Books #

List of books I read #

2024 #

  • Burkeman - Four Thousand Weeks
  • Silver - On the Edge
  • MacCulloch - The History of Christianity

2023 #

  • Carr - A Month in the Country
  • Knausgaard and Ekelund - Writing the Beautiful Game
  • Cave and O’Hagan - Faith, Hope and Carnage

2022 #

  • McElreath - Statistical Rethinking
  • Maisel - Why Smart People Hurt
  • Safran - Puff Piece

2021 #

  • Odell - How to Do Nothing
  • Nystrom - Crafting Interpreters

2020 #

  • Sattouf - The Arab of the Future
  • Hari - Lost Connections
  • Turnbull - A Bigger Picture
  • James - Beyond a Boundary
  • Corey - Leviathan Wakes
  • Hofstader - Godel, Escher, Bach

2019 #

  • Balaskas - Active Birth
  • Tolstoy - War and Peace
  • Jemisin - The Stone Sky
  • de Botton - Religion for Atheists
  • Graves - Hypnobirthing
  • Oster - Expecting Better
  • Wilson - First We Make the Beast Beautiful
  • Perry - The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
  • Nichols - Real Food Pregnancy
  • Jemisin - The Obelisk Gate
  • Smith - White Teeth
  • Jemisin - The Fifth Season

2018 #

  • Knausgaard - My Struggle I
  • Herbert - Dune
  • Franzen - Purity
  • Yaffe - Reckless Daughter

2016 #

  • Silver - The Signal and the Noise

2015 #

  • Tartt - The Goldfinch

Technical bookshelf #

  • Hartshorne - Algebraic Geometry
  • Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman - The Elements of Statistical Learning
  • Kablik and Nichols - The Rust Programming Language
  • McElreath - Statistical Rethinking
  • Rudin - Real and Complex Analysis
  • Sedgewick and Wayne - Algorithms

Books to read #

Reading right now #

  • Safran - Depends What You Mean By Extremist
  • Hobb - Assassin’s Apprentice
  • Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan - Faith, Hope and Carnage

Ongoing #

  • Wallace - Infinite Jest
  • Schalansky - Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

Next (already own) #

  • Fong and Spivak - Seven Sketches in Compositionality
  • Burkeman - Four Thousand Weeks
  • M.E. de Montaigne - The Complete Essays
  • Simmons - Hyperion
  • Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
  • Doyle - Blessed
  • Corey - Caliban’s War
  • O’Connell - Notes from an Apocalypse
  • Knaussgard - My Struggle 2
  • Kravitz - Ha Kelev haYehudi
  • Dostoyevky - Crime and Punishment
  • Yudkowsky - Rationality
  • Rowling - The Casual Vacancy

Next (need to buy) #

  • Mod - Things Become Other Things
  • Baker - The Business of Expertise
  • Taniguchi - A Walking Man
  • Ishiguro - The Buried Giant
  • Austen - Pride and Prejudice
  • Eno - A Year with Swollen Appendices
  • McCall Smith - Portuguese Irregular Verbs
  • Garth Marenghi - TerrorTome
  • Rooney - Normal People
  • Marsh - And Finally…
  • Petzold - Code
  • Vonnegut - Sirens of Titan
  • Alexander et al - A Pattern Language
  • Bell - Refuse to be Done
  • Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb
  • Pera - A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing but Using the Bathroom as an Escape
  • Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
  • Thoreau - Walden
  • Lish - Preparation for the Next Life
  • Jung - Personality Types
  • Meisel - Bilingual Children: A Parents’ Guide
  • LeGuin - The Wizard of Earthsea
  • Landau - Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World
  • Fitzgerald - Great Gatsby
  • Salinger - Franny and Zooey
  • Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
  • Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Walker - Why We Sleep
  • Bulgakov - Heart of a Dog
  • Pamuk - Snow
  • Nabokov - Lolita
  • Richard Flanagan - The Sound of One Hand Clapping
  • Lucia Berlin - A Manual for Cleaning Women
  • Annie Ernaux - The Years
  • Hägglund - This Life
  • Memmi - The Pillar of Salt
  • Diaz - In the Distance
  • Winton - Breath
  • Prescott - The Town
  • Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated
  • Knausgaard - My Struggle 6
  • Burns - Milkman
  • Franzen - The Corrections
  • Rushdie - Midnight’s Children
  • Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow
  • Hume - History of Britain
  • White - Voss
  • Proust - A la recherche de temps perdu
  • Saunders - Pastoralia
  • Winton - The Shepherd’s Hut
  • Stead - The Man Who Loved Children
  • Hurimaki - 1Q84
  • McCarthy - The Road
  • McCarthy - Blood Meridian
  • Majahan - Street Fighting Mathematics

