Reading for pleasure in the past year has been a bit of a struggle as I’ve come to the end of my PhD. I’ve found this is where audiobooks (🎧) really come into their own: Joan Didion’s works read to me in the compassionate voice of Julianne Moore as I made morning coffee on a summer camping trip to the north of Norway; the distinctive humour of Lena Dunham accompanying me as I strolled the streets of Paris after submitting my thesis. The main photo of this post was taken in Fjærland, a book town in the fjordlands of western Norway. I finally visited in July 2026, eight years after my dear friend Flora bought me a book called Book Towns as a leaving gift when I said goodbye to Shakespeare and Company.
Paris is where I always seem to go during periods of upheaval or uncertainty. Emotionally, it represents nostalgia and safety, acceptance and stability – the bookshop, thankfully, isn’t going anywhere – so it provides the perfect social environment to bookend, as it were, life’s chapters. Typically, this has been when something has ended for me: a relationship, a period of travel before I know what’s coming next, a PhD. Maybe I’m just reaching the age where people start to look back, rather than forwards in their life, but whenever I return to Paris I wonder about that parallel universe where I stayed. At the end of 2018, after my year at Shakespeare and Company, I had a strong sense that the world still had so much to offer. I left the bookshop to travel and study more, but that chapter was one of the most special of my life, and it didn’t feel anywhere close to its natural end.
Nonetheless, it took leaving the city to understand what “nature” is like in practice, not just in the representations of writers I admired. In that sense, I expanded the bounds of myself by spending time in New Zealand and Norway, places where the place of humans within nature acquires its proper proportions. You feel appropriately small at the top of a mountain, at the bottom of a fjord, next to a pod of enormous whales, travelling through a snowstorm in −20 degrees. In Paris, I could read about whales from a cosy armchair, look at their skeletons in the Jardin des Plantes museum and go to world-class photography exhibitions in which they feature. But as historian D. Graham Burnett says, “if it is whales you want, you have to go to sea”. So I had to go to sea.
Now, to the books.
1. The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis (2025) 🎧
2. Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi (2003)
3. North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail by Scott and Jenny Jurek (2015)
4. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005) 🎧
5. Blue Nights by Joan Didion (2011) 🎧
6. Notes to John by Joan Didion (2025) 🎧
7. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (2018)
8. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne (2024) 🎧
9. Commonwealth by Ann Patchett (2016)
10. How Forests Think by Eduardo Kohn (2013)
11. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm by Alex Blanchette (2020)
12. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovitz (2025)
13. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (2025)
14. A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (1938)
15. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (2021)
16. The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy (2017)
17. Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (1883)
18. The School of Night by Karl Ove Knausgård (2025)
19. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (2025)
20. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (1997)
21. The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård (2020)
22. Flesh by David Szalay (2025)
23. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author by Clifford Geertz (1988)
24. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat (2011)
25. Scar Tissue by Anthony Keidis (2004)
26. Transcription by Ben Lerner (2026)
27. The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgård (2023)
28. Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel L. Everett (2008) 🎧
29. Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth (2016) 🎧
30. The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgård (2024)
31. Free Will by Helga Hjorth (2017)
32. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020)
33. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (2026)
34. Strangers by Belle Burden (2026) 🎧
35. Famesick by Lena Dunham (2026) 🎧
36. Life of M by Rachel Cusk (2026)
37. La Familia Grande by Camille Kouchner (2021)
38. Sandwich by Catherine Newman (2024)
