2018)
  • Franz Kafka (3 July 1883–3 June 1924)
    • The Complete Stories (1971)
  • W.G. Sebald (18 May 1944–14 December 2001)
    • The Rings of Saturn (1995/1998)

USA

  • Herman Melville (1 August 1819–28 September 1891)
    • Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (1962)
    • Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)
  • Joseph Conrad (3 December 1857–3 August 1924)
    • Heart of Darkness (1899)
    • Lord Jim (1900)
    • The Secret Agent (1907)
  • William Faulkner (25 September 1897–6 July 1962)
    • Light in August (1932)
    • The Unvanquished (1938)
    • The Reivers (1962)
  • Vladimir Nabokov (22 April 1899–2 July 1977)
    • Speak, Memory (1966)
  • Thomas Pynchon (8 May 1937– )
    • Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
  • Ben Lerner (4 February 1979– )
    • Leaving the Atocha Station (2011)
    • The Topeka School (2019)

Non-fiction

Britain

  • W.N.P. Barbellion (7 September 1889–22 October 1919)
    • The Journal of a Disappointed Man (2017)

France

  • Charles Baudelaire (9 April 1821–31 August 1867)
    • Les fleurs du mal (1857)
    • Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne (1863)
    • Salon de 1845 (1845)
    • Salon de 1846 (1846)

Germany

  • Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724–12 February 1804)
    • Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790/2000)
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (27 August 1770–14 November 1831)
  • Karl Marx (5 May 1818–14 March 1883)
  • Theodor W. Adorno (11 September 1903–6 August 1969)
    • Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947/2002)
    • Minima Moralia: Reflections From a Damaged Life (1951)
    • Aesthetic Theory (1970/1997)
  • Walter Benjamin (15 July 1892–26 September 1940)

Hungary

  • György Lukács (13 April 1885–4 June 1971)

Russia

  • Vladimir Lenin (22 April 1870–21 January 1924)
    • The State and Revolution (1917/1992)

Scotland

  • David Hume (7 May 1711–25 August 1776)
    • “Of Tragedy” (1757)
    • “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757)
    • “Of Commerce” (1752)
    • “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (1752)
    • “Of Eloquence” (1752)
    • “The Sceptic” (1752)
    • “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing” (1752)

USA

  • Gillian Rose (20 September 1947–9 December 1995)
    • The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (2014)
  • Susan Buck-Morss (1942– )
    • The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989)
    • The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (1977)