What I’m Reading

Some years ago I started keeping a list of my reading so I wouldn’t forget what I’d already read. Just recording the title and author was insufficient to remember what I’d read, so I started adding capsule reviews as well. Photography books are at the bottom.

May 2026

Smoke and Whispers, Mick Herron – A Zoë Boehm mystery which starts with her dead on a slab in the morgue being identified by her friend Sarah. Sarah is left to solve two mysteries she believes to be linked, whilst navigating Newcastle in the cold and wet. Typically well written fare from Herron.

Breaking Point, Robin Dahlberg – Masterful book detailing multiple cases of wrongful convictions, overturned after victims had spent years in jail, following false confessions that had been extorted from them by police interrogation techniques that pushed the suspects past their breaking points. Photographs, newspaper articles, re-enactments, interrogation transcriptions and short essays, combine to make a powerful black and white statement in an all-black paper and covered book.

The Twist of a Knife, Anthony Horowitz – The next book in this series, nominally about the author himself, immediately following A Line to Kill, which I read last month, below, documenting the exploits of Hawthorne, a detective who always gets to the bottom of things. In this episode, Horowitz himself is the police’s top murder suspect and Hawthorne must, reluctantly, help get him off. I’m beginning to find the willfully blind, but self-exculpatory voice Horowitz has adopted for these tales somewhat tiresome.

Good Material, Dolly Alderton – The story of a breakup told mostly from the man’s point of view, a 35-year old, b-grade comedian who is a nice guy but a bit of a nebbish. Written in the first person, it details The Madness that overwhelms him in his grief and undying love. Towards the end we hear from the girlfriend which casts all we’ve read in a different light. Amusing and touching.

April 2026

Brighton Rock, Graham Greene – Classic Greene that I never read before but did now for a potential photo project. The usual themes of Catholic good and evil, as played out through the life of a young psychopathic thug in mobbed up Brighton between the wars. You know at the outset it won’t go well, and it doesn’t, but for the bright spot that is the large-breasted heroine, Ida Arnold.

The Silent Places, Sarah Mellor – The second book in a new series, another murder mystery for Liverpool policewoman Leigh and her sometime boyfriend DI Des Chung to solve, amid the tumult of Toxteth rioting in 1981 and whilst juggling the demands of her baby Kai. And throughout, she continues the hunt for her brother James, missing from an Isle of Man vacation for seven years.

A Line to Kill, Anthony Horowitz – Another in the series in which Horowitz plays Watson to the fictional Hawthorne, a former police detective, now consulting independently to the police. In this episode they find themselves at a literary festival on the Channel Island of Alderney where some nasty people are murdered. A good mystery and well written; I find Horowitz’s sef-deprecation growing tiresome, though.

Don’t Let the Devil Ride, Ace Atkins – Combination of a mystery and an international thriller. A woman’s husband disappears from their home in Memphis. She hires a famous local Black detective to find him and her entire life unravels as international forces converge on historic deceptions. Very entertaining.

North Woods, Daniel Mason – an unusual book, a bit like Powers’ Overstory, a history of the trees of a particular area of Western Massachusetts back to colonial times. But also the history of a home and its inhabitants over the centuries, it’s lawns and woods, orchards and forests and also a ghost story in which the past and the present coexist.

March 2026

Vera, or Faith, Gary Shteyngart – Another brilliant entry in the Shteyngart oeuvre, told from the perspective of 10-year old Vera, daughter of a Shteyngartian Russian Jew, his WASP wife and a Korean birth mother who is out of the picture. They live well in a fictional Manhattan where they own an autonamous car and a political battle is raging to grant oppressed white Americans a bumiputra-like 5/3 vote to retain their power over the country. Vera is very smart but suffers from many anxieties which are hilariously related.

The Collaborators, Michael Idov – a well-written spy thriller taking part over a couple of weeks in August 2021 with roots in the events of 1995, involving Russian emigrés, the CIA and plots gone awry. A younger generation must attempt to clarify and clean up the mess. An enjoyable, quick read.

The Temptation of Forgiveness, Donna Leon – Another Guido Brunetti police procedural. Once again, Bruneti doggedly pursues his quarry, working around the incredible corruption endemic to Italy. Once again, he discovers the criminal and yet again, it remains unclear if justice will be done. This time, an honourable accountant is killed on a bridge and it’s unclear who had a motive to do so.

Finlay Donovan Knocks ’em Dead, Elle Cosimano – I had read good things about the first Finlay Donovan book but this is the one they had at the library. A very light piece of fluff that really defies credulity, with a plot that feels like it was made up a bit at a time as the author struggled to think of what comes next.

The Departed, Sarah Mellor – A police procedural taking place in Liverpool in 1979, during the Winter of Discontent, through the eyes of the sole woman detective on the CID team. Together with her British-Chinese partner, they suffer not merely the nasty weather, poverty and crime of the time, but brutal sexism and racism from their colleagues, slowly figuring out who the murdered boy is and running rings around their brutish fellow officers.

February 2026

Alex Cross Must Die, James Patterson – Having had difficulty reading over the last few weeks I picked up this Patterson, whom I’ve never read before, hoping a thriller would at least keep me engaged and off my devices, get me back in the groove. Read it in a single day. Lots of story threads and suspense, a serial killer, a terrorist shooting planes out of the sky, and more. Didn’t all quite make sense, but at least I did some sustained reading.

Ungovernable: The Political Diaries of a Chief Whip, Simon Hart – it has been a weeks-long slog but finally finished this insider view of Tory governments from Boris Johnson through Rishi Sunak’s demise. Rather too much blokey, bonhommie and old school tie, one-of-us-ness for my taste. While eventually seeing Johnson’s frailties, he’s quite happy to lionise him at the outset. He lists lunches, meetings, teas and dinners but until late in his Whip career there’s little sense of him doing anything, making any decisions – just commenting on the vanity or uselessness of others. Gave me a little insight into British parliamentary life but not as much as I could have hoped.

Biography of X, Catherine Lacey – A remarkable book, ostensibly, an attempt at correcting the record of her wife’s life in a poor biography, our narrator is unravelling, the nature of her relationship, the nature of identity, and reusing all of late 20th century art and intellectual life to explore these issues, perhaps “to forge in the smithy of [her] soul the uncreated conscience of” her own identity. It also takes place in an alternate America where the South seceded at the conclusion of WWII to becaome a conservative Christian theocracy until the late 1990s, allowing for the altering of the work of Connie Converse, David Bowie, Susan Sontag, Sophie Calle and countless others. I’m not sure where it leaves us but a fascinating, brilliant, tour de force.

January 2026

• I Will Find the Key, Alex Ahndoril – The first in a planned series of Swedish detective novels. Julia, who walks with a cane, whose PTSD won’t allow her to be touched by anyone, and who suffers massive insecurities, is a brilliant private investigator, attempting to win back the love of her divorced police husband, whom she betrayed in some unexplained fashion. They are called in to discover if a lumber magnate is guilty of a murder he discovers in a photograph on his phone. For 275 improbable pages we are plagued by the members of an awful timber-fortune family until Julia figures it all out. For some reason, soon to be on Netflix.
• Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis – The brutal tale of Lionel, an oik, a violent psychopath, who part-raises his gentle, intelligent, orphaned, mixed-race nephew, Desmond. Lionel hits it lucky, Desmond struggles with his own secret and the tension grows as the inevitable final tragedy is approached. A vicious send-up of British society, circa 2006-2013, it was extremely well written but full of a distasteful piss-and-vinegar misanthropy.
• The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood – An amusing and up to date retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective as a 20th-century shade in Hades, exploring the lot of women, particularly the 12 maidens Odysseus slaughtered after the suitors, from a contemporary point of view. Amusing and also pointed.
• Lori & Joe, Amy Arnold – Interesting, 3rd person stream of consciousness from a woman either dying or truly hopeless. Discovering her husband dead in the morning, she decides to take a walk in the fog on the fell. Her thoughts never complete but run over and interrupt one another and she moves about in time, thinking of past events involving her husband and the neighbour family, and the deaths she’s experienced. In time, we learn a few dark secrets, but they seem to have no effect.
• Smut, Alan Bennett – Two witty stories by the English dramatist, subtitled accurately, “two unseemly stories.” The first concerns a widow, making ends meet with a job in hospital acting out different conditions for student doctors and taking in lodgers; the second story concerns the family of a very handsome young man who marries an unbeautiful wife despite his same gender predilections, and their various couplings.
• Death of a Spy, M C Beaton with R W Green – A Hamish Macbeth mystery that came out in 2024 (5 years after MC Beaton’s death), the latter, apparently a Scotswoman who wrote under many noms de plume, mystery series, romances and much else. A fairly “comfy” story with some of the feel of Local Hero, as an American is seconded to help Macbeth, while really pursuing his own Russian spy ring.
• The Fugitive Pigeon, Donald E Westlake – Another Westlake comedy of errors with a dopey “bum” who works in a Canarsie bar framed by the mob and running for his life, comically discovering depths he never imagined he had. A fast-paced and enjoyable quick read.

December 2025

• The President’s Shadow, Brad Meltzer – A fast-paced thriller to finish the year. A frankly unbelievable plot, by shadowy historical groups, threatens an unnamed post-Obama president. Looking up some of the most unbelievable bits, I learned that they were true or represented real historical entities (after Hinckley shot him, Reagan always carried his own gun!). Definitely keeps you reading to the end.
• Delphi, Clare Pollard – This is an excellent novel, appearing to comprise a series of short definitions of different methods of fortune-telling based on Greek (mostly) mythology, and telling the story of one middle-aged woman’s pandemic-era family life in London along the way. Erudite, current, and moving. Highly recommended.
• Launderama: London’s Launderettes, Joshua Blackburn – as the title suggests, a book that documents the world of London’s rapidly vanishing launderettes in photographs. Lovely photography and a strikingly effective edit from the Hoxton Mini Press. Delightful.
• Exposition, Nathalie Léger – an interesting meditation on the curious photographic history of the Countess of Castiglione, Second Empire mistress of Napoleon III. She was reputed a great beauty and for forty years directed the production of 700 “photographs in which she re-created the signature moments of her life for the camera. She spent a large part of her personal fortune and even went into debt to execute this project. Most of the photographs depict the Countess in theatrical outfits, such as the Queen of Hearts dress.” The novel contemplates her life traveling across a broad terrain, incoporating Barthes’ Camera Lucida; the reputed author’s own mother’s photographs; my namesake, Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Ève future; Cindy Sherman, other photography of famed 20th century actresses, and much else besides.
• The Hanging Wood, Martin Edwards – A police procedural of a 20-year old cold case, brought to life by a contempoarary death, taking place in the Lake District (Ambleside, Keswick). Our heroine is a young DCI leading the cold case squad whose insecurities and oscillating affections for the men in her orbit I found annoying. The mystery is reasonably engaging although I found the denouement to be somewhat arbitrary. A lot of repetitious over-explication of characters’ behaviour and interior motivations made it drag a bit.
• Déjà View, A collaboration between Martin Parr and The Anonymous Project. from the publisher’s description: “This book is a playful conversation between two important bodies of photographic work. Each spread of Déjà View pairs one of Martin Parr’s iconic snapshots with an image from The Anonymous Project’s collection of found amateur photographs taken between the 1950s and 80s. These unnervingly similar ‘twin’ pictures remind us of photography’s greatest power: to intimately preserve everyday moments of humour, warmth, ennui and absurdity.”
• I Want It Now, Kingsley Amis – I found a shelf of Martin Amises in the library and plucked this one out. Reading it, I was surprised at how much like Amis senior his early writing was. Checking the original publication date I was surprised to see 1968, much earlier than I remembered Amis fils being published. Slowly light dawned. Kingsley Amis writes with his usual supercilious sneering at all and sundry, his casual bigotry and misogyny only insignificantly softened by historical context. A comedy of manners (or errors) wherein a television journalist fortune hunter slowly improves to find love with the odd, frigid daughter of the unpleasant rich.
• The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow – another story of business malfeasance uncovered by forensic accountant Marty Hench (see Red Team Blues, below), this one written more recently but taking place earlier. Covers the gory details of America’s prison system and how the incarcerees and their families are ripped off mercilessly by the prison-industrial complex. Along the way it takes swipes at quite a few other cases of corporate greed and and criminality in our post-Reagan laissez-faire style of klepto-Capitalism.
• Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet – purporting to be a biographical account of an unorthodox (and unqualified) psychotherapist, intertwined with the journal entries of a repressed female patient who visits him under false pretenses, it actually exposes the psychopathology of both. Along the way there is a lot of the dismal greyness of England in the 1950s and some of the intellectual ferment of the 1960s, with verisimilitude aided by cameos from the likes of John Osborne, Dirk Bogarde and R D Laing.
• Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow – The first Doctorow (documenter of enshittification) I’ve read and quite good. A mystery thriller, telling of a retiring forensic accountant’s dangerous Silicon Valley adventure red-teaming a cryptocurrency theft and uncovering the worldwide web of criminality it entails. Some elements lacked verisimilitude, but engaging overall.

November 2025

• Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973, Haruki Murakami – These are Murakami’s first two novels, the latter a sequel to the former and, in an introduction, he describes how they came about. They exhibit all the hallmarks of later Murakami, the imaginative story lines growing out of nowhere, recurring jazz, smoking, spaghetti, etc. Most characters are nameless: the Rat, the twins, the girl, etc. Like Wes Anderson films, they tease one with marvelous technique and artistic flourishes but never go anywhere. As our narrator’s character reports in Chapter 9 of Pinball, “good style, clear argument, but you’re not saying anything.” Not a writer who would have passed John Gardner’s Moral Fiction test. I think I’ve done my duty by Murakami and Anderson and need never look at them again.
• Blood Grove, Walter Mosley – A recent (2021) Easy Rawlins mystery, taking place in LA in 1969. A shell-shocked veteran asks for help finding out if he really knifed someone to death but this turns out to be a red herring and not really what the story’s about. All the usual Mosley elements are present but somehow this one never really came together for me. The mystery seemed somehow obscure and tangled and it never developed the suspense to keep me interested in what came next. There were lots of suspects all related to one another, sometimes tenuously, sometimes tightly, but I was never really sure, and then it was all just tied up somewhat arbitrarily.
• Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, Georges Simenon – I picked up this typically short Simenon, expecting to find Maigret in New York. Instead, it is one of those horrid pieces of very French, post-war tales of a bizarre love affair between a recently separated French actor adrift in Greenwich Village, and an equally lost woman. Their love is difficult to understand and tumultuous, ultimately failing to provide the satisfaction to the reader that it inexplicably provides to them.
• Hazards of Time Travel, Joyce Carol Oates – Somehow, I’d never read Oates before, despite her prodigious output. Unfortunately, I didn’t care for this. Starting in a not too distant future rather like the worst one might imagine the US is headed for, a police-state governed by Homeland Security for the benefit of hidden oligarchs, our heroine inadvertently errs and is punished with exile. Told in the first person, she endlessly repeats her young woman thoughts, her crush on a professor, her loneliness, over and over. Much of the book repudiates B F Skinner’s behaviourism, until abruptly that thread stops. In a moment of rebellion all is lost and she becomes a willing drone. It’s not really clear why or what the purpose of all this has been.
• The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel – Another one of those novels where the stories of several people eventually coincide, but without the dramatic or narrative arc or suspense one once associated with the novel. In this case we are reading the stories of people associated with (or victimised by) a Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi schemer, moving in and around their lives and hauntings of one another.
• The Thing Itself, Peter Guttridge – The third and final installment of his Brighton mystery, the Brighton Trunk Murder of 1934 is finally solved (in the present day). But first, we visit the trenches of WW I France, move up to the 1930s and Oswald Mosley’s fascists, before reprising briefly the 1960s from the last book and returning to the present, with lots of interesting history and Brighton local colour along the way. Much tragedy is visited on the main characters.

