All books (will soon) have mini-reviews, some have links to full reviews.
Read / in progress
#12 Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “You asked whether it might fit the project, and it turned out to be a perfect addition—an introspective, quietly devastating novel that aligns with your interest in interior lives, emotional understatement, and overlooked literary voices. Its melancholic restraint, meditations on love and identity, and recent rediscovery in translation all echo central project threads, from Open City to Gilead, while standing apart in tone and cultural setting. A quiet but resonant pause in the reading journey.”
Rating: in prog
#11 Speedboat by Renata Adler
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To close the project’s journal-like phase with something sharper and more chaotic than The Folded Clock—a fast, fragmented, and darkly witty book that captures city life and personal disorientation in brief, glancing impressions. It aligns with your interest in books that operate on multiple levels: readable as a stylish collage of moments, but rich with deeper themes of instability, alienation, and the difficulty of constructing coherent narratives from modern experience.”
Rating: in prog
#10 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To explore a unique and deeply moving document of subjective reality, touching on themes of perception, structure, and the desperate human need to impose meaning under pressure.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (fantastic recommendation)
#9 The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To extend your enjoyment of reflective, diary-like writing while examining the interplay between memory, self-presentation, and the passage of time.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
#8 The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To follow Gilead naturally with a novel that challenges ideas of faith, communication, and relational distance in a speculative and emotionally intricate setting.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
#7 The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To introduce a deceptively simple, dryly comic, and increasingly unsettling story that plays with structure, repetition, and hidden absurdity.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
#6 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To engage thoughtfully with themes of belief, mortality, and generational memory through a voice of warmth, humility, and quiet theological depth.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
#5 The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To complement your love of lyrical, fragmentary writing that elevates the everyday, offering exquisite observations of beauty, boredom, and court life.”
Rating: in prog
#4 Open City by Teju Cole
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To immerse you in a wandering, perceptive narrative where walking and memory shape experience, matching your love of books driven by thought and movement.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
#3 This Census-Taker by China Miéville
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To explore layered, ambiguous storytelling where perception, inherited violence, and fragile freedom emerge against a haunting, half-seen world.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
#2 Room Temperature by Nicholson Baker
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To celebrate the everyday and magnify the mundane into something tender, articulate, and profoundly attentive to experience and connection.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
#1 White Noise by Don DeLillo
Why ChatGPT recommended this book: “To set the tone for the project with a sharp, darkly funny exploration of mediated experience, existential anxiety, and how meaning is constructed in contemporary life.”
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
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, held until she’s ready to read]
- The Power by Naomi Alderman [collab with my wife, held until our holiday]
- Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
- Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
- Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
- The Art of Communicating by Thich Nhat Hanh
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