Every book I’ve read in 2023, 2024, and 2025 (so far)

Thoughts 4 Minutes

It’s been a long time since I’ve published my recent readings, so here goes. The biggest shift in my reading habits came in mid-2024, when I bought a Kindle after being recommended it by a couple of younger friends who are big readers. I thought about buying a different e-reader, but I didn’t have the patience to research them all, so I went with what I was recommended. Being a certified bookshop lover, I had always been reflexively anti-e-reader – one of the big pleasures of reading for me is the way that it trains your attention on a single thing, a single mode, a bit like running. On a good day, especially with fiction, you gradually ease into an attentional mode that feels meditative. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (thanks to Pico Iyer): the only cure for distraction is attention. I’d assumed that an e-reader would emulate an iPad, even with the knowledge that the screens are not backlit in the same way. I’d assumed it would make me read fewer books.

But I can say with confidence that owning a Kindle has actually made me read more. One of the hard things about living abroad is that it’s so difficult to find newly-released or less well-known books from niche presses in the bookshops, and if you order a book online in Norway, it often comes from outside the country. This means you have to pay an import charge in addition to the high price of the book itself (the UK is relatively very cheap for books). The greatest gift the Kindle has given me is to enable me to read books that have just come out, rather than waiting for them to reach Norway (if they ever would). Having that kind of instant access means that I can immediately enjoy new releases.

More than that, the Kindle acts as a complement to other forms of reading. I listen to a fair amount of audiobooks on Spotify and Audible, albeit only ever nonfiction, in addition to paperbacks and hardbacks. It’s just another way to enjoy books. I wasn’t expecting to come to this conclusion, but I’ve been so pleasantly surprised. Now, when I travel, the Kindle comes with me, in addition to a few paperbacks.

Enjoying my Kindle in the mountains

Still, the warnings of Nicholas Carr have rung in my head since I read The Shallows years ago – that prophetic, brilliant book about how screens shape the way we think and prevent the practice of deep reading. I feel the tactile losses – of paper pages, of book spines – and the more aesthetic pleasures, such as font choice, quite keenly. I miss the feeling of knowing I’m getting to the end of a book by the way its weight has shifted in my hand.

I won’t be abandoning bookshops any time soon, but I have surprised myself by feeling grateful for the Kindle’s presence in my life.

On the subject of favourites, the highlight for me in the past three years has of course been Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, which took me six months to get through and amounted to one of the most profound and exciting reading experiences of my life. Even when it was boring, I couldn’t put it down. Other notable mentions include

2023

  1. The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin (1987)
  2. Kitchen and Moonlight Shadow by Banana Yoshimoto (1993)
  3. Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet by Graham Huggan (2018)
  4. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe (2016)
  5. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby (1995)
  6. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo (2012)
  7. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (2015)
  8. Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (2020)
  9. Why Look at Animals? by John Berger (2009)
  10. Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020)
  11. People of the Whale by Linda Hogan (2013)
  12. Of Whales and Men by R. B. Robertson (1956)
  13. Love by Hanne Ørstavik (2019)
  14. Porn: An Oral History by Polly Barton (2023)
  15. Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (2020)
  16. My Struggle 1: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011)
  17. My Struggle 2: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011)
  18. Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness by Scott Jurek (2012)
Read my full review of Knausgaard’s My Struggle here

Above Grindelwald, Switzerland, in July 2024

2024

  1. Stay True by Hua Hsu (2022)
  2. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall (2011)
  3. My Struggle 3: Boyhood Island by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011)
  4. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis (1985)
  5. My Struggle 4: Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011)
  6. My Struggle 5: Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011)
  7. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer (1996)
  8. My Struggle 6: The End by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011)
  9. Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance (2016)
  10. Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1809)
  11. A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean (1976)
  12. A Book of Waves by Stefan Helmreich (2024)
  13. All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld (2024)
  14. Outline by Rachel Cusk (2016) – first book read on Kindle
  15. Beyond Nature and Culture by Philippe Descola (2013)
  16. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)
  17. Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq (2024)
  18. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024)
  19. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood Among the Siberian Yukaghirs by Rane Willerslev (2007)
  20. The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (2024)
  21. All Fours by Miranda July (2024)
  22. Marine Mammals by Annalisa Berta (2023)
  23. Submission by Michel Houellebecq (2015)
  24. Transit by Rachel Cusk (2016)
  25. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami (2007)
  26. Kudos by Rachel Cusk (2018)
2025 has delivered some pretty nice reading spots

2025

  1. The Rise of the Ultra Runners: A Journey to the Edge of Human Endurance by Adharanand Finn (2019)
  2. The Place of Tides by James Rebanks (2024)
  3. Touching the Void by Joe Simpson (1988)
  4. Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy (2013)
  5. The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy (2018)
  6. Real Estate by Deborah Levy (2021)
  7. The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (1997)
  8. The Killer Whale Journals by Hanne Strager (2023)
  9. Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie (2025)
  10. Beartooth by Callan Wink (2025)
  11. The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia by Michael Booth (2014)
  12. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (2020)
  13. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (2024)
  14. Sylvia by Leonard Michaels (1992)
  15. Forbidden Fruit: An Anthropologist Looks at Incest by Maurice Godelier (2023)
  16. A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul (1979)
  17. Tapping the Source by Kem Nunn (1984)
  18. Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic by Andre Tavares (2024)
  19. The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis (2025)
  20. North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail by by Scott Jurek and Jenny Jurek (2018)

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