October 2025

• The Bricklayer, Noah Boyd – A maverick ex-FBI man is called back to solve a fiendishly difficult case where a shadowy gang are killing FBI critics each time they don’t get large ransoms. Our hero is unconventional and doesn’t work well with others but unerringly sees through misdirects. Keeps on reading but annoyingly tests verisimilitude and love angles are poorly handled.
• Shanghai, Joseph Kanon – When Daniel, a young Jew, escapes Nazi Berlin via boat from Trieste to Shanghai, he little realises what lies ahead. The uncle who has paid his fare and spirited him out of danger introduces him to the colourful life of pre-war Shanghai with Chinese gangs, European spheres of influence, the Japanese Kampetei, all jostling for advantage. And he carries with him his own secrets. Tremendous thriller with not a little of Graham Greene to it.
• The Last King of Brighton, Peter Guttridge – The next book in the series of Brighton noirs, it continues the story from City of Dreadful Night (below) after taking us through the criminal evolution of the chief bad guy from that book including a history of pop music in the ’60s and more Brighton local history. The criminals now extend to Serbian gangsters and psychopaths, there is no happy ending, and we are enjoined to continue reading the saga in the next book. Fascinating stories but there remains something slightly off about the writing.
• Hotel World, Ali Smith – A novel that follows the lives (and one death) of five people, tenuously linked by a common hotel. All of them are interior monologues, most narrated in the 3rd person, one as a first person stream of consciousness, à la Molly Bloom. The first is the ghost of a girl who died, then a homeless woman, a hotel employee, a hotel guest and the ghost’s sister as well as a few walk-on parts. Like most Ali Smith it’s very poetic, and amazing how she inhabits the minds of her many characters and brings them together. The ending is a tad enigmatic with an apparent direct invocation to the reader from the writer, if I’m not misinterpreting it.
• The Berlin Exchange, Joseph Kanon – When an American physicist who’s served 10 years in a British prison for sharing nuclear secrets with the Communists is released in a prisoner exchange, he is reunited with his re-married wife and child in East Berlin – and her new husband. But he is not free and the forces of black market cold war intrigue and espionage force him to a carefully calibrated multivariate solution in this cracking spy novel.
• City of Dreadful Night, Peter Guttridge – Dual, possibly interlinked mysteries taking place in Brighton in 1934 and around 2010. Told from the 3rd-person perspective of multiple characters: a junior reporter, a police detective sergeant and in the first person, by a disgraced ex-Chief Constable. Interesting mysteries, with lots of local Brighton colour, hinting at conspiracies that reach high up. Unfortunately marred somewhat by that first person voice telling more than showing and defending his own bad behavior. Continues in subsequent volumes I shall probably try.
• The Master & Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov – A strange novel that took me some time to get through. The devil visits Moscow in the early 20th century and causes havoc. The story of his antics alternates with the re-telling of the crucifixion, and the rehabilitation of Pilate’s reputation (at the expense of the Jews?) as told, first by the devil and then by the hapless Master, who has written a novel about Pilate. While the tale is an amazing satirical romp about certain parts of Moscow society, I was never clear on what the point of it was, putting my incomprehension down to the extreme alien-ness of Russian culture a century ago, and certain that I was missing topical allusions. The novel appears to be having a moment.

September 2025

• The Fell, Sarah Moss – An interesting novel told as the streams of consciousness of several characters: a mother who breaks quarantine during the pandemic lockdown in the Peak District, her teenage son, an aging next door neighbour, a mountain rescue team member who searches for her, and his daughter. The poetic literary technique allows us to experience the world from each of their vantage points and understand a little about their personal histories.
• The Wall, John Lanchester – Post-apocalyptic dystopian England. It seems there has been environmental disaster globally and England survives behind massive sea-rise walls that are defended by our narrator/protagonist and his ilk against attempted breach by “Others.” Life is nasty and the current generation want nothing to do with the parents whose generation allowed this to happen. It goes on, with some ups and downs but no real narrative arc or denouement and then it ends.
• Fourth Down and Out, Andrew Welsh-Huggins – Triple intertwined mysteries around a missing laptop as told by a private eye with a notorious football history in football-mad Columbus Ohio. Recognized everywhere he goes for his infamous football failure, this twice-divorced, failed father is beaten and abused but keeps going till the laptop is retrieved and the mysteries resolved.
• Even the Dead, John Banville as Benjamin Black – The first Quirke mystery I’ve read (but 7th in the series) takes place in Dublin at an undefined time, I should guess late ’50s or early ’60s (but copyright 2015). Quirke is a pathologist, recovering from a head injury and a lifetime of drinking. He partners with Inspector Hackett to solve the cases of a murdered young man, a missing girl and the connection between them, all while solving mysteries of his own life and love. Along the way there’s a lot of atmospheric, noir, dear, dirty Dublin couleur locale, smoking, drinking, poverty and provincialism. Excellent!
• The Left-Handed Twin, Thomas Perry – Another thriller in the Jane Whitefield series. She is a woman of Seneca heritage who helps people at risk of being murdered to escape into new lives. In this case, Russian mobsters become aware of her and realize the potential value of her knowledge. Heart-pounding suspense, told in Perry’s typical deadpan, flat, ongoing-present voice.
• Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut – Another brick in the Vonnegut oeuvre that shows the folly of war and toxic masculinity (from before that was a term). It tells the story of Abstract Expressionist and excellent draughtsman Rabo Karabekian from between the wars up to the present (mid-1980s), using his Armenian heritage and the Hamptons-based ’50s painters as fodder for his standard schtick. Enjoyable if very like much other Vonnegut.
• The Public Burning, Robert Coover – a literary tour de force that recounts the 3 days leading up to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Chapters alternate between VP Richard Nixon’s stream of consciousness apologia pro sua vita and a fever dream hallucinatory present tense narration of the ongoing battle between an animate Uncle Sam and the Phantom, communist evil personified. Many other advertising characters and celebrities make their entrances and exits as well as key politicians and other public figures. I found myself frequently looking up improbable bits of ’50s history, only to discover they had really happened as described.

August 2025

• Lonely Hearts, John Harvey – The first (1989) in a series of British police procedurals I hadn’t previously heard of, taking place in Nottingham. Charlie Resnick, the lonely English, Polish emigré, Detective Inspector who likes jazz, coffee, interesting sandwiches and his cats, stubbornly pursues his man, with shoe leather and intuition.
• Dark Matter, Blake Crouch – The story of a physicist’s multiplicity in the multiverse, leveraging some of the stranger implications of physics theory to propel the plot. The 2nd or 3rd book I’ve read by Crouch, it was competently, if not well, written, with compelling suspense leading one along, if often predictably and in annoying 1st-person present tense. I easily foresaw many of the plot twists, although not the last one or two.
• Valley of Bones, Michael Gruber – The 2nd Jimmy Paz detective novel, also taking place mostly in Miami with some portion in Africa and with Santeria and, in this case, Catholic spiritualism thrown in as well. A good mystery and the same commingling of the paranormal and materialist doubts that made Tropic of Night (see Nov. ’21, below) and The Forgery of Venus (see Aug, ’24, below) so good.
• The Spy, James Phelan – The hero of this spy thriller must uncover and foil a domestic terror plot designed to replace the intelligence community with private operators in the name of efficiency and reducing government spending and whose perpetrators will stop at nothing. Thrills and suspense keep you turning the pages rapidly.
• The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey – a scholarly review, for a popular audience, of the barbarism of early Christianity from Alexandria to Athens, and throughout the Roman Empire. The notion that Christian monasteries preserved the works of the ancients belies the fact that first they destroyed them in brutal, totalitarian fashion. Published in 2018 it echoes the attacks on science and the arts we endure today, chillingly.
• Down Don’t Bother Me, Jason Miller – Slim is a coal miner in Southern Illinois who has sometimes helped find missing family members. This leads him to be hired by his mine owner to find his missing son-in-law. The resulting mayhem, told in a unique, ornery voice, is an entertaining mystery tale of a midwest we east coast elites are rarely aware of.
• Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy, Thomas L Webber – as it’s titled, a memoir of growing up white in East Harlem in the ’50s and ’60s when it was considerably more dangerous than it is today. Recommended by Peter Calvert for my CRUX – Landscape of Inequality project, it proved to be a fascinating tour through neighborhoods that I know now and a few that I knew in my youth, and a plea to overcome our many meaningless divisions and celebrate our diversity. Whilst in the middle of it, I met the author at an East Harlem event for his new book, Aida’s Story.

July 2025

• Why Me?, Donald E Westlake – an early Dortmunder farce, in which an unintentional theft becomes the engine for this tale of New York being turned upside down. Short and enjoyable – but only if you can ignore the casual use of ethnic slurs (in the mind of jerks – but still – wouldn’t happen this century, at least pre-Trump).
• Waste Land, Robert D Kaplan – a short powerful book, or set of 3 interlinked essays really, looking at our current geopolitical situation in the context of the tides of global history, comparing our current state to that of the Weimar Republic and its fragility. One particular through-line is how globalisation and technology have led to the interlinking of all parts of the world and thus the potential impact of events anywhere on anywhere else in the world. The scope is vast encompassing Arendt, Spengler, Huntington and (young) Kissinger, T S Eliot, Elias Canetti, Jane Jacobs and many others. There is much to disagree with and yet much to recognise and fear.
• Orfeo, Richard Powers – Powers at his brilliant best. The story of a composer that reprises serious music of the twentieth century. Reading it almost made me feel I understood music theory and composition (I don’t) and led me to listen to Mahler, Messaien, Shostakovitch and Reich to be sure I was getting it all. Like The Goldbug Variations, it mixes music with code (in this case DNA) so that it jousts rigorously with ideas while, at the same time engaging the emotions with real characters who can bring a lump to your throat.
• No Man’s Nightingale, Ruth Rendell – a late entry in the Inspector Wexford mysteries, now retired Wexford is sitting in with his friend and successor Mike Burden, on the murder investigation of a single mother vicar. In typical Rendell fashion, we get a lot of psychological insight into the many different characters as well as Wexford’s musings on age and the differences among the generations.
• Standing by the Wall, Mick Herron – a short story (published in book form) taking place in a single afternoon at Slough House on Christmas Eve. Roddy Ho has been called upon to alter a photograph Jackson Lamb received as a gift. River visits from sick leave. Molly Doran ponders. That is all. Typically hilarious and devious and partly revealing more Lamb history.
• Queen & Country, Alan Judd – A quickly read, contemporary British espionage novel pitting a retired chief of MI6 against the wiles of the current Deputy “CEO,” whose slavish modishness creates trouble when Russians are knocking off old defectors living in England.

June 2025

• Black Out, John Lawton – a strong espionage tale, masquerading as a police procedural in dispiriting, end-of-the-war London. Our hero martyrs himself insanely, repeatedly, and has an awful lot of unlikely sex. Put that aside and it’s a fine novel, first in a series starring English public-school, Russian-descended, obsessively-driven policeman, Detective Sergeant Frederick Troy.
• Art Is Life (Icons, Iconoclasts, Visionaries & Vigilantes, & Flashes of Hope in the Night), Jerry Saltz – Having enjoyed his How to be an Artist last year I picked this up when I saw it in the Hove library. It turns out to be a collection of his articles from the Village Voice and New York magazine, organised into rough art periods of about a decade each. While one tends to tire of all his superlatives, all the paintings that changed his life, his wildly subjective flights of transcendental art experiences that are hard to connect to, especially in the absence of the images – it did force me to constantly look up paintings and artists on my iPad, so the overall experience was like visiting a ton of galleries and museums, over the course of a week, from the comfort of home.
• Goldengrove, Patrick McCabe – a startlingly original work, ostensibly the memoir of an MI5 agent and assassin operating, with his partner, in Ireland during the troubles. It is full of hilarious bits, in a dream-like periphrastic style, reminiscent of the Nighttown section of Ulysses, as the mind of our memoirist gradually comes apart and he reveals, still rather obscurely, the murders of so many, including those closest to him. Difficult to get through but a fascinating piece of work.
• Companion piece, Ali Smith – another brilliantly lush novel by Smith that one drinks in thirstily. Ostensibly the story of a first person narrator, a very literary painter, whose life and home have been invaded by a clueless and emotionally needy family, towards the end of the pandemic, while her father is in hospital with heart problems. It is interspersed with the story of a young girl blacksmith living during the time of the plague, which is never really satisfyingly tied into the main plot, which also fails to resolve fully.
• Bordeaux, Private Eye, Rorie Smith – a short and highly amusing meta-narrative in which Bill Smith is writing a novel about a character named Bill Smith and it becomes less and less clear which is which. Along the way we get a lot of salacious material from 20th century scandals of the rich and powerful, a plea for environmental action, art and history (via Montaigne, Goya, Jackson Pollack and others) and an essentially post-modernist version of the social contract, all wrapped in a putative, but superfluous, detective story.
  [I read this in a paper book and borrowed 2 more from the library – I am trying to break my addiction to my iPad and hope to reconsitute some level of persistence of attention. – ed.]
• Savage Season, Joe R Lansdale – the first in a series of amusing capers, rather in the vein of Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen, but Texas-style. Our narrator Hap and his buddy Leonard, a gay, black Viet Nam vet, get inveigled into a farcical caper by Hap’s ex-wife which ends tragicomically violently but our heroes come out ok.