Tim Price book list #

Fiction #

  • Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote (1605-1615)
  • Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  • Herman Melville - Moby-Dick (1851)
  • Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary (1856)
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment (1866)
  • Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
  • Jerome K Jerome - Three Men in a Boat (1889)
  • Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
  • Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
  • George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion (1912)
  • E.M. Forster - A Room with a View (1908)
  • Robert Walser - Jakob von Gunten (1909)
  • Marcel Proust - Swann’s Way (1913)
  • W. Somerset Maugham - Moon and Sixpence (1919)
  • James Joyce - Ulysses (1922)
  • Herman Hesse - Siddhartha (1922)
  • Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
  • Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse (1927)
  • William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying (1930)
  • Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (1932)
  • Flann O’Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
  • Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
  • Stefan Zweig - Chess Story (1941)
  • Albert Camus - The Stranger (1942)
  • George Orwell - 1984 (1949)
  • Marguerite Yourcenar - Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)
  • Flannery O’Connor - Wise Blood (1952)
  • Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man (1952)
  • Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim (1954)
  • Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita (1955)
  • Antonio Di Benedetto - Zama (1956)
  • Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin (1957)
  • Patrick White - Voss (1957)
  • Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard (1958)
  • Oakley Hall - Warlock (1958)
  • John Williams - Butcher’s Crossing (1960)
  • Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
  • J.D. Salinger - Franny and Zooey (1961)
  • Joseph Heller - Catch-22 (1961)
  • Walker Percy - The Moviegoer (1961)
  • Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire (1962)
  • Kurt Vonnegut - Cat’s Cradle (1963)
  • Thomas Pynchon - V. (1963)
  • John Williams - Stoner (1965)
  • Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
  • Flann O’Brien - The Third Policeman (1967)
  • Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita (1967)
  • Charles Portis - True Grit (1968)
  • Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
  • John Williams - Augustus (1973)
  • Cormac McCarthy - Child of God (1973)
  • Thomas Pynchon - Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
  • Italo Calvino - If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler.. (1979)
  • J.L. Carr - A Month in the Country (1980)
  • Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping (1980)
  • John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)
  • Salman Rushdie - Midnight’s Children (1981)
  • Stefan Zweig - The Post-Office Girl (1982)
  • Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
  • Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters (1984)
  • Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian (1985)
  • Don DeLillo - White Noise (1985)
  • Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day (1989)
  • W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn (1995)
  • David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (1996)
  • George Saunders - Civilwarland in Bad Decline (1996)
  • Philip Roth - American Pastoral (1997)
  • Roberto Bolano - The Savage Detectives (1998)
  • J.M. Coetzee - Disgrace (1999)
  • Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)
  • Enrique Vila-Matas - Bartleby & Co. (2000)
  • W.G. Sebald - Austerlitz (2001)
  • Jonathan Franzen - The Corrections (2001)
  • Tobias Wolff - Old School (2003)
  • David Foster Wallace - Oblivion: Stories (2004)
  • Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go (2005)
  • Zadie Smith - On Beauty (2005)
  • Magda Szabo - The Door (2005)
  • Steve Erickson - Zeroville (2007)
  • Teju Cole - Every Day is for the Thief (2007)
  • Chuck Klosterman - Downtown Owl (2008)
  • Sergio de la Pava - A Naked Singularity (2008)
  • Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice (2009)
  • Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle series (2009-2011)
  • Jonathan Franzen - Freedom (2010)
  • Denis Johnson - Train Dreams (2011)
  • Jennifer Egan - A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011)
  • Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending (2011)
  • Teju Cole - Open City (2012)
  • Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah (2013)
  • George Saunders - Tenth of December (2013)
  • Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch (2013)
  • Rachel Cusk - Outline (2014)
  • Ben Lerner - 10:04 (2014)
  • John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van (2014)
  • Michel Houllebecq - Submission (2015)
  • Paul Beatty - The Sellout (2015)
  • Jonathan Franzen - Purity (2015)
  • Zadie Smith - Swing Time (2016)
  • Gibbons, Gibbons & Coogan - Alan Partridge: Nomad (2016)
  • George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
  • Ottesa Moshfegh - Homesick for Another World (2017)
  • Sergio de la Pava - Lost Empress (2018)

Non-fiction #

  • Marcus Aurelius - Meditations (unknown)
  • George Orwell - Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
  • Viktor Frankl - Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)
  • Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory (1951)
  • George Orwell - Essays (1963)
  • Truman Capote - In Cold Blood (1966)
  • Patrick Leigh Fermor - A Time of Gifts (1977)
  • Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)
  • David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997)
  • Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (1997)
  • Alain de Botton - The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)
  • Javier Marias - Written Lives (2000)
  • David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)
  • Michael Azzerad - Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001)
  • Alain de Botton - Status Anxiety (2004)
  • David Sedaris - Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)
  • David Foster Wallace - Consider the Lobster and other Essays (2005)
  • Chuck Klosterman - Killing Yourself to Live (2005)
  • Simon Reynolds - Rip it Up and Start Again (2005)
  • Carl Wilson - Let’s Talk About Love (2007)
  • Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals (2009)
  • Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)
  • Barbara Demick - Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009)
  • John Jeremiah Sullivan - Pulphead (2011)
  • Walter Isaacson - Steve Jobs (2011)
  • Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens (2011)
  • Simon Reynolds - Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2011)
  • David Hunt - Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia (2013)
  • Bob Stanley - Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncè (2014)
  • Mark Greif - Against Everything: Essays (2016)
  • Rob Sheffield - On Bowie (2016)
  • Simon Reynolds - Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century (2016)
  • Lizzy Goodman - Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in NYC 2001-2011 (2017)
  • Zadie Smith - Feel Free: Essays (2018)
  • A list of Nick Cave’s favourite books.
  • Art Garfunkel’s list of every book he has read since 1968.