We are now three quarters of the way through the disaster that is 2020 – only three more months to grind out – and to mark the occasion I thought I’d do a log of everything I’ve read so far this year.
I appreciate that it would have made more sense to do this 6 months into the year, but I’ve missed the boat and had some spare time last night, so quickly tallied up the texts on excel, dividing into fiction and non-fiction categories.
It was surprising to see that I’d read almost as many fiction texts as non-fiction texts (13 vs. 15). Since graduating with an English Literature degree, my natural inclination has been to drift towards historical/geopolitical books – a kind of sub-conscious rebellion against all the fiction I consumed in my three years in Manchester. That said, it seems I’m still partial to the odd novel.
I suppose part of the reason why I feel like I have always got a non-fiction book in my hand is because they invariably seem to be longer. Whereas I can get through a novel in 3-4 days, a 700-page historical text can take 2-3 weeks.
Reading List 2020
Fiction
- Mikhail Bulgakov, ‘The Master and Margarita’
- Albert Camus, ‘The Outsider’
- Albert Camus, ‘The Plague’
- Chuck Palahniuk, ‘Fight Club’
- David Foster Wallace, ‘Infinite Jest’
- Henry Miller, ‘Tropic of Cancer’
- Ian McEwan, ‘Machines Like Me’
- John Steinbeck, ‘Cannery Row’
- Julian Barnes, ‘England, England’
- Julian Barnes, ‘The Sense of an Ending’
- Patrick Hamilton, ‘Hangover Square’
- Salman Rushdie, ‘Quichotte’
- Virginia Woolf, ‘To the Lighthouse’
Non-Fiction
- Alex Ferguson, ‘My Autobiography’
- Andy Malsen, ‘Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide to Great Copywriting’
- Chris Wickham, ‘Medieval Europe’
- Eugene Rogan, ‘The Arabs: A History’
- John Romer, ‘A History of Ancient Egypt’
- Marc Morris, ‘The Norman Conquest’
- Micheal Atherton, ‘Atherton’s Ashes’
- Paul Strathen, ‘The Medici’
- Reni-Eddo Lodge, ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
- Simon Jenkins, ‘A Short History of England’
- Thomas Williams, ‘Viking Britain: A History’
- Tom Holland, ‘In the Shadow of the Sword’
- Tom Holland, ‘Millenium’
- Tom Holland, ‘Persian Fire’
- Uwe Schutte, ‘Kraftwerk: Future Music From Germany’
In terms of what’s up next… Judith Herrin’s new book, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, is certainly on my reading list, and so too is Maggie O’Farell’s period tale, Hamnet. Sport-wise, Cricket 2.0 by Tim Wigmore and Freddie Wilde has been causing a bit of a storm, so I will try and get my hands on that.