May 2025

• The Handover, David Runciman – a fascinating look at AI in our future. But it starts with Hobbes’ Leviathan, moving on to Hannah Arendt, and looks at the ways both states and corporations are like (and unlike) AIs – They are all things we have created that extend human capabilities with lives that transcend those of their creators. In the end, it’s not clear what we ought to do but the way of thinking about these issues and the challenges we face, is illuminating.
• I’m finding it difficult to read anything serious on politics, history or economics – Anything that wasn’t written yesterday feels irrelevant to the daily tergiversations of the current regime.
• Harry’s Game, Gerald Seymour – a thriller tracking an English undercover agent’s hunt for an IRA killer. Told from the points of view of several characters it paints an excellent but grim picture of the Troubles and ugliness and brutality of the struggle between the English, Ulstermen factions, Provos and civilians. Well done thriller but painful to read, short as it was.
• The Expats, Chris Pavone – The story of a family who move to Luxembourg, the secrets they tell each other and those they keep from each other and the couple they meet there who aren’t quite what they seem. Moving across 2 or 3 timelines, there is revelation upon revelation in each time period. Our heroine figures things out and tantalizes us with the possibility of sharing them with us.
• The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell – an unexpected bonanza. Starting in the voice of a 15-year old English schoolgirl, Holly Sykes, the novel moves on to be told from the perspective of a young psychopath Cambridge student with the self-destructive rapier wit of a Butley, before changing again to the voice of the now grown 15-year-old’s war correspondent husband, followed by that of a dissolute, disappointed writer. All are tied together by their relationship to Holly. Each has occasional brushes with the inexplicable and potentially paranormal. In the next act, years have passed and the paranormal has taken over for a fantasy/sci-fi battle royale, before moving forward to a post-apocalyptic future. Mitchell’s mastery of each voice is remarkable. A fascinating story and warning.
• And There He Kept Her, Joshua Moehling – A police procedural where the reader knows the solution from the beginning and the suspense is watching the police figure it out. Our hero is a closeted gay assistant sherriff, working out his personal issues as he solves the case. A good yarn but I felt curiously little for most of the characters.
• The Big Empty, Robert Crais – a recent Elvis Cole and Joe Pike mystery. Well-written story of an online influencer and baker who is hunting for her 10-year missing father. The case is cold but Cole’s persistence pays off painfully for all.
• Strip, Thomas Perry – a Perry thriller, this time involving a strip club owner, a man who robbed him and his girlfriends, the man accused of robbing him, a policeman, assorted secondary characters of varying inelligence and amusement value and several other story threads that kinda sorta come together by the end.

April 2025

• Of Love and Hunger, Julian Maclaren-Ross – an interesting bit of history from the 1940s, the story of a man at loose ends, selling vacuum cleaners in the Brighton/Worthing area in the run-up to the Second World War. Verisimilitude of the mean-minded poor in the late inter-war period in England. Fascinating in its way but tough to read, with an interesting telegraphic style.
• Walking East Harlem: A Neighborhood Experience, Christopher Bell – a set of walking tours with directions, photographs and brief histories. I briefly met the author, a friend of Peter Calvert’s and Martha Eddy’s, and I had read his book, East Harlem Remembered, on Martha’s recommendation for my CRUX – Landscape of Inequality project. After Peter spoke with him recently he reached out to me and we’ve scheduled a call this coming weekend.
• Dolphin Junction, Mick Herron – a collection of short stories by a master story teller. Many of them contain the sort of ironic twist that short stories were once known for before, “slice-of-life” vignettes took over. Marvelously inventive and well written, some focused, at least tangentially, on characters from his Zoë Boehm novels and one Jackson Lamb, Molly Doran story.
• Murder by Natural Causes, Helen Erichsen – the bildungsroman of a young psychopath raised by the Soviet state to be a killer for the State and her attempts to retain some independent bit of herself against the odds. A very well done thriller.
• The Masquerades of Spring, Ben Aaronovitch – from The Rivers of London series, I once again failed to study the blurb copy adequately. Taking place in New York in the Jazz Age, a posh, gay, public-school type (think Bertie Wooster) English wizard is forced into an adventure to rescue a maiden, involving faeries and jazz during prohibition. Not really my sort of thing but an amusing bit of fluff.
• What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust, Alan Bradley – A Flavia de Luce mystery. I took a cursory glance at the library to ensure this was not a “cozy” mystery but, alas, not a close enough look. Our heroine is a precocious English eccentric girl (no age given but pre-teen or “tween” at a guess), living in a stately home with servants, sisters, and a cousin. Although published last year, the action takes place in 1953 when she feels impelled to investigate the murder of a local, retired hangman. Very purple prose and the sense of a jolly adventure you might find in an Enid Blyton adventure
• The Last Thing He Wanted, Joan Didion – An interesting entry in the Didion oeuvre, a thriller that leverages the obscurity of covert government writing to slowly expose the tragedy of two people with tangential involvement in the Iran-Contra events of the Reagan administration. Using a range of unlikely literary techniques, like repetition and pairings of what may or may not have occurred, the story is gradually revealed. Excellent!
• The Beginning of Spring, Penelope Fitzgerald – an odd book, telling a series of quotidian events in the life of an Englishman living in Moscow in 1913. At the beginning of the novel his English wife has gone off and, nominally, the book narrates the weeks after her departure from his perspective but without really ever revealing his inner feelings.
• The Mailman, Andrew Welsh-Huggins – another first entry in a thriller/detective series. This one is almost cartoonishly implausible, but all the more enjoyable for all that. A private courier displays unexpected skills when the person he’s attempting delivery to is found in harm’s way, with complications, an unbelievable array of complications, twists and turns.
• The Second Life of Nick Mason, Steve Hamilton – a taut thriller, a bit in the mode of Reacher, only here our protagonist is a criminal and for him to do good he must commit more crimes and become the murderer he only wanted to avoid being. An enjoyable, if gruesome, read.
• Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood – a dystopian sci-fi novel I’ve been meaning to read for some time, extrapolates recent technology trends, particularly in bio-genomics to a grim future, followed by an even more grim post-apocalyptic future with a strange new engineered group of humans. As the novel progresses another timeline moves backwards to ultimately uncover the hubristic origins of humankind’s demise. Extremely well written.

March 2025

• Portrait of an Unknown Woman, Daniel Silva – a break from serious reading, this 24-hour thriller features art restorer (and former Israeli security chief) Gabriel Allon, jetsetting around Europe and New York to take down a massive art fraud ring, built around a hedge fund. In truth, I saw it coming but the suspense of how and the thrill of the chase were enjoyable and, fortunately, it contained nothing of Mid-East politics.
• alone together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Sherry Turkle – This book was on my daughter’s reading list for a class on Loneliness in Literature at the Brooklyn Institute. Since it’s title mirrored my sub-project of Modern Romance I decided to read it. It casts a wide net, starting with tamagochis and furbies, moving on to the internet, social media, robots and AIs (as of 2011), online confession pages, and the like, examining how we relate to these technologies and how their use changes our relations to each other. While it has important, even urgent, warnings about where we’re headed, it’s about half again as long as it needs to be, entirely anecdotal with quotations from her observations of disguised, first name participants, with interpretation woven in here and there and highly, highly repetitive. There are no null hypotheses here, just the description of every white swan she comes upon with nary an attempt at finding a black swan. It was a long slow slog through what ought to have been a much more enjoyable read (perhaps because I read it on my iPad, in defiance of the book’s very cautions?).
• Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey – another book hypothesizing the evolution of consciousness from non-consciousness. The critical distinction, using the phenomenon of blindsight to explicate it, is the difference between merely sensing and having an experience of sensing, hypothesized to arise from neural feedback of the original stimulus and its internalization. Also proposes that warm-bloodedness is a necessary prerequisite, so sentience, as defined, is a property chiefly of birds and mammals.
• Brothers Keepers, Donald E Westlake – a farcical tale of a contemplative Order of monks fighting to retain their 200-year old monastery in midtown Manhattan. Full of NY couleur locale and the zeitgeist of the mid-1970s. An enjoyable and amusing read with not a little (pace Orwell) erudition.
• The Ludwig Conspiracy, Oliver Pötzsch – a novel exploring the mysteries surrounding the death of Ludwig II of Bavaria towards the end of the 19th century. While a fascinating story with a definite hook, it was extremely awkwardly written, both in terms of the plot and the language, with a lot of telling where showing would likely have worked better (some of that may be down to the translation).
• Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right, Walter Mosley – the first King Oliver novel I’ve read and hot off the presses. Kind of like Easy Rawlins transposed to contemporary New York with the usual combination of philosophizing about race relations, women throwing themselves at our hero and a couple of mysteries to be solved, this time including a California millionaire seeking his estranged wife and daughter while at the same time searching for the truth that will exonerate Oliver’s father.
• A Person of Interest, Susan Choi – The story of a Chinese-American, twice-divorced, mid-western Math professor, swept up in the pursuit of a mad-bomber. But, while wholly innocent of the bombing, he is massively inept at life, earning trouble for himself rather in the manner of Kafka’s K or Camus’ Meursault with his hostile indifference. A brilliant novel, I found tiresome to read with its endless interiority (though this may reflect more the feverishness of the first weeks of the new presidency).

February 2025

• In Too Deep, Lee Child and Andrew Child – a recent entry in the Reacher mythos. Enjoyable as far as it goes – an art heist group tangles with Reacher and the FBI and it’s never quite clear who all the bad guys are. Some kind of rough justice prevails in the end.
• Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create, Pascal Boyer – an up to date overview, integrating insights from the latest science across cognitive psychology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, neurosciences, sociology and evolutionary biology, that disputes inbuilt prejudices and offers conjectures on evolved human faculties implicated in how we communicate, learn, trade and create societies.
• Generosity, Richard Powers – another bravura performance from Powers. A novel dense with ideas, observations, and insights asking questions about human happiness. It’s unseen author frequently interrupts with the difficulties of crafting this fiction and seeing where it will go as the unhappy world of a happy young woman from a tragic background unwinds. On the one hand it inspires one to write, on the other fills one with the futility of attempting what’s already been wrought.
• The Middleman, Olen Steinhauer – a taut FBI thriller, playing on the polarization in the US, the rise of populist nationalism and elite financial chicanery and ultimately returning us to the earlier world of Steinhauer’s Tourist novels.

January 2025

• Man in the Dark, Paul Auster – a late novella of Auster’s, it starts with a typical Auster conceit: our narrator is making up a story a bit like Escher’s hands, with a character intimately tied to himself. Then about two thirds of the way through, Auster tires of this and ends it, turning instead to the narrator’s family tragedies and love lives. Along the way many other stories are invented and abandoned, displaying, on the one hand Auster’s amazing story-spinning ability and, on the other, raising the suspicion that he has cobbled together lots of unfinished pieces lingering in drawers into an untempered whole. Enjoyable nevertheless.
• The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise, Colleen Oakley – an enjoyable, light picaresque story of a young woman who has not found her way in life and the cross-country adventure she has with an old woman with a secret past and a dangerous present. While the past gets revealed in surprising ways the plot also has a certain foreseeable inevitability.
• The Promise, Robert Crais – An Elvis Cole/ Joe Pike adventure that Libby doesn’t have and we picked up for a dollar at Bluestocking Books in Hillcrest, San Diego – an exciting story involving a woman seeking answers in the death by terrorism of her journalist son and a K-9 dog, Inventively, Crais writes some chapters from the dog’s perspective. An enjoyable, fast read.
• Amsterdam, Ian McEwan – a deliciously sly, novella of the British upper middle classes, starting with the funeral of a woman who’d once been the lover of a Foreign Secretary, a composer and a newspaper editor, and their entanglements with her husband, all scrabbling up the greasy pole.
• Willful Behavior, Donna Leon – another Commissario Brunetti murder mystery, this time involving one of his wife’s literature students and the nasty history of art wrested from the victims of the fascist regime during the war. Once again, Brunetti solves the mystery, but watches helplessly as Italy’s webs of corruption block justice being done.
• Death and Judgment, Donna Leon – another excellent Commissario Brunetti mystery with the usual solution and unhappy denouement. This one involves the deaths of an international lawyer, his brother-in-law, and an accountant from Padua. Once again it is impossible to evade entanglement in the corruption that pervades Italian institutions.
• With or Without Angels, Douglas Bruton – a gem of a novel, a response to the work of the Scottish artist Alan Smith, The New World and the painting by Giandomenico Tiepolo, Il Mondo Nuovo which inspired it. An old painter, never named, is ill and, assisted by a young photographer, creates a set of images responding to the painting, weaving poetically among memories and reveries in the winter of his life.
• The Eighth Detective: A Novel, Alex Pavesi – an interesting meta-mystery that alternates between English murder mysteries and discussions of them between an editor and their putative author on a Mediterranean island.
• Gentlemen of the Road, Michael Chabon – an entertaining and learned story of Jews with swords, the mysterious Khazars, in medieval Central Asia. Excellent.
• Several readings for the Light and Ink Workshop I’ll be taking with Laura Larson:
  • On Keeping a Notebook, Joan Didion
  • The Oppositional Gaze, bell hooks
  • Remembrance: The Child I Never Was, Annette Kuhn
  • Fortified by Words: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs, Sarah Meister
  • Suite vénitienne, Sophie Calle and Please follow me, Jean Baudrillard
  • The Caption, Nancy Newhall
• Blue Moon, Lee Child – Started the year with an easy read. Jack Reacher against Ukrainian and Albanian mobs terrorizing a medium-sized Western city.

December 2024

• Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, James Williams – a short book that was mentioned by Greg Epstein, below. A former Google designer, Williams left to earn a PhD in Philosophy at Oxford and write this book on the misalignment between tech companies’ goal (grasping as much of our attention as possible) and our goals in using their tech. He maps and diagnoses the problems this gives rise to and suggests some directions for improving the situation.
• Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, Greg Epstein – a maddening book that covers very interesting ground on technology’s ubiquity and mentions many (potential) resources. It starts by defining elements of “tech” (distinguished from technology but thereafter used interchangeably) that parallel constituents of religions. Unfortunately the logic is sometimes circular. For instance, to demonstrate that the tech religion has its heretics, he introduces those who oppose tech in some way. But they’re really only “heretical” if tech is a religion, they can’t also be part of the proof that it is. He relentlessly displays a humanist bonhomie and political correctness throughout and is ambivalent on almost every subject he touches, in his conclusion defending this as an active, dynamic agnosticism. Weak tea, methinks.
• Old Filth, Jane Gardam – a very British novel telling the life story of Eddie Feathers, a raj orphan, barrister and judge, known as Old Filth (Failed in London, Try Hong Kong). Rather like Anthony Powell’s seasonal dozen novels, recounts the class history of fading imperial Britain in the 20th century through Feathers’ life.
• The Long and Faraway Gone, Lou Berney – A trio of mysteries, only one of which is solved, the others two only kinda sorta resolved, but satisfyingly and intersecting only tangentially. A girl who disappeared years ago and the younger sister who is haunted by the question of what happened, a boy who survived a deadly robbery, spends his life wondering why, and a dive bar owner harassed for no apparent reason, pulled together entertainingly and poignantly.
• The Reckless Mind, Mark Lilla – yet another Lilla book, a series of short essays on the currents in 20th century thinkers that led them, whether consciously or not, to support various forms of tyranny. Starting with Heidegger it moves on to Carl Schmitt, the ambiguities of Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojève, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Lucid sketches of the philosophers, their times, their thoughts and the dangers of their ways of thinking.
• Judas 62, Charles Cumming – a contemporary (during the time of Covid) British spy thriller, part of the BOX 88 series, taking place in 2 acts: in the early days of post-Soviet Russia and in the present, mostly in Dubai. It proceeds with a certain inevitability but nevertheless sustains the necessary suspense. Enjoyable, but it took me over a week to get through it. Reading has suddenly become difficult to sustain.
• How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky – While never truly answering the question of its title, the book surveys the writings of a vast array of Jewish thinkers from roughly the 18th century to the mid 20th century, from Germany to the Eastern European shtetl, to the United States and Palestine/Israel on what Jewishness is (a religion, a culture, a people, a nation, or some combination?). It does trace, if somewhat obliquely, how the idea of religion as a distinct sphere of human experience emerged with the individualism of the modern, liberal nation-state.
• The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla – My third Lilla book (see July and October, below), this was the oldest (2008) and the hardest to get through. A study of Western political theology – what does religion say about how we should order our societies politically? Delineating the differences in theological stance among pantheistic (God is everywhere), gnostic (God is elsewhere) and transcendent (God is above us, paying attention) stances, Lilla moves rapidly from Augustine and Aquinas to Hobbes who he credits with the insight that separates politics from theology in the West, thence to Rousseau and Kant and on to Hegel before finishing with influential German Protestant and Jewish thinkers of the 19th and early 20th century, who are seldom mentioned nowadays.

