Read / in progress
#10 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber
Mini-review TBC
#9 The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Mini-review TBC
#8 The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber
Mini-review TBC
#7 The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills
Mini-review TBC
#6 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Mini-review TBC
#5 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
Mini-review TBC
#4 Open City by Teju Cole
#3 This Census-Taker by China Miéville
Mini-review TBC
#2 Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker
Mini-review TBC
#1 White Noise by Don DeLillo
Mini-review TBC
Coming up
These are ChatGPT’s next recommendations for the project, in the recommended reading order:
- The Wall by Marlen Haushofer [collab with my friend]
- The Power by Naomi Alderman [collab with my wife]
- Speedboat by Renata Adler
- Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
- Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
- Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
Other recommendations
These are recommendations made before the project was formalised, or ones that were rejected where multiple options were given for a recommendation. Ones that look particularly interesting are marked with an asterisk:
- An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter by César Aira
- A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar
- A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
- Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
- Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
- Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
- Engine Summer by John Crowley
- Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt
- House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
- H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
- Ice by Anna Kavan
- Just Kids by Patti Smith
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro*
- Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges [ended up as an official rec]
- Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
- Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec*
- Light by M. John Harrison
- Light Years by James Salter
- Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
- Memoirs of a Right-Wing Anarchist by Peter R. Breggin
- Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi* [ended up as an official rec]
- My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgård*
- Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer
- Outline by Rachel Cusk*
- Peste & Cholera by Patrick Deville
- Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
- Silence by Shūsaku Endō*
- Speedboat by Renata Adler [ended up as an official rec]
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
- Submission by Michel Houellebecq
- The Affirmation by Christopher Priest*
- The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail* (I asked for recommendations that would challenge my worldview)
- The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon*
- The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin*
- The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom
- The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
- The Men’s Club by Leonard Michaels*
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
- The Pale King by David Foster Wallace*
- The Pedersen Kid by William H. Gass
- The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
- The Ravickians by Renee Gladman
- The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
- The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran*
- The Unit by Ninni Holmvqist*
- The Vorrh by Brian Catling
- Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec
- Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal* [ended up as an official rec]
- Ways of Seeing by John Berger*
- Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson*
- 10:04 by Ben Lerner