My Reading List




My Reading List

I read a lot. My list of books I’ve read, with marginalia.

Books That I Remember When I Read Them

- by Alexei Grinbaum (Finished 4 November 2024)

-Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova (Finished 2 November 2024)

-In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami (Finished 2 November 2024)

-Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami (Finished 24 October 2024)

-The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Finished 20 October 2024)

-Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy Zegart (Finished 17 October 2024)

-La Traversée des Temps (Tome 1) by Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt (Finished 10 October 2024)

-Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Finished 10 April 2024)

-The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader by Clarence Brown (Finished 8 April 2024)

-Les chambres de bois by Anne Hébert (Finished 28 December 2023)

-Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin (Finished 12 December 2023)

-Psychonauts by Mike Jay (Finished 8 December 2023)

-The Postmortal by Drew Magary (Finished 18 October 2023)

-Ithaca by Claire North (Finished 13 October 2023)

-Ulysse from Bagdad by Éric-Emmanuel Schmidt (Finished 4 October 2023)

-The American Canon by Harold Bloom (Finished 22 September 2023)

-Mythos by Stephen Fry (Finished 21 August 2023)

-Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Finished 15 August 2023)

-The Radium Girls by Kate More (Finished 14 August 2023)

-A Wicked Company by Philipp Blom (Finished 26 July 2023)

-The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (Finished 1 July 2023)

-Axiomatic by Greg Egan (Finished 18 June 2023)

-Solito by Javier Zamora (Finished 12 June 2023)

-Mythos by Stephen Fry (Finished 10 June 2023)

-The Half Known Life by Pico Iyer (Finished 27 May 2023)

-The War that Killed Achilles by Caroline Alexander (Finished 21 May 2023)

-The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Henlein (Finished 6 May 2023)

-Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Finished 27 April 2023)

-Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur by Maurice LeBlanc (Finished 20 April 2023)

-Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Finished 20 April 2023)

-House of Names by Colm Tóibín (Finished 9 April 2023)

-Diaspora by Greg Egan (Finished 8 April 2023)

Notes: The narrative was uneven and Mr. Egan’s use of jargon obscures his point. He explores the important idea of what it means to be human if you become a disembodied mind, and then even move to another dimension, but the exposition was much poorer than, say, Klara and the Sun.

-Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Finished 26 March 2023)

Notes: I very much liked the portrayal of Klara, as intellectualy simplistic yet trenchant and authentic. Mr. Ishiguro nicely dissociates emotional intelligence from declarative knowledge while showing that a machine could be more human in either than a human.

-Permutation City by Greg Egan (Finished 23 March 2023)

-L’événement by Annie Ernaux (Finished 10 September 2022)

Notes: I buy French books from French Books Online, not Amazon.

-Mersault, contre-enquête by Kamel Daoud (Finished 18 July 2022)

-When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (Finished 10 July 2022)

Books That I Don’t Remember When I Read Them

-The Least of us by Sam Quinones

-In the Shadow of Humanity by N. John Williams

-Heaven by Hieko Kawakami

-Babel by R.F. Kuang

-Victory City by Salman Rushdie

-Le Consentement by Vanessa Spingora