November 2024

• A Spy Alone, Charles Beaumont – an excellent contemporary British spy novel, in the best tradition of Le Carré or Slough House, eviscerating Britain’s insouciant accession by and surrender to dirty (Russian) money and a warning about the intersection of finance, power and oligarchy.
• Hero, Thomas Perry – A thriller in which a woman in private security saves a client heroically, which makes her a target. The story is told alternately from her perspective and that of the professional assassin who’s after her. Not as compelling as some of Perry but suspenseful enough with a somewhat flat, anticlimactic ending.
• Dark Side of the Street, Jack Higgins – the first Higgins I’ve read. A very English, very ’60s sort of thriller, don’t you know, old chap. Enjoyable enough prison-break story, if one is able to shift oneself into the past and ignore the sexism and general hokey-ness.
• Drowned Hopes, Donald E Westlake – I’ve found it difficult to concentrate on reading since the election. I thought another Dortmunder caper would do the trick: a hapless bungling crew of criminals, forever coming up with slick plans that go awry, this one involving a long buried treasure and a murderous madman. But in my current state of mind it’s been a slog, if an enjoyable one.
• The Vacation, John Marrs – Unnerved by the US presidential election, it has been hard to read and taken me almost 2 weeks to get through this strange mix between a picaresque novel and, say, Elmore Leonard, telling the stories of backpackers in a Venice Beach hostel. Each of them has a hidden tragicomic past that is annoyingly revealed piecemeal in scraps of flashback.

October 2024

• Bad Luck and Trouble, Lee Child – another Jack Reacher story, one we saw a disappointing television adaptation of. Chasing down bad guys who have harmed old friends and preventing the misuse of dangerous military equipment. The usual, but fun to read.
• The Shipwrecked Mind, Mark Lilla – an excellent short book of essays I decided on after reading The Once and Future Liberal (below, July 2024). It examines various forms of reactionaries. Unlike revolutionaries, looking forward to a fantastic future after a recent or coming rupture with the current dispensation, reactionaries look backwards to a prelapsarian golden age, before a critical break or rupture with a better form of social organisation. Typically they have a theological notion of society being anchored morally in external absolutes, as opposed to the relativism of post-Enlightenment rationalism and individualism that lack that firm foundation.
• The Seminarian, Hart Hanson – a witty LA (Venice Beach) mystery story with a former seminarian as the protagonist detective, searching for his own would be murderer and grappling with being a fully loved and loving human. A nice return to reading after a week of abandoning several books I started but couldn’t engage with.
• The League of Frightened Men, Rex Stout – the 2nd Nero Wolfe mystery novel, bound in a volume with Fer-de-Lance, below. Another enjoyable Wolfe mystery wherein a group of terrified Harvard classmates hire Wolfe to free them of their fear of another of their classmates whom they once wronged.
• Fer-de-Lance, Rex Stout – the very first Nero Wolfe novel from 1935. A good yarn and kind of fascinating to read today, looking up various bits of couleur locale from the New York of nearly a century ago. A man dies but Wolfe figures out that he was murdered, and how and why.
• A Painter of Our Time, John Berger – Berger’s first novel, that I’ve been meaning to read for some time. A Hungarian émigré painter in London in the early to mid-1950s struggles both with his painting and the rôle of the artist and with his own political sympathies in light of the execution of his dearest and oldest friend by the Hungarian Communist regime for counter-revolutionary behaviour, and his own sense of having betrayed the revolution with his escape to England.

September 2024

• Racing the Light, Robert Crais – another in the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series of mysteries for some light entertainment after my policy reading (below). An enjoyable recent entry in the long-running series.
• 5 Easy Theses, James Stone – A study of 5 areas for improvement in US public policy: fiscal balance, inequality, education, healthcare and financial sector reform. In addition to the recommendations he makes, which he admits would all be politically difficult, his exposition of the markets’ workings and the history of the problems is exemplary if not delivered in the most scintillating prose.
• Show Your Work, Austin Kleon – a follow-up to Steal Like an Artist (below) this short book focuses on techniques for finding and growing your audience while you do your work.
• Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng – a sad and uplifting novel of an America rather like our own in which a new McCarthyism has taken hold with Asians rather than communists its target. Told mostly from the perspective of a biracial young boy whose Chinese American poet mother has been caught up in the trouble, it is both devastatingly sad and poetically hopeful.
• The Glass Woman, Alice McIlroy – a near-future sci-fi mystery involving AIs and machine brain interfaces and one woman’s struggle initially to forget and then to remember her role in their use. Not a bad plot but very repetitive, a lot of telling and some clanging infelicities (like “changing tact,” rather than “tack,” and “all the surfaces in the room looked bequeathed with an oiled sheen.”).
• Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon – a short book of creative inspiration that’s quickly read and just the thing to keep one going. Recommended.
• The Age of Insecurity, Astra Taylor – an amazing book, covering a wide range of contemporary issues within the context of insecurity deliberately manipulated by capitalism for the benefit of the few, conjuring, housing, education, debt, the environment and more with erudition and eclecticism. Highly recommended for all.
• One Fearful Yellow Eye, John D MacDonald – Another Travis McGee mystery, from 1966-era Chicago. A typically good yarn but McGee’s psychologizing and “fixing” of poor, broken-bird women with his own brand of Florida sun and sexual healing has grown almost impossible to stomach in this day and age, to say nothing of his unenlightened comments on “fairies” and the “negroes.”
• When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro – a strange novel in a way, told in Ishiguro’s almost Jamesian, century-old effete British diction, it is the tale of an English detective, spending his early years in Shanghai, who is so obtusely and obliviously focused on finding his parents he misses having his own life or meaningful relationships. Does he suffer from Aspergers or is he merely veddy English?

August 2024

• The Chancellor Manuscript, Robert Ludlum – The first Ludlum I’ve ever read, from 1977 and it has not aged well. Fast-paced thriller of unbelievable intrigues in the FBI, the military and secret cabals. While the conspiracies are believable the ways in which they are executed are not, the presentation of women and minorities are hard to credit from a contemporary perspective.
• The Forgery of Venus, Michael Gruber – a propulsive thriller about a painter who may, or may not, be channeling Velázquez, his struggles with reality, hallucinogens, love, forgery, and painting. Very enjoyable, by an author whose Tropic of Night also thrilled me.
• The Artist’s Journey, Steven Pressfield – since I couldn’t download The War of Art I got this instead. It’s a semi-mystical, universal myth-themed invocation to produce art, trotting out the traditional romantic notion of the artist struggling heroically against the forces that would deter him from his quest. Not quite as inspiring as some I’ve read.
• Summary of Steven Pressfield’s the War of Art – Somewhere I heard about this book but Libby didn’t have it, only a cliff-notes type of summary, so I read that in about 10 minutes. Unfortunately the summary doesn’t capture the inspiration I imagine exists in the original. A bunch of twaddle about the struggle to create being like a war against negativity and to connect with our spiritual unconscious.
• Utopia, Sir Thomas More – finally read the original (well, an English translation from the Latin) from which we get the concept of a perfect society that exists nowhere. Remarkable to realize that as early as 1515 people were recognizing the potential for equal distribution of property, freedom of thought and belief, the evils of slavery and hunting, and more nostrums we consider to be the discoveries of modernity.
• The Book of Ayn, Lexi Freiman – a fever-dream of a novel in which a contrarian woman entering middle age has a kind of nervous breakdown as she cycles wildly through self-revelation after epiphany in a hallucinogenic string of misadventures all hung on the skeleton of Ayn Rand’s writings and sad biography.
• The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, Coleman Hughes – a short and powerful examination and refutation of much of recent anti-racist theory. While I don’t agree with everything, it is a well-reasoned and statistically competent assessment of the benefits of color-blind vs anti-racist approaches to public policy to undo and remediate the many injuries of racial injustice we are heir to.
• Fleishman is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner – A searing novel that I had put off reading for many months. It has the urgency of Philip Roth at his best that grows deeper and more complex as it progresses. It is a howl against the injustice of woman’s allotted role and a slow motion car wreck that nevertheless ends on a note of (possible) hope. Ostensibly documenting the dissolution of a marriage it also captures a zeitgeist, a cultural milieu and the tragedy of not hearing or seeing one another wholly.
• The Burglar who Painted Like Mondrian, Lawrence Block – a Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery I don’t think I ever read before, an enjoyable light read, replete with Block’s usual good writing, humour, NYC couleur locale and literary allusions and asides.
• Making it in the Art World, Brainard Carey – a book mentioned by a colleague in a crit. It’s the kind of book that is full of practical techniques for advancing one’s art career but is somewhat hateful for all that. Some suggestions sound positively Machiavellian, if not downright illegal (using others’ tax breaks or mailing lists). Some are slightly out of date (leveraging FB, but no mention of IG or TikTok) The key thing is to be bold in reaching out and meeting people to build the network you need. Don’t be afraid to ask for things. Manage your time and stay healthy.
• mirrors, messages, manifestations, Minor White – a classic volume by one of the founders of Aperture, brought to my attention recently by my reading of Tim Carpenter and Robert Adams. Some stunning photography and White’s mystic explorations of “Camera.”
• The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker – a sci-fi novel in which the earth’s rotation slows with many untoward effects, told from the perspective of a pre-teen girl in California. Enjoyable, reminded me slightly of Station Eleven in its description of a world that is like our own but for one change.

July 2024

• Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams – a classic set of essays on the aesthetics of photography by one of its masters. Thoughtful discussion of what makes art, art; the necessity of concrete thing-ness and fidelity to life. Also, it came up quite a bit in my reading of To Photograph is too Learn to Die (below), so a timely read, thanks to Kirk Tuck’s book recommendations on his new blog, Ground Zero Art.
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder – a short excellent set of lessons from the fascist and communist dictatorships of the 20th century, with direct application to the strategies and techniques of an unnamed recent US president. The parallels are drawn, the dangers presented and some recommendations on how to respond are provided. It’s up to us, folks.
• The Chemistry of Death, Simon Beckett – a murder mystery with the sort of deranged psychopathic killer one tends to meet in novels and films but not the news, with a denouement that didn’t feel fully credible to me. Also, the first-person narration, unfortunately, led to a strong desire to scream, “show, don’t tell.”
• To Photograph is to Learn How to Die: an Essay with Digressions, Tim Carpenter – an incredible book on photography, life, aesthetics and ethics. Through an astoundingly erudite weaving of the essay with quotations from many writers and photographers, particularly poets, and especially Wallace Stevens, Carpenter attempts to reconcile the many binary oppositions of which life’s contests are composed: self with non-self, what is with what is not, the indexical with the imaginary, the internal with the external, or, perhaps, not to reconcile them but to explore their combat or the “still point at the centre,” in Eliot’s beautiful phrase. Seeks to explain how working with cameras leads to a more fulfilled life.
• The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, Mark Lilla – an impassioned plea for American liberals to overcome the fissiparous individualism of identity politics and focus their efforts on an inclusive citizenship, imbued with what we have in common, that seeks political power at every level to create citizens with a liberal vision in a new dispensation (like FDR’s or Reagan’s, in the way theirs permeated the zeitgeist with a way of thinking about issues for a generation or more).
• Point of Impact, Stephen Hunter – a thriller in which a former marine sniper is exploited and framed but through sly Southern orneriness he and a disgraced former FBI sniper overcome the covert operation.
• End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin – a stunning work of “scientific” history, leveraging the new science of cliodynamics to examine our current sociopolitical trajectory using techniques of theoretical biology and population dynamics on masses of social historical data. The US’s current crisis arises from massive inequality, particularly as regards the immiseration of the mass of ordinary people and the over-production of credentialed elites jockeying for position. There are possible hopeful outcomes (elites working for the long-term health of our society with reforms that counter their short-term interests), but they appear to be less likely than a century or so of discord.
• Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre – a short book on the causes, origins and nature of our current “alternative facts” universe (as of 2017) with special reference to Trump’s campaign and early presidency. It traces the development of science and truth denialism from the early ’50s cigarette company conspiracy to refute tobacco’s link to cancer, through post-modernism’s leaking into the alt-right; covers the cognitive biases that make it so potent and posits the need to stand up for truth at every opportunity.
• The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré – A late edition to the Smiley oeuvre, it is really a series of short stories recounted by Ned, at a postprandial evening for trainee spies, linked by a paragraph or two from Smiley, who has been drafted in from retirement to inspire the young ‘uns, that prompt Ned’s memories. Again, le Carré questions the justice of the cold war’s “victors,” preferring simpler, human virtues.
• How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett – a compelling argument for dispensing with the traditional “essentialist” view that emotions are clearly defined in locations in the brain and triggered by external stimuli, in favour of a “constructionist” approach: our emotions are generated as needed from socially constructed and internally wired categorized emotion “concepts,” based on prior experience and what our interoception predicts are the moment by moment needs of our bodies. Along the way, considers the implications of this for better managing our emotions, our health, the legal system and animals’ emotional lives.

June 2024

• The Creative Act, Rick Rubin – Another inspirational book on making art, mixing a lot of meditative sic et non koans and Buddhist ways of thinking with common ideas on creativity. Inspirational but repetitive and written by one of the most influential music producers of all time who, I am confidently informed, was known as Rick the Prick by his college dorm-mates for his monopolization of community resources.
• Extraordinary People, Peter May – the first in the Enzo series (and the first Peter May I’ve read). Another British/French mystery series (this time Scottish) with a protagonist who misjudges and mistreats those closest to him through a very male kind of obliviousness, that he then recognizes but fails to do anything about. The mystery is somewhat arcane, requiring one to believe that a chap with limited relevant experience and Google can figure out what the police and ENArques cannot.
• The Price You Pay, Nick Petrie – the latest in the Peter Ash series and the most bloody. A book in which the protagonists spend all their time debating the morality of their killing but inherently justify it because the bad guys are evil without much complexity.
• The House of Secrets, Brad Meltzer and Tod Goldberg – an enjoyable page-turner of a thriller, amusingly stretching credulity past the breaking point, involving a dead father’s great mysteries TV show, his somewhat amnesiac daughter, and the legend of Benedict Arnold.
• Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino – an interesting short, speculatively philosophical novel, contemplating, language and culture, our place in the cosmos and the differing scales and time. I confess to not being in the right frame of mind to read this and having zoned out and having to re-read bits, but there are many interesting meditations along lines I have often contemplated myself.
• Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay – an important book I wish I could get everyone to read. Provides a lucid and sympathetic explanation of the postmodern theories of Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, et. al., traces their evolution and mutation into Critical Theory today (post-colonial theory, queer theory, gender studies, disability studies and others) and, while showing where these add value, deplores their theological and intolerant dangers to liberal society, as they have escaped academia and infected many other spheres, fueling resurgent right wing populism.
• The Children’s Game, Max Karpov – an almost unbelievable espionage thriller. Almost, because in a way, it prefigures the Russian invasion of Ukraine two years ago, now. The writing is competent if sometimes lacking in verisimilitude.

