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 … Continue reading Every book I’ve read July 2025–September 2026
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 … Continue reading Every book I’ve read in 2023, 2024, and 2025 (so far)
Six months after I started reading Knausgård's Min Kamp (2009-2011), I have come to the end of my pilgrimage.
Unquestionably my most memorable read this year has been the memoir, An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie (1981), which I came across when visiting my bookshop family at Shakespeare and Company in April. I bought a copy, then devoured the book while sitting on my green sofa back in Lisbon. The memoir follows an … Continue reading My year in books November 2021-2022
Once upon a time in a Paris loft... It's finally time to publish it. I started keeping this list - of every book I have read cover to cover - in October 2018, as I was nearing the end of my transformational time at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. Being there with the … Continue reading Every book I’ve read in the last two years
Some research I worked on for months came to fruition at last this summer! This mysterious deep-sea shark is built to live for centuries. Will it survive to tell the tale of the Anthropocene? I consider the Greenland shark, nuclear waste, and ocean plastics, showing how their scales of time and space converge. Please read … Continue reading Atomic bombs and 500-year-old sharks…
As Storm Ciara raged across the UK and the Netherlands this weekend, I found myself battling across Amsterdam to get to the cinema as everyone else seemed to be hiding inside. For the first time since moving here, I had decided to shun my beloved bicycle for weather reasons when I realised I would struggle … Continue reading ‘Your Name’ is a cosmic masterpiece
Unusually for me, most of my favourite books this year have been non-fiction, and it's true that I've read a lot more of this kind of book in 2019. It's probably due to a reorientation towards studying again, meaning that I have to spend most of my free time reading books that are mostly informative … Continue reading My best books of 2019
