What I'm Reading Now
On Silbury Hill -- Adam Thorpe (Little Toller, 2014)
Derek Jarman's Garden -- Derek Jarman (1995) (Thames and Hudson, 2002)
What's On My Back Burner
Modern Nature -- Derek Jarman (Vintage, 1992)
What I've Read Lately
July
No Signposts in the Sea -- Vita Sackville-West (1961) (Virago, 1985)
The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking -- Olivia Laing (2013) (Canongate, 2014)
The Year of Reading Dangerously -- Andy Miller (4th Estate, 2014)
The Emperor Waltz -- Philip Hensher (4th Estate, 2014)
Bodies of LIght -- Sarah Moss (Granta, 2014)
In the Light of What We Know -- Zia Haidar Rahman (Picador, 2014)
How Should a Person Be? -- Sheila Heti (2012) (Vintage, 2014)
June
Four Major Plays [A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder] -- Henrik Ibsen (1879-1892) (OUP, 2008)
High-Rise -- J. G. Ballard (Jonathan Cape, 1975)
The Shock of the Fall -- Nathan Filer (2013) (Borough, 2014)
All That Is -- James Salter (2013) (Picador, 2014)
The Night Guest -- Fiona McFarlane (2013) (Sceptre, 2014)
The Fly Trap -- Fredrik Sjöberg (Penguin, 2014)
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking -- Susan Cain (Penguin, 2013)
The Woman in White -- Wilkie Collins (1859-60) (Penguin, 2003)
Things That Are -- Amy Leach (2012) (Canongate, 2013)
The Humans -- Matt Haig (Canongate, 2014)
Burial Rites -- Hannah Kent (Pan Macmillan, 2013)
All Passion Spent -- Vita Sackville-West (1931) (Virago, 1983)
Bel Canto -- Ann Patchett (Harper Perennial, 2002)
The Edwardians -- Vita Sackville-West (1930) (Virago, 2003)
May
Orlando: A Biography -- Virginia Woolf (1928) (Penguin, 2000)
Tracks -- Robyn Davidson (1980) (Bloomsbury, 2014)
Cloud Atlas -- David Mitchell (Sceptre, 2005)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- trans. Simon Armitage (Faber, 2009)
Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery -- Jeanette Winterson (1995) (Vintage, 1996)
April
No Great Mischief -- Alistair MacLeod (1999) (Vintage, 2001)
Falling Out of Time -- David Grossman (Jonathan Cape, 2014)
Gone Girl -- Gillian Flynn (Random House, 2012)
The Empathy Exams -- Leslie Jamison (Graywolf, 2014)
The Undertaking -- Audrey Magee (Atlantic, 2014)
Americanah -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013) (4th Estate, 2014)
Sculptor's Daughter -- Tove Jansson (1968) (Sort Of, 2013)
Fair Play -- Tove Jansson (1989) (Sort Of, 2007)
The True Deceiver -- Tove Jansson (1982) (Sort Of, 2009)
The Summer Book -- Tove Jansson (1972) (Sort Of, 2003)
The Burgess Boys -- Elizabeth Strout (2013) (Simon & Schuster, 2014)
The Luminaries -- Eleanor Catton (2013) (Granta, 2014)
Levels of Life -- Julian Barnes (2013) (Vintage, 2014)
The Quarry -- Iain Banks (Quercus, 2013)
March
The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart -- David Greig (Faber, 2011)
Invisible Man -- Ralph Ellison (1952) (Penguin, 2001)
Acts of Union and Disunion -- Linda Colley (Profile, 2014)
The Professor of Truth -- James Robertson (Hamish Hamilton, 2013)
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner -- James Hogg (1824) (Canongate, 2008)
Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off -- Liz Lochhead (1987) (Nick Hern, 2010)
All the Birds, Singing -- Evie Wyld (Jonathan Cape, 2013)
The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil -- John McGrath (1973) (Methuen, 2012)
The Goldfinch -- Donna Tartt (Little, Brown, 2013)
Rob Roy -- Sir Walter Scott (1817) (OUP, 2008)
To the Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf (1927) (Penguin, 2000)
February
The Mayor of Casterbridge -- Thomas Hardy (1886) (Penguin, 2003)
The Rosie Project -- Graeme Simsion (2013) (Penguin, 2014)
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Brontë (1847) (OUP, 2009)
Artful -- Ali Smith (Penguin, 2012)
King Lear -- William Shakespeare (1603-06) (Arden, 1997)
Saints of the Shadow Bible -- Ian Rankin (Orion, 2013)
Night Haunts -- Sukhdev Sandhu (Verso, 2010)
January
The Accidental -- Ali Smith (Penguin, 2005)
Shire -- Ali Smith (Full Circle Books, 2013)
Hotel World -- Ali Smith (Penguin, 2001) (a second read)
Under the Skin -- Michel Faber (2000) (Canongate, 2011)
The Duchess of Malfi -- John Webster (1612-13) (New Mermaids, 2003)
The Blackhouse -- Peter May (Quercus, 2011)
Consider the Lilies -- Iain Crichton Smith (1968) (Orion, 2001)
Henry V -- William Shakespeare (1599) (OUP, 1982)
Like -- Ali Smith (Virago, 1997)
Girl meets boy -- Ali Smith (Canongate, 2007)
44 Scotland Street -- Alexander McCall Smith (Abacus, 2005)
Hotel World -- Ali Smith (Penguin, 2001)