May 2024

• Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead – follow-up to Harlem Shuffle this splendid novel finds Carney, and Harlem, in the early to mid 1970s. A noir-ish set of interlinked stories chart the fortunes of Carney’s two businesses as avatars of Harlem – excellent!
• The Weather in Berlin, Ward Just – an interesting tale of an American filmmaker best known for an art film years back about three young men and women in Germany after the first War, finding himself at a loose end and discovers himself a little on a residency in Berlin. Interesting interweaving of actual film and art into the fictional story.

April 2024

• A Wanted Man, Lee Child – after the perplexity of the Gide, I treated myself to some light entertainment and suspense with another Jack Reacher thriller. As low cal and enjoyable as expected.
• Marshlands (Paludes), André Gide, translated by Damion Searls – I’ve read Gide before with pleasure. At University I read Les Faux-Monnayeurs in the original with understanding (and the theme of free will surfaces occasionally here as well). Unfortunately I found this almost impenetrable – as if the cultural difference between late 19h century France and contemporary England was too great to translate. Only in the Afterword does Gide begin to make clear what he was on about. The symbolism, alas, is lost on me.
• Journey of the Mind, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam – a fascinating review of mental function, leading from the most basic biological “thought” in unicellular beings, through more complex mental modes involving multiple modules, through consciousness, the “hypermind” of culturally connected minds to self-consciousness, based significantly on the work of Stephen Grossberg.
• Nothing to Lose, Lee Child – was trying to read Umberto Eco but couldn’t attain the requisite focus, so switched to another Jack Reacher thriller. In this one [spoiler alert] he explodes a dirty bomb in Colorado. Other than that, perfectly credible in all respects.
• See/Saw, Geoff Dyer – a collection of articles on photographs, photographers and photography writers from over the years, ordered mostly, by the year of birth of the photographer. Some very good articles and some less interesting. The chief pleasure, aside from Dyer’s writing, is the way they drove me to go lookup up the work of the artists under discussion.
• Without Fail, Lee Child – Finding it difficult to dig into anything serious, read another early Jack Reacher thriller. Enjoyable, fast read.
• The Queen of Patpong, Timthy Hallinan – Having finished his Junior Bender stories I turned to one of a series with Poke Rafferty, an American travel writer with a Thai family, solving mysteries in Bangkok, this time with Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a leitmotif.
• Arcadia, Lauren Groff – an extremely moving novel, told in the third person but from the first person perspective of a photographer who grows up in an upstate NY commune in the ’70s, which is ultimately undone by its own internal contradictions. The writing is extremely sensuous and poetic with particular attention to smell, making the protagonist’s world achingly tangible to us and the emotions of love, loss, and hope strikingly poignant.

March 2024

• Taken, Robert Crais – yet another Elvis Cole and Joe Pike tale, this time among people smugglers in the southern California deserts.
• The Forgotten Man, Robert Crais – another Elvis Cole and Joe Pike mystery. In this one Elvis may have found the father he never knew.
• Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson – the well known book on the origins and development of nationalism. It’s hard to think of a world without the nation-state but they are, in fact, fairly recent creations and ways of thinking about political organization. The story’s not as simple as one might think and the work focuses not on the usual European culprits but on many other parts of the world to good effect.
• Total Chaos (Total Kheops), Jean-Claude Izzo – the prime example of Mediterranean noir, a roman policier taking place in the streets of 1990s Marseilles where the many immigrant communities fight it out amongst themselves, the cops, and the National Front. Fabio, a cop and the last living of a trio of boyhood friends, figures out love and his mates’ deaths.
• Photography and Cinema, David Campany – recommended some time ago by a tutor for the cinematic look I’m trying to get in my current project, Modern Romance, I finally read this well-known text. It is an interesting set of meditations on the intersections between photography and cinema and the effects they have had on one another, how they have been both symbiotic and contradictory.
• Bruno, Chief of Police, Martin Walker – a very French roman policier, written by an Englishman, that takes place in the Périgord in modern times, taking in the ugliness of France’s Algerian horror, the Vichy regime and today’s National Front and anti-Arabism with plenty of charming couleur locale and a certain anti-elite bonhomie.
• Upgrade, Blake Crouch – a sci-fi novel of the near future where gene editing is easy and illegal following a disaster. Some want to save humanity through further gene editing, others have doubts. Lots of human biology and not brilliant from a literary perspective, but thought-provoking nonetheless.
• Blonde Faith, Walter Mosley – an Easy Rawlins mystery taking place in 1967 with a lot of philosophizing but the usual strong couleur locale.
• Aging together: Dyadic profiles of older couples’ marital quality, psychological well-being, and physical health, Josh R Novak, Stephanie J Wilson, Ashley E Ermer, and James M Harper – a research study I read in support of my Modern Romance project. Surveying close to 600 aging US couples across multiple dimensions with some statistical rigour, the study identified 4 significant classes: maritally satisfied and healthy (63.5%), maritally dissatisfied and moderately healthy ( 14.7%), maritally satisfied with unhealthy wives (12.3%) and, maritally satisfied with unhealthy husbands (9.3%). It was unclear which way correlation ran causally: do couples genetically predisposed to remaining healthy have better marriages, or do good marriages support longer term health? Equally, more education was correlated with better health and better marriages, but causality was not really measured.
• Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Janet Malcolm – a well known book, I remember coming out in the early ’80s, seeks to penetrate, approvingly, the mysteries of working as a psychoanalyst. At a 40-year remove it strikes me as illuminating what utter, unscientific, tosh the enterprise was (and is).

February 2024

• Rock of Ages, Timothy Hallinan – last (I think) of the Junior Bender series, an amusing jaunt through the world of aging, has-been rock and rollers (and gangsters) with a few shortcuts taken by the author, methinks.
• The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth – the first of the Zuckerman novels, typically brilliant (and, also typically, a tad creepy), with the hint of self-recognition on every page and the urge to run. But what an imagination. Ah, to write like Roth.
• Van der Valk – Love in Amsterdam, Nicholas Freeling – a detective story from the 1960s full of Amsterdamse couleur locale and odd, idiomatic expressions from the time or in Dutch, French or Afrikaans that are scarcely comprehensible today. Interestingly, told largely from the perspective of the chief suspect.
• How to be an Artist, Jerry Saltz – a series of short rules for staying creative and doing the work, recommended recently on a Work Show Grow call.
• The March of Folly, Barbara W Tuchman – a marvelous history of the folly of power with masterful studies of the Trojan War, the Renaissance papacy leading to the Protestant Reformation, George III’s loss of America and, most powerfully for one who lived through much of the time, America’s Vietnam horror.
• The Marlow Murder Club, Robert Thorogood – an English village murder mystery solved by some eccentric local older women, charmingly, in the voice of a children’s bedtime story with all the associated cliché pleasures and a faint undertone of feminism.
• The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid – fascinating short novel in which America turns brown. That is, white people turn brown and “whiteness” ceases to be. After initial horror and unpleasantness, things seem better.
• Nighttown, Timothy Hallinan – the next in the Junior Bender series, as enjoyable as ever with a s star turn by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
• Revenge of the Scapegoat, Caren Beilin – an arty book, part beat, part surreal, with occasional flashes of something interesting, it kinda sorta tells the story of a woman adjunct professor of writing at an arts college who, at 36 years of age, still whines about the slights she received from her family as a teenager. Full of knowing allusions to art and literature, it seems to me to do no more than complain, “I hurt and it’s not my fault.”
• L. A. Requiem, Robert Crais – the 8th Joe Pike and Elvis Cole story. Exciting and sad.

January 2024

• The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass and Public Policy, William Julius Wilson – a landmark study of inequality in the urban ghetto, particularly among American Black communities, originally published in 1987 with a 25th anniversary afterword that considers its impact and subsequent scholarship in the area. Very informative for my proposal to CRUX’s Landscape of Inequality photographic project.
• Alias Emma, Ava Glass – another light, British vs Russian spy thriller taking place in London. Pretty lightweight with clear, marvelous good guys and equally obvious baddies.
• The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, Lawrence Block – Thought I’d read a Block mystery for a little light relief, the first Evan Tanner novel, from the mid-’60s. Kind of surprisingly light-hearted and fluffy, espionage-ish adventure.
• What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael J Sandel – I came upon this book while researching my project proposal for the CRUX Landscape of Inequality photo project at the Arts University of Bournemouth. It’s an excellent and readable book that examines how Reagan and Thatcher opened vast swathes of public life to adjudication by markets, valuing many public goods by financial rather then more suitable measures.
• Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Arundhati Roy – A scathing indictment of Indian corruption in aid of global capitalism’s incessant demands, aided by the major philanthropies founded by prior generations of American capitalists.
• Kluge, Gary Marcus – Looks at the many cognitive fallacies, psychological issues, and linguistic traps that humans are prey to, to argue that the evolution of our brains, with features and layers upon layers is a “kluge” rather than an optimal design.
• Before the Fall, Noah Hawley – an excellent novel in which a painter, almost accidentally, finds himself surviving a private jet crash in the Atlantic, acts heroically but has to deal with human ugliness as a result, with meditations on the role of the camera, the nature of observation and other subjects germane to photo criticism.
• The Toaster Project, Thomas Thwaites – recommended by one of my tutors for researching my photographic project, Regimes of Power, this book started as an MA project by a student at the Royal College of Art. In attempting to build his own toaster from scratch, including smelting metals and polymerising plastic, he charted the unsustainability of our current modes of production without capturing the environmental costs of externalities.
• The Secret Hours, Mick Herron – the latest in Herron’s tales of the British Secret Service and perhaps his best. Deliciously written, with dry, English, ironic wit, it’s a kind of prequel to the Slough House stories, providing backstories for several characters while keeping their identities hidden, providing additional reading pleasure as you suss out who each of them is.
• Indigo Slam, Robert Crais – another Elvis Cole and Joe Pike thriller, this one involving counterfeiting, a Russian/Ukrainian mob and children. Fast-paced and enjoyable. Still not sure I’m ready to read anything more serious.
• 61 Hours, Lee Child – #14 in the Jack Reacher series (I can’t seem to get back into serious reading), ends without our knowing (spoiler alert) if Reacher made it out alive – shocking!
• Changing the Past, Thomas Berger – I read lots of Berger in my 20s until I began to find his books a tad too misanthropic to take. This one, I thought, might be useful for my photographic project, À la recherche du temps perdu. At times I had difficulty continuing because the characters seemed so awful (that old misanthropy), but in the end I enjoyed it and the writing can’t be faulted – masterful. Rather than conflate the past with the present, as I’m doing however, it altered the past to create totally different presents, none satisfactory.
• Closing Costs, Seth Margolis – an amusing comedy of NY in the period between the dot com bust and the 2008 crash, telling stories of greed and vanity, linked by real estate. Very enjoyable.
• The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Aging, Douwe Draaisma – a book I came upon that is directly relevant to my current photographic project, À la recherche du temps perdu, in which I am trying to reconcile the image of my younger self in my mind’s eye when I am shocked to see my old self in the mirror. Interesting material, including a review of the scientific literature, historic views of aging and memory, an interview with Oliver Sacks, and other philosophical meditations.
• Skin Tight, Carl Hiaasen – More vacation reading – a laugh out-loud tale about Florida-man, this time linked to the cosmetic surgery industry.
• The Boyfriend, Thomas Perry – still in vacation mode, another Perry thriller with private investigator Jack Till, this time stalking a contract killer who hides behind escorts.

December 2023

• The Hard Way, Lee Child – Another quick Jack Reacher story – a decent mystery, although I had figured it out fairly early.
• One Shot, Lee Child – Found myself unable too concentrate on anything serious over the holidays, so grabbed one of the earlier Reacher tales, before the killing grew kind of glib. Good mystery.
• Earthlings, Sayaka Murata – a strange and horrifying little novel that has been hailed as a best book of the year by the NY Times. I would not agree. The story of a young woman, a victim of abuse and society’s “programming” who, with her cousin and husband slowly escapes “the Factory” that is conformist society in taboo and revolting ways, which appears to be the point.
• Keywords for Capitalism: Power, Society, Politics, John Patrick Leary – a series of key terms, their origins, uses, misuses and abuses in contemporary discourse, written with wit and erudition, although occasionally a bit quick to snippily dismiss some thinkers I value.
• Sunset Express, Robert Crais – another Elvis Cole and Joe Pike mystery. Finding it hard to concentrate on anything more serious during this holiday season. This is one where whodunnit is pretty clear early on and the suspense is in how it will play out. In this case, justice is only served extra-legally and, thus, somewhat disappointingly to my mind.
• Fields Where They Lay, Timothy Hallinan – After Future Histories I felt I deserved a little light entertainment and got it from the next in the Junior Bender series of mysteries narrated by a burglar detective for other crooks.
• Future Histories, Lizzie O’Shea – a look at how we can overcome technological capitalism in the digital age by looking at the past to envision a different future, with lessons from the Paris Commune, to the enclosure of the commons, to the alternate perceptual modes of New Zealand’s First Peoples and the open-source software movement. A lot of good models for escaping the notion that the capitalist mode is natural or best, unfortunately somewhat let down by a repetitive writing style.
• Free Fall, Robert Crais – an Elvis Cole and Joe Pike mystery from the early ’90s. Quite enjoyable and suspenseful, although I’m a bit dubious that the police would forgive so easily all the crimes of which this duo are guilty, in spite of helping get the “bad guys.”
• The List, Mick Herron – I had been expecting another Slough House novel, but this turned out to be just a short story or novella. Quite good, with familiar characters, but over quickly.
• The Twittering Machine, Richard Seymour – Another book-long essay about the dangers of social media in the context of techno-capitalism’s unceasing appetite for us as products. One unique aspect of this book is the notion that everything is a form of writing and we have all been conscripted, as it were, to contribute all the time. So, not only are we the product but we create more product all the time (for free) by participating.
• Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov – a fascinating novel, directly relevant to my current photographic project, À la recherche du temps perdu, an attempt to reconcile time present with time past and consider the role and nature of memory. A brilliant book, winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize, with debts to Thomas Mann and J L Borges (among many others).
• The Coroner’s Lunch, Colin Cotterill – In the acknowledgments at the end of King Maybe, Timothy Hallinan recommends the novels of British writer Colin Cotterill about Dr. Siri. The NYPL seems to have lots of them as e-books so I borrowed the first. A fascinating glimpse of life in Laos in the late ’70s after the victory of the Pathet Lao. Not sure if I’ll read more of them but I thoroughly enjoyed this one, devouring it last night and this morning.
• King Maybe, Timothy Hallinan – The fifth in the Junior Bender series and an amusing and well told tale of burglary and Hollywood. Unfortunately this one ends with Junior taking a step further than I would have liked.

November 2023

• Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Jonathan Crary – A fascinating analysis of the shift in the understanding of vision that occurred between the 18th and 19th centuries, moving from a model like the camera obscura, which saw vision accurately projecting an external reality on to the human perception to a model more in line with the stereoscope, in which the subjectivity of the observer is more significant. Somehow, this fits into a Foucault’s Discipline and Punish view of capitalist machinations but I really didn’t understand it.
• Prelude to Terror, Helen MacInnes – an ancient spy thriller from 1978. I had long known her name and thought I’d give it a try. Kind of laughably 1960s-ish. Peculiar sexism that’s hard to remember I lived through. Unbelievable plotting and story. Enjoyed as an historical anachronism and study.
• Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Geoffrey Batchen – a compelling work of scholarship and erudition, thoroughly researched and illustrated that clarifies much in the epistemological battles over photography, let down a little, I thought, by its final chapter which uses Foucault and Derridian linguistic jiu-jitsu to resolve the differences (or should I say différance?) between the postmodern contextualists and the formalist connoisseurs.
• The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza, Lawrence Block – 4th in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series, an amusing mystery told by the burglar implicated in the murder he must solve to exonerate himself. Lots of NY couleur locale (and 1980s time-colour, to boot).
• The Nostradamus Traitor, John Gardner – when I saw this I first thought it might be a novel by the literary John Gardner that I’d missed but it turns out to be the first in a series of spy novels by a British writer. It’s a well written and exciting tale of cold war espionage in London in 1978, casting a net back to WWII.
• Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York (Peter Galassi) – Assignment for our lectures on painting and photography, from a MoMA exhibition – this is a well known text that some of my subsequent reading (Burning with Desire) takes issue with. But an interesting look at how different tools in painting altered the perspective of viewers leading up to the invention of photography.
• The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye and AI, Joanna Zylinska – pdf version of a book soon to be published (and subject of an author talk I’m attending in London next week). Very current and wide ranging survey of post-photography, the post digital, image-making and vision, generally, AI image generation and machine vision, drone photography and other currents in image making, including reference to major thinkers in all these areas. Unfortunately full of hyper-intellectually dense but empty and meaningless bits of misunderstood and misused terms and technologies, using metaphysical conceits to conjoin them misleadingly. I hope the talk proves less annoying.
• You Are Here: Art After the Internet, edited by Omar Kholeif – interesting collection of essays and a few projects that treats the so-called post-internet world of art. A few quite good essays and some lesser ones. To some extent it suffers from the very internet acceleration and ephemerality which it attempts to map, given the nine years that have elapsed since its publication.
• Snakes, Sunrises, and Shakespeare: How Evolution Shapes our Loves and Fears, Gordon H. Orians – an evolutionary biologist looks at how our Pleistocene origins on African savannas shapes our tastes, preferences and aesthetics, with less direct discussion of aesthetics than I was hoping for.
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson – an important book that casts American racism in terms of the self reinforcing attributes of caste systems, with reference to India’s and the Nazi regime. It is unfortunately a bit repetitive but its detailed examination of the many tentacles and modes of caste within the US, historically and today make for a compelling case and call to action.
• A couple more articles from my course reading list:
  • The Digital Image in Photographic Culture: Algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation, Daniel Rubinstein and Katrina Sluis – intriguing look at how digital photography differs from analog in terms of the broken indexicality of the digital.
  • Post-Photographic Presences, or How to Wear a Digital Cloak, Haidy Geismar – short article exploring the use of digital photographic technologies in re-animating a Maori cloak, with interesting discussion of indexicality vs presence, spirituality and community through contemporary network technologies.
• Silence, Thomas Perry – another heart-pounding thriller from Perry with some unexpected twists at the end.
• Gangsterland, Tod Goldberg – an amusing (and slightly terrifying) tale of a Chicago Mafia hitter hiding out as a Rabbi in Las Vegas. Well done!

October 2023

• What is liminal space? The nostalgia aesthetic used in the most watched cartoons, Rashmi Haralalka – a short article that conflates the art of liminal spaces with kidcore and nostalgia. For Haralalka liminal spaces don’t evoke the anomie of in-between non-spaces but the nostalgic warmth of the backgrounds from fondly remembered cartoons and TV shows of youth.
• Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud – I had thought this might be relevant for my work this semester but it transpires it’s another piece of Gallic semiotic, philosophic word salad. Moving on from the potential for art to engage us in social relations, Bourriaud spins unlikely combinations of psychoanalytic and anti-capitalist jargon, giving them his own arcane definitions, sneers condescendingly at those who might disagree or produce other forms of art, and uses Guattari’s subjectivities to defend his non-falsifiable and empty declarations. I don’t recommend it.
• The Truth About Lorin James, Alison Lurie – an interesting novel about a woman in the NY art world researching a planned biography of a brilliant, dead woman painter and seeking to find her own truth as much as her subject’s. From the late 1980s, it betrays its age with a peculiar portrayal of feminism, vacillating between robustness and shocking self-doubt. It’s not clear to me whether this reflects Lurie’s own sense or merely the state of (NY) women’s lib in the mid ’80s; it paints an unflattering portrait of women’s attempts to break free of patriarchy, I think.
• Vicious Circle, Robert Littell – another thriller from Littell, this one particularly apt at the moment. The first woman President of the US has knocked heads together to create a working plan for a Palestinian state whilst protecting Israel. Meanwhile fanatics on both sides can’t abide it and strangely parallel terrorists are actively attempting to scupper the deal before it can be consummated.
• Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel – another interesting short novel from Mandel, dealing with a glitch, music, time, pandemics and, probably, her own experience of writing an incredibly popular novel about a pandemic presciently before Covid-19.
• Secret/Wish, the problem of the object in relational aesthetics, Landi Raubenheimer – interesting article on the successes and failures of an artwork that sought to embody the principles of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics with a spectator-built event/work of art.
• Let us eat cake, Anthony Luvera – a bookroom object based on a collaborative, photography-based effort among the Northern Ireland LGBTQ+ community.
• Herbie’s Game, Timothy Hallinan – the 4th Junior Bender tale. Well written with some nice literary flourishes, a good yarn and amusing. A nice entertainment and break from photography theory.
• Contemporary Photography and Theory: Concepts and Debates, Sally Miller – another book from my course reading list. Some interesting discussion and debate but some of the more theoretical debates late in the book, especially the Lacan-related psychoanalytic stuff, are such non-falsifiable, phantasmic flights of sophomoric mental masturbation they made me want to scream.
• The PhotoPerformer: The Performance of Photography as an Act of Precarious Interdependency, Manuel Vason – PhD by Publication recommended by Emmanuelle Waeckerlé who supervised with Jean Wainwright, two of my teachers. An interesting exploration of performance/photography that was a tad too nebulous for my taste but intersected with issues I’m working on in my current projects.
• Photography and Collaboration: From Conceptual Art to Crowdsourcing, Daniel Palmer – an interesting and well written study of the ways in which photographic authorship have varied since the 1960s, starting with a set of potential sources or modes of authorship, each chapter moves on to examine 3 artists who play with different modes of creative partnership, collaboration, social engagement, metaphotography, and other techniques that undermine traditional concepts of sole authorship.
• The Civil Contract of Photography by Azoulay, Ariella, Chad McCracken – I thought I was downloading her book but it turned out simply to be a short review of it in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Just as well, as you can see below that in July I had to skip to the end in Azoulay’s Civil Imagination. Sontag talked about criticism as “the revenge of the intellect upon art,” and Azoulay’s writing illustrates this beautifully, while still exploring important issues in the production of photography across 500＋ pages.
• The Fame Thief, Timothy Hallinan – another amusingly told Junior Bender mystery, this time expanding on the character Irwin Dressler from the last novel, who is loosely based on a real mob lawyer and fixer in Hollywood. An enjoyable bit of entertainment with old film references.
• Dead Aim, Thomas Perry – another of his taut thrillers. Perhaps not so credible as others I’ve read.
• Media and the Ecological Crisis, Eds. Richard Maxwell, Jon Raundalen, Nina Lager Vestberg – I was unable to find a recommended article by Nina Vestberg so read this book instead. Some interesting new thoughts and awareness but such a poorly edited and patchy collection that it was ultimately dissatisfying.
• more articles for school work:
  1. Joan Fontcuberta: post-photography and the spectral image of saturation, Camila Moreiras – also watched Fontcuberta video, From Here On, which explains the post-photographic quite well
  2. The Post Photographic Condition: Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, Tracy Valcourt
• The Water Room, Christopher Fowler – another of the delicious Bryant and May mysteries, this one full of the arcana and history of London’s many ancient (but still extant) rivers.
• A miscellany of articles for school, trying to learn about the post-digital:
  1. Digital Art Now: Histories of (Im)Materealities, Christiane Paul – A history (and pre-history) of digital art and its materiality/immateriality. Some interesting points but I’m unpersuaded about the significance. I think new AI-generated artwork and the metaverse are the first instances of technologies that actually embody (so to speak) many of the concepts discussed in the article.
  2. Perspectives on the postdigital: Beyond rhetorics of progress and novelty, Sy Taffel – recommended reading from our teacher – I thought this was terrible. Similar to the “systems” material we read last year, academic writing about digital culture from someone who evidently has never read Orwell and over uses long Graeco-Latinate multi-syllabic words to impress, in long, badly formed sentences with multiple, superfluous prepositional clauses, ultimately saying very little.
  3. Post-Digital Humanities: Computation and Cultural Critique in the Arts and Humanities, David Berry – couldn’t make heads or tails of this.
  4. Autonomy and Space – Hans Haacke’s systems aesthetics, Florian Cramer – An early piece, not really about the post-digital from a well know post-digital critic. I wrote a screed about this in my journal. I think it was nonsense.
  5. After the artefact: Post-digital photography in our post media era, Greg Shapley – very helpful overview of the origins and meanings of the post-digital.
  6. Digital Realities and Virtual Ideals: Portraiture, Idealism and the Clash of Subjectivities in the Post-Digital Era, Euripides Altintzoglou – an interesting look at post digital portraiture by way of Rancière’s Regimes of the Arts.
  7. Regimes of the Arts, Jean-Philippe Deranty – good introduction to Rancière’s concept.
  8. The Aesthetic Dimension: Aesthetics, Politics, Knowledge, Jacques Rancière.

September 2023

• Castle in the Air, Donald E Westlake – a short, well-executed heist farce from 1980 by a writer I enjoy. As amusing and well written as it was, I’m not sure whether it was the story which did not age well, or me, but I found it a slog to get through.
• How Photography Became Contemporary Art: Inside an Artistic Revolution from Pop to the Digital Age, Andy Grundberg – An interesting personal view, very New York-centric, of the development of art’s use of photography and photography as art from a leading photography critic. Of particular interest is his distinction between what he calls connoisseurs and contextualists.
• The Last Detective, Robert Crais – another Elvis Cole and Joe Pike adventure, this time including the police detective who featured in Demolition Angel.
• Blind Spot, Teju Cole – An interesting book of photographs taken around the world interspersed with prose commentary that meditates and ruminates at the intersection of poetry, art, and politics. Somewhat reminiscent of Sebald who I first learned of in some of Cole’s earlier essays, in the combination of fiction that quotes broadly from history and the arts with photographs that may or may not illustrate the subject under discussion.
• On Green Dolphin Street, Sebastian Faulks – a love story, told against the backdrop of the US presidential election of 1960, the Cold War and post-war Britain. I had never heard of Faulks when I read a glowing review of his latest book in The Guardian and chose this to start with, based largely on the title and memories of Miles Davis’ rendition of the old standard.

August 2023

• Eddie’s Boy, Thomas Perry – another in the Butcher’s Boy series. The past comes back to haunt our hero murderer. Another taut thriller although I’m finding such yarns increasingly hard to swallow.
• photo text text photo: The Synthesis of Photography and Text in Contemporary Art, edited by Andreas Hapkemeyer and Peter Weiermair – I happened upon this at the University library and thought it might be relevant to my text photomontages but it was ultimately disappointing. It is the show catalogue of an exhibit of text-y photographs at the end of the 20th century put on by 2 German museums. Unfortunately, the reproductions are not large enough or good enough to really read all of the text and the explanatory materials aren’t helpful.
• on Landscape and Meaning, Richard Misrach – another of the Aperture Photography Workshop Series and one of the best. Misrach’s discussions of how he pursues ideas photographically is truly inspiring and gave me a number of ideas for things I’d like to explore with a camera.
• No Plan B, Lee and Andrew Child – another fast and furious Reacher thriller, the first I’ve read co-written with Child’s son. An entertaining diversion, although Reacher’s willingness to hurt or kill bad guys (who are drawn to richly deserve it) is beginning to pall.
• on the Portrait and the Moment, Mary Ellen Mark – another in the Aperture Photography Workshop Series, this one was quite good again. She really helps you understand how she’s looking at the world while composing, or constructing her images and what type of working style she and her students bring to their work.
• Face On: Photography as Social Exchange, Mark Durden and Craig Richardson, editors – interesting examination of the social relations that exist between photographic artists and their subjects, among contemporary portrait artists deliberately attempting to alter the traditional roles. While I found the central conceit interesting, I remain unpersuaded that most of these attempts really achieve their aims in the absence of written artists’ statements explaining them, which strikes me as missing the point of the medium.
• on Composition and Improvisation, Larry Fink – another in the Aperture photography workshop series (see Todd Hido, below). This one was not as impressive as Todd Hido’s. It had some observations on what made some of his pictures work, and quite a bit of philosophy of picture taking but was less successful at showing the cultivation or development of work in a way one could easily apply to one’s own practice.
• Street Photography From Atget to Cartier-Bresson, Clive Scott – a writer recommended to me by a technical tutor, the book ostensibly attempts to differentiate street photography from documentary photography, particularly Parisian street photography, by way of painting (particularly the Impressionists) and literature (Proust, Baudelaire, Apollinaire) and a discussion of the many temporal modes and moods of the street photography of this era (roughly 1860-1960). While there were many interesting ideas, I found it difficult to get through, with a lot of peculiarly French subjective meditations (á la Barthes), by contrast with a book like Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment which I found thoroughly enjoyable.
• The Old Success, Martha Grimes – a late entry (#25) in a series that is meant to revolve around pubs, although the Old Success Pub in this one plays a nugatory role. An American writer, her Richard Jury novels are based in England and this one read almost as a parody of an old fashioned British whodunit, more than The Knowledge (#24), which I remember quite enjoying.
• on Landscapes, Interiors and the Nude, Todd Hido – I picked up this book almost at random, browsing at the school library but I really enjoyed it. Hido describes his working practices, how he develops picture concepts, collections of pictures, tells stories and puts together books in an easy, conversational way. It’s a book for photographers. It’s not really about the genres of the title but it is about how he made pictures in those genres, if that distinction makes sense.
• Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, Michael Löwy – a fascinating look at the nexus of messianic-anarchist thought at the turn of the 20th century, with Walter Benjamin as the fulcrum between such diverse Jewish-German(ic) writers and thinkers as Kafka, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Erich Fromm, Georg Lukács, and others, less well remembered today, using the concept of elective affinities to illuminate the correspondence among the currents of thought.
• Forty Thieves, Thomas Perry – another enjoyable thriller from Perry, well written and almost credible, this time involving two couples on either side of a mystery that both joins and separates them.

July 2023

• Photography and its Violations, John Roberts – extremely abstract and metaphysical, full of sesquipedelian, Latinate words like “nonistrumentalized,” “nonheteronomous,” enculturalization,” dehierarchization,” and “nonrelationality,” which force you to decompose them into their component parts to parse their meaning (where Orwell and I would have preferred shorter Anglo-Saxon ones). He also tends to impute human actions or motivations to these abstractions. As new chapters began I sometimes felt I had a grasp on the argument but then, a couple of pages in I was lost. I think I’m not supposed to feel bad about taking documentary photographs as long as they’re tied to true, Left values.
• Clement Greenberg: A Political Reconsideration, Louis Battaglia in SHIFT | Queens Journal of Visual & Material Culture – a chance reference to this 25-page article in John Roberts’ The Violations of Photography, which I’m in the middle of, led me to this interesting reevaluation of Greenberg together with its survey of the mid-20th century cultural-political zeitgeist.
• The Word is Murder, Anthony Horowitz – the first in a series (including Magpie Murders) of whodunit mysteries where the author himself is a Watson-like documenter of a brilliant, if inscrutable, detective.
• The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Charlotte Cotton – Looks at contemporary photographic (and not so photographic, “postInternet” artists’ work, describing how each reflects concerns with the medium and context of photography with, usually, a single image to illustrate the work of each artist discussed. Maddening art-critic language, making multi-syllabic adjectives out of nouns rather than thinking about a better, more concise and understandable way to convey her meaning, but a useful compendium.
• Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay – I confess I couldn’t read all of this book skipping from about Chapter Two (of four) to the Epilogue. A philosophical and political examination of photography in the context of the Palestinian plight, examining the roles of photographers, subjects, and viewers. One of those dense, French, Cartesian, hyper-rational texts of impossible logical leaps. Nevertheless, it makes the telling point that by focusing our vision on the oppressed Palestinians we are failing to focus on the regime that not only oppresses them, but implicates “innocent” Israelis in that oppression by hiding and obfuscating the nature of the subjugation (I think).
• Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel – a strange and enjoyable novel stitching together the lives and times of several characters before and after a catastrophic pandemic alters human civilization irrevocably, tied together with Shakespeare’s King Lear
• Bank Shot, Donald E Westlake – another amusing caper for the fatigued Dortmunder, great quick vacation read.
• The Wild One, Nick Petrie – another Peter Ash thriller in which his PTSD again gives him superpowers. A faraday cage made out of tin foil, really? Please!
• The Company, Robert Littell – a novelistic history of the CIA up to the early 1990s, capturing many of their most epic failures but, ultimately, swallowing whole the mythology of “the American Way,” cowboy antics and the notion that the ends justify the means (while piously pretending not to).

June 2023

• Put On by Cunning, Ruth Rendell – Wexford is obsessed with an impossible impostor, before all is revealed.
• By Its Cover, Donna Leon – Commissario Brunetti investigates rare book thefts and murder.
• Redhead by the Side of the Road, Anne Tyler – a well-written short novel, novella perhaps, telling the story of a middle-aged man who hasn’t figured life out.
• Little Elvises, Timothy Hallinan – another enjoyable entry in the Junior Bender series, a smart-mouthed burglar and detective for crooks has to juggle 3 criminal investigations, his love life and his relationship with his precocious teenage daughter.
• Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy, Claire Provost and Matt Kennard – the basis for a new exhibit by the brilliant Peter Kennard. Charts not just the privatisation of the state but the usurpation of democratic control by corporate, non-state players globally. States are now agents of transnational corporations rather than their regulators.
• Brain Energy, Christopher M Palmer, MD – an interesting “self-help” book that looks at the difficulties of categorizing, diagnosing and treating mental diseases and finds underlying them all problems of metabolism and, specifically mitochondrial health, suggesting a range of treatment regimes from, diet and exercise to meditation, medication and life purpose.
• The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, Lawrence Block – Another Bernie Rhodenbarr the burglar mystery with all the usual fixins, good NY couleur locale, literary jokes and general good humor.
• The Golden Egg, Donna Leon – from 2013 but one of the best Commissario Brunetti’s mysteries I’ve read in a while, with lots of subtle psychology and a surprising outcome.
• Small Town, Lawrence Block – a post 9/11 mystery, with lots of New York local color and a surprising amount of steamy sex, but definitely up to the Block standard.
• On the Abolition of All Political Parties, Simone Weil, with essays by Czeslaw Milosz and Simon Ley – an impassioned plea against the logically ineluctable dishonesty of political parties by one of the 20th century’s most fascinating intellectuals.
• City of the Mind, Penelope Lively – an excellent novel. What Joyce did for Dublin, Lively does here for London, imbricating it in the stream of consciousness of a London architect and father, with differing perceptions of time and the city, and voices from past London’s enriching the timeless story.

May 2023

• The Madman of Bergerac, Georges Simenon – feeling lazy after walking the Cornwall coast for 8 miles a day, I relaxed with a short, early Inspector Maigret.
• Nobody’s Perfect, Donald E Westlake – an older Dortmunder tale, this one gone hilariously awry in the manner of Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.
• Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland – a great, short book on the difficulties of making art and how to overcome the many fears that prevent one from continuing.
• Look For Me, Lisa Gardner – My first Gardner murder mystery. A good yarn told from multiple perspectives. An unfortunate tendency to tell rather than show, but a definite page turner.
• The Burglar, Thomas Perry – fun murder mystery, told by a burglar who becomes involved.
• The Modern Concept of History, Hannah Arendt – just a short article really, I read following up on the Peter Kennard exhibit based on it. Explores the history of our (Western) conception of history, comparing contemporary perspectives with those of the Greeks and evaluating beside our perspectives on science in the context of humanity’s place in the world.
• Nobody Runs Forever, Richard Stark – another taut Parker novel, as it turns out immediately preceding Dirty Money which I read a couple of weeks ago.
• Demolition Angel, Robert Crais – I’d been expecting a Joe Pike and Elvis Cole mystery but got something new. A heart-pounding mad bomber mystery.

April 2023

• Homicide Trinity, Rex Stout – 3 short but enjoyable, if somewhat musty, murder mysteries. They seemed familiar so perhaps I read them already, though it’s not listed below.
• The Music Room, Dennis McFarland – A novel in which a thirty-year old man becomes unmoored when his brother commits suicide and traverses his drunken family’s history to find himself.
• Dirty Money, Richard Stark – a short, sharp noir thriller, starring Parker. Not one word too many.
• The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki – a remarkable novel of voices and Zen, in which Walter Benjamin plays a part as well as Zen emptiness (mu) from my haiku project. Plays with questions of text and authorship as well. Excellent!
• Gone Tomorrow, Lee Child – another suspenseful Jack Reacher yarn. As usual requires no little suspension of disbelief and global realities but hard to put down.
• Hanna Höch, – a collection of essays on her work, with some of her writings and interviews but mostly plates that show her work. An important collagist and photomontagist of the 20th century and potentially useful to my project this semester.
• Good Behavior, Donald E Westlake – one of the Dortmunder stories, dry and amusing. Good fun and aging slightly better than some others of the era (1985).

March 2023

• The art of interruption: Realism, photography and the everyday, John Roberts – An academic history of photography and criticism from a class-based perspective. I have to admit to skating over some of the opaque and arcane debates within Russian early-Leninist circles. Written in an anti-Orwellian style of periphrasis, the author never uses a short, concrete Anglo-Saxon word where a long Latinate one with supernumerary syllables can be used instead. From a chapter on Jeff Wall’s photographs, for instance, we have, “Marx’s complex theory of totality is a fallibilistic attempt to understand the specificity of the discrete ontological levels of society as a historical process,” and, a page later, “The totalising of consciousness, then, offers a particular dialogic address for the spectator.” Mostly impenetrably dense, there were a few nuggets of insight I gleaned and an awareness of a class-based perspective.
• The Once and Future Spy, Robert Littell – Another great one from Littell. This one, something of a tour de farce, both showing the cleverness of the secret services and mocking their depravity. With some excellent historical and literary echoes as well.
• The Rings of Saturn, W. G Sebald – a most unusual novel, with no apparent plot or driving mystery, in which a protagonist who may or may not be the author, walks England’s Eastern coast, along the way regaling with all manner of tenuously linked bits of history from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial to the Dowager Empress of China, supported by fuzzy old photographs apparently documenting the fantastic tales.
• Silverview, John le Carré – his last and quite good. The usual clever and subtle English bonhomie, and this time, perhaps, a certain wistfulness for a Service that has lost its guiding raison d’être.
• The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes – Another brilliant novella (?) from Barnes meditating on time, memory, and remorse with his usual deep insights into the human psyche casually delivered along the way.
• The Finance Curse: How Global Finance is Making Us All Poorer, Nicholas Shaxson – a scathing indictment of the financialisation of the global economy. While he ends on a hopeful note for the opportunities to fix things, it paints a pretty grim picture of how the wealthy have taken over everything, massively increased inequality, and tightly proscribed the scope for remediation.
• Warlight, Michael Ondaatje – A novel of postwar England in which a young man attempts to reconstruct his mysterious and interrupted boyhood and family history. Well written and literary (by the author of The English Patient), although not as satisfying for me as hoped.
• The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer – a remarkable book that meditates on the ways in which photographs and photographers commune with each other across time and common themes. It re-inspired me at a low-point in my MFA.
• A Purple Place for Dying, John D MacDonald – another old Travis McGee tale. Good story but it’s harder and harder to stomach the sorts of attitudes to women that passed for enlightened in 1964.
• The Debriefing, Robert Littell – a taut, short espionage thriller of the Soviet era, clever and well written and reminiscent in some ways of the best of early le Carré.
• Visual Dissent, Peter Kennard – stunning e-book of Kennard’s history of political art that is truly inspiring. All these works take on major issues, mostly through photo-montage. I would love to see if I can connect with him somehow.

February 2023

• Research in Photography: Behind the Image, Anna Fox and Natasha Caruana – a lot of resources for the research to be done and professional practices to be developed behind the creation of photography. Unfortunately, many of the web resources provided are already defunct.
• Tear It Down, Nick Petrie – Another Peter Ash adventure, this time attempting a racially charged situation. Story very engaging but as far as the race part goes, and the violence, made me a little uncomfortable here and there.
• Art Photography, David Bate – an interesting overview of the historical relations between art and photography with, for my taste, a little too much fealty to the hyper-intellectualism of the likes of Foucault and Victor Burgin. This school of thought likes to demonstrate that the very hotness of heat makes it cold, the whiteness of white renders it black.
• Liberalism: A Counter-History, Domenico Losurdo – a remarkable, scholarly assessment of the history of classical liberalism and its entanglement with genocidal racism.

January 2023

• Unto Us a Son is Given, Donna Leon
• Speech Police, David Kaye
• The Investigator, John Sandford
• The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt
• The Informant, Thomas Perry
• The Law of the Land: The Evolution of our Legal System, Charles Rembar
• Persuader, Lee Child

December 2022

• Paleopoetics: The Evolution of the Preliterate Imagination, Christopher Collins
• Surviving Autocracy, Masha Gessen
• Tripwire, Lee Child
• The Affair, Lee Child
• Pronto, Elmore Leonard
• Illuminance, Rinko Kawauchi
• Cui Cui, Rinko Kawauchi
• Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes [again]
• Crudo, Olivia Laing
• The Prodigal Spy, Joseph Kanon

November 2022

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin
• Light it Up, Nick Petrie
• Time, Eva Hoffman
• The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Paul Virilio
• Utatane, Rinko Kawauchi
• A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America, Elliot Currie
• Architecture of Time, Hiroshi Sugimoto
• Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes
• Driving on the Rim, Thomas McGuane
• Girl Pictures, Justine Kurland
• Critical Theory Today, Lois Tyson

October 2022

• Die Trying, Lee Child
• Dead Lions, Mick Herron
• Echo Burning, Lee Child
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt
• Running Blind, Lee Child
• The Unfolding, A M Homes
• Out of the Wreckage, George Monbiot
• Anxious People, Fredrik Backman
• A Deadly Shade of Gold, John D MacDonald

September 2022

• The Camera: Essence and Apparatus, Victor Burgin
• Understanding a Photograph, John Berger
• Ways of Seeing, John Berger
• The Postscript Murders, Elly Griffiths
• The Sentry, Robert Crais
• The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Edward Luce
• Bad Boy Brawly Brown, Walter Mosley
• Bad Actors, Mick Herron
• The Empty Copper Sea, John D MacDonald

August 2022

• Eternal Life, Dara Horn
• Photography: A Critical Introduction (6 ed.), Liz Wells, editor
• First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek
• The General’s Daughter, Nelson DeMille
• A Dangerous Man, Robert Crais
• The Unbanking of America, Lisa Servon
• Metzger’s Dog, Thomas Perry

July 2022

• The Heavens, Sandra Newman
• 24/7, Jonathan Crary
• Native Tongue, Carl Hiaasen
• A Famished Heart, Nicola White
• Ways of Seeing, John Berger
• Case Histories, Kate Atkinson
• Understanding a Photograph, John Berger
• Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate, Adam Jentleson
• The Godwulf Manuscript, Robert B Parker
• It’s Time to Fight Dirty, David Faris

June 2022

• Crashed, Timothy Hallinan
• A Trick of the Light, Louise Penny
• The Knowledge, Martha Grimes

May 2022

• Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead
• The Short Life and Curious Death of Free Speech in America, Ellis Cose
• Slough House, Mick Herron
• The Walkaway, Scott Phillips
• The Last Voice You Hear, Mick Herron
• Nobody Walks, Mick Herron
• The Catch, Mick Herron
• Joe Country, Mick Herron
• Dead Street, Mickey Spillane

April 2022

• French Exit, Patrick deWitt
• The Sentence Is Death, Anthony Horowitz
• Bright Orange for the Shroud, John D MacDonald
• Box 88, Charles Cumming
• The Anomaly, Hervé Le Tellier
• Suburban Dicks, Fabian Nicieza
• The Moon in the Gutter, David Goodis
• The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead
• Deadeye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut

March 2022

• The Drifter, Nick Petrie
• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier
• Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism, Robert Kuttner
• Lullaby Town, Robert Crais
• The Dark Hours, Michael Connelly
• The Runaway, Nick Petrie
• 1979, Val McDermid

February 2022

• Nothing to See Here, Kevin Wilson
• Burning Bright, Nick Petrie
• A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan
• The First Rule, Robert Crais
• Clock Without Hands, Carson McCullers
• Alone Street, Gregory Crewdson

January 2022

• On Fascism: 12 Lessons from American History, Matthew C MacWilliams
• Midnight Mile, Dennis Lehane
• The Loo Sanction, Trevanian
• Guilty Minds, Joseph Finder
• The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies and the Fate of Liberty, Daron Acemoglu & James A Robinson
• Gutshot Straight, Lou Berney
• Hit and Run, Lawrence Block
• The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot

December 2021

• Maigret Hesitates, Georges Simenon
• St Patrick’s Day Murder, Lee Harris
• Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius, Harry Freedman
• The Devil You Know, Charles M Blow
• The Nomination, William G Tapply
• Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari
• Hour of the Assassin, Matthew Quirk
• Talking to my Daughter About the Economy or, How Capitalism Works – and How it Fails, Yanis Varoufakis
• Eighth Dwarf, Ross Thomas
• Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat
• A Bitter Feast, Deborah Crombie

November 2021

• White is for Witching, Helen Oyeyemi
• Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, Francis Fukuyama
• The Detective and the Chinese High-Fin, Michael Craven
• Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, Amy Bach
• Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann
• Tropic of Night, Michael Gruber

October 2021

• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt
• Summer, Ali Smith
• The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield
• Spring, Ali Smith
• Lush Life, Dallas Murphy
• Winter, Ali Smith
• Autumn, Ali Smith
• Death Benefits, Thomas Perry
• Dead Irish, John Lescroart
• The Stranger Diaries, Elly Griffiths

September 2021

• Oranges and Lemons, Christopher Fowler
• Daylight, David Baldacci
• The Lost Shtetl, Max Gross
• The Ice Swimmer, Kjell Ola Dahl
• To Have or to Be?, Erich Fromm
• How You Say It, Katherine D Kinzler
• Black Buck, Mateo Askaripour

August 2021

• Final Account, Peter Robinson
• The Quick Red Fox, John D MacDonald
• Teeth of the Dog, Jill Ciment
• Deacon King Kong, James McBride
• Stalking the Angel, Robert Crais
• Hooked, Michael Moss
• Bird in a Cage, Frédéric Dard
• What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He & She, Dennis Baron
• The Monkey’s Raincoat, Robert Crais
• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J Gaines
• A Shadow Intelligence, Oliver Harris

July, 2021

• The President’s Dossier, James A. Scott
• Electric Barracuda, Tim Dorsey
• The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee
• The Conjure-Man Dies, Rudolph Fisher
• Even Dogs in the Wild, Ian Rankin
• How to Live Safely In a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu
• The Pardon, James Grippando
• The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
• Squeeze Me, Carl Hiaasen
• Through a Glass, Darkly, Donna Leon
• Night of Fire, Colin Thubron
• Winterkill, Ragnar Jonasson
• New England Bound, Wendy Warren

June, 2021

• The Life of the Mind, Christine Smallwood
• Speedboat, Renata Adler
• The Wolf, Lorenzo Carcaterra
• But What if We’re Wrong, Chuck Klosterman
• Lost and Wanted, Nell Freudenberger
• A Thousand Pardons, Jonathan Dee

May, 2021

• Wherever You Go, Joan Leegant
• Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies, Dick Gregory
• Moonflower Murders, Anthony Horowitz
• Fatal Invention, Dorothy Roberts
• Still Life with Bread Crumbs, Anna Quindlen
• Butcher’s Moon, Richard Stark
• Ask the Parrot, Richard Stark
• The Burglar in Short Order, Lawrence Block
• Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Number9Dream, David Mitchell

April, 2021

• Near Enemy, Adam Sternbergh
• Too Many Cooks, Rex Stout
• D, Michael Faber
• Parishioner, Walter Mosley
• Begin Again, Eddie S Glaude Jr
• The Tenth Commandment, Lawrence Sanders
• Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, Michael Walzer

March, 2021

• Out of Sight, Elmore Leonard
• My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
• The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit
• Crying Out Loud, Cath Staincliffe
• Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart
• House of Correction, Nicci French
• Quichotte, Salman Rushdie

February, 2021

• Shut Your Eyes Tight, John Verdon
• Picnic Comma Lightning, Laurence Scott
• Snow, John Banville
• The Holdout, Graham Moore
• The Battle for Human Nature, Barry Schwartz

January, 2021

• Photo Work: Forty Photographers on Process and Practice, Sasha Wolf, editor
• The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Nine Shiny Objects, Brian Castleberry
• Little Gods, Meng Jin

December, 2020

• Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin
• IQ, Joe Ide
• Six Days of the Condor, James Grady
• The Order, Daniel Silva
• Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra
• The Silver Swan, Elena Delbanco
• Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas
• Serafim and Claire, Mark Lavorato
• The Kill Artist, Daniel Silva
• Improvement, Joan Silber
• The Dakota Winters, Tom Barbash
• The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
• Naked Came the Florida Man, Tim Dorsey

November, 2020

• The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, Danny Lyon
• The Overstory, Richard Powers
• November Road, Lou Berney
• Galápagos, Kurt Vonnegut
• Too Many Women, Rex Stout
• American Spy, Lauren Wilkinson
• Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry
• Day of the Dead, Nicci French
• Everywhere You Don’t Belong, Gabriel Bump
• Friday on My Mind, Nicci French
• The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald
• Escape Clause, John Sandford
• Holy Ghost, John Sandford

October, 2020

• Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, Lawrence Block
• The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, Lawrence Block
• How Fascism Works, Jason Stanley
• And Sometimes I Wonder About You, Walter Mosley
• The Weight of Ink, Rachel Kadish
• The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Tim Wu
• Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed
• The Consciousness Instinct, Michael S. Gazzaniga

September, 2020

• Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss
• Nightmare in Pink, John D MacDonald
• Dunbar, Edward St. Aubyn
• Rose Gold, Walter Mosley
• In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic, Peter Berger & Anton Zijderveld
• Let Me Be Frank With You, Richard Ford
• The High Window, Raymond Chandler
• Fearless Jones, Walter Mosley
• Past Tense, Lee Child
• The Antagonist, Lynn Coady
• White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg 
• Baroni, Alfred Harris
• Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday
• A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines
• The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen

August, 2020

• Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, Sarah Meister, Nicole Fleetwood, Bryan Stevenson, Gordon Parks
• Persons Unknown, Susie Steiner
• Reader, Come Home, Maryanne Wolf
• The Pale Criminal, Philip Kerr
• A German Requiem, Philip Kerr
• World Without Mind, Franklin Foer
• Paradise, Toni Morrison
• Jazz, Toni Morrison

July 2020

• Many Rivers to Cross, Peter Robinson 2020-07-27
• Fletch’s Moxie, Gregory Mcdonald 2020-07-24
• Gumshoe on the Loose, Rob Leininger 2020-07-22
• Rocket to the Morgue, Anthony Boucher 2020-07-20
• The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe, Romain Puertolas 2020-07-19
• Eight Perfect Murders, Peter Swanson 2020-07-11
• The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, John D. MacDonald 2020-07-10
• Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz 2020-07-08
• Tishomingo Blues, Elmore Leonard 2020-07-07
• The Laughing Policeman, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo 2020-07-01

June 2020

• The Velvet Rope Economy, Nelson D. Schwartz 2020-06-30
• Calamity at Harwood, George Bellairs 2020-06-27
• The Midnight House, Alex Berenson 2020-06-26
• McNally’s Secret, Lawrence Sanders 2020-06-25
• Pale Gray for Guilt, John D. MacDonald 2020-06-24
• The Hot Rock, Donald E. Westlake 2020-06-22
• Call Me Zebra, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi 2020-06-21
• Please Pass the Guilt, Rex Stout 2020-06-08
• The Circle, Dave Eggers 2020-06-07
• The Long Lavender Look, John D. MacDonald 2020-06-06
• Empire of Things, Frank Trentmann 2020-06-03

May 2020

• Killing with Confetti,Peter Lovesey 2020-05-09
• The Searcher, Simon Toyne 2020-05-07
• The Boy Who Saw, Simon Toyne 2020-05-03
• A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré 2020-05-02
• Shylock Is My Name, Howard Jacobson 2020-05-02

September 2019

• The Rise & Fall of Great Powers, Tom Rachman 2019-09-16
• The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman 2019-09-04
• Charcoal Joe, Walter Mosley 2019-09-02

Earlier

non-Fiction	Mysteries	Other Fiction
Everybody Lies	Journey into Fear	Mr. Vertigo
First Class Passengers on a Sinking Ship: Elite Politics and the Decline of Great Powers	The Light of Day	The Book of Evidence
Empire of Things	A Coffin for Demetrios	Open City
The Origins of Totalitarianism	The Case of the 7 Whistlers	Voltaire’s Calligrapher
Picture This	Murder in the Marais	The Names
Between the World and Me	Burglars Can’t be Choosers	Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
From Bacteria to Bach and Back	The Burglar in the Library	Juneteenth
The Origins of Political Order	The Burglar on the Prowl	Dinner at the Center of the Earth
Sapiens	The White Trilogy	First Person
Capital in the 21st Century	Red Hook	The Comedians
The Blank Slate	The Black Echo	The Ministry of Fear
Enlightenment Now	Trunk Music	The Quiet American
The Stuff of Thought	The Last Good Kiss	A Horse Walks into a Bar
Food Rules	Shadows Still Remain	The Library at Mount Char
The Omnivore’s Dilemma	Buried on Avenue B	Prodigal Spy
The Evolution of Everything	Manhattan is my Beat	Our Kind of Traitor
Prime Green: Remembering the 60s	The Remorseful Day	Call for the Dead
A People’s History of the US	Blood Rain	Smiley’s People
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism	Murder in the Queens Armes	Is this Tomorrow
The Company	The Double Game	Mr Paradise
The Signal and the Noise	Broken Harbor	The Photograph
The Black Swan	Payment in Blood	The Hike
Dataclysm	For the Sake of Elena	Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Breaking the Spell	Careless in Red	Tangerine
Thinking Fast and Slow	The Woman from Prague	So You don’t get Lost in the Neighborhood
Liberalism	Exit Lines	Woman with a Blue Pencil
The Moral Landscape	Magpie Murders	At Swim Two Birds
Consciousness Explained	A Firing Offense	Appointment in Samarra
A Short History of Nearly Everything	A Mind to Murder	The Expats
The Language Instinct	A Certain Justice	The Tragedy of Arthur
The Red Queen	Sacred and Profane	Bleeding Edge
The End of Faith	Moonlight Mile	The Mathematician’s Shiva
Why We Buy	By its Cover	The Speed of Light
$uperHubs	In Big Trouble	Super Sad True Love Story
Inside the Dream Palace	Innocent Blood	On the Lisbon Disaster
	The Last Detective	Jailbird
	The Chill	The Golem and the Jinni
	Accident on the A35	The Imperfectionists
	The Marx Sisters	The Rise and Fall of Great Powers
	Silver Meadow	Shylock is My Name
	Corpus Christmas	The Boy Who Saw
	The Ruin	The Searcher
	Little Green	The Circle
	Nemesis	Call Me Zebra
	So Say the Fallen	Tishomingo Blues
	Killing Orders	The Blind Assassin
	Critical Mass	The Robber Bride
	Disappeared	Radio Free Vermont
	Déjà Dead	Solar Bones
	From Doon with Death	Inherent Vice
	Wolf to the Slaughter	Absurdistan
	The Best Man to Die	The Story of Lucy Gault
	An Unkindness of Ravens	A Gentleman in Moscow
	The Veiled One	The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir who got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe
	McNally’s Secret
	Buried Prey
	Stolen Prey
	Extreme Prey
	The Late Monsieur Gallet
	Heat Lightning
	Whose Body?
	The Judge’s House
	Last Seen Alive
	RoseAnna
	The Locked Room
	Not Quite Dead Enough
	Murder by the Book
	If Death Ever Slept
	And Four to Go
	Homicide Trinity
	Outsider in Amsterdam
	Think of a Number
	Shut Your Eyes Tight
	Wolf Lake
	King Solomon’s Carpet
	Finnegan’s Week
	The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper
	The Laughing Policeman
	Calamity at Harwood
	Pale Gray for Guilt
	The Hot Rock
	Please Pass the Guilt
	The Long Lavender Look
	Eight Perfect Murders
	Gumshoe on the Loose
	Fletch’s Moxie
	Many Rivers to Cross

Photography Books

Some of the favorite books of photographs in my collection (starting unabashedly with two of my own self-published books of photos. [back to top]

• Alone Together, Together Alone: A Modern Romance, Adam Isler with Margaret Haggerty, 2025 (UK link, US link)
• Camera Obscura, Adam Isler, Blurb, 2010
• Early Color, Saul Leiter, Steidl, 2006 – this is a book I repeatedly turn to for inspiration
• The Last Resort, Martin Parr, Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2009
• The Americans, Robert Frank, Steidl edition, 2008
• Eye, Mind, Spirit: The Enduring Legacy of Minor White, Nathan Lyons, ed., Howard Greenberg Gallery, 2008
• Helen Levitt, Helen Levitt, powerHouse Books, 2008
• Friedlander, Peter Galassi, Museum of Modern Art, 2005
• Women, Annie Liebovitz -photographs, Susan Sontag – essay, Random House, 1999
• Sergio Larrain, Agnès Sire, Aperture, 2013
• The Suffering of Light, Alex Webb, Aperture, 2011
• Modern Color, Fred Herzog, Hatje Cantz, 2017
• A Kind of Rapture, Robert Bergman, Pantheon, 1998
• East 100th Street, Bruce Davidson, Harvard University Press, 1970
• Shtetl in the Sun, Andy Sweet, Letter16 Press, 2018
• Only Human, Judy Dater, Marymount Institute Press, 2017
• Kitchen Table Series, Carrie Mae Weems, Damiani and Matsumoto Editions, 2016

Books of photography criticism:

• The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer – a remarkable book that meditates on the ways in which photographs and photographers commune with each other across time and common themes. It re-inspired me at a low-point in my MFA.
• Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Geoffrey Batchen, MIT Press, 1999 – Fascinating, erudite, academic discussion of the history and meaning of photography, somewhat let down for me at the end by lots of post-modern gobbledy-gook. Well worth reading.
• Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images, 4th ed., Terry Barrett, McGraw Hill, 2006
• The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Aperture, 1999
• Why People Photograph, Robert Adams, Aperture, 1994
• Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography, Peter C. Bunnell, Aperture, 2009
• The Nature of Photographs: A Primer, Stephen Shore, Phaidon, 2008
• The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski, Museum of Modern Art, 2007

 And some books on making pictures that I have found helpful:

• The Passionate Photographer: Ten Steps Toward Becoming Great, Steve Simon, New Riders, 2012
• Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision, David DuChemin, New Riders, 2009
• The Practice of Contemplative Photography: Seeing the World with Fresh Eyes, Andy Karr and Michael Wood, Shambhala, 2011
• The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos, Michael Freeman, Focal Press, 2007
• The Photographer’s Mind: Creative thinking for better digital photos, Michael Freeman, Focal Press, 2011
• The Photographer’s Vision: Understanding and Appreciating Great Photography, Michael Freeman, Focal Press, 2011
• The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression, Bruce Barnbaum, Rocky Nook, 2010
• On Street Photography and the Poetic Image, Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb, Aperture, 2014