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Journal






04 Feb 2024 — Books read in 2023 

I’m late as usual. Perpetually running behind was my modus operandi in the garden last year, even as the cold set in and there was less to do. I suspect this year will not be that different, even with the ability to start in spring rather than summer. I suspect all farming feels this way. It was like that working with Lulu in the vineyards in Jura. The trimming, the weeding, the mowing — there was always more we could do. Yet the fruit won’t wait to be picked. We can only do what we can do. So I’m late sharing this list of books, but only socially, the land won’t mind.

I read less in 2023 than I did in 2022 and 2021. After living out of a suitcase for much of 2019 and 2020, and reading minimally, I set myself the goal to read one book per fortnight while I was stagnant during an eight-month London lockdown. With the intention set and accomplished (just), I upped my aspirational count to one book per week the following year. While setting these kinds of goals might seem impossible to some and laughable to others — for me, reading is perhaps another modern, personal measure of what success feels like. As I writer, I need to be reading. My writing is only good if I’m reading the work of others. What I write about is only relevant and meaningful if I’m gathering knowledge and reading widely. For me, reading has purpose, but it’s also incredibly pleasurable. It’s a practice, one that could always expand. There’s always more to read.

The garden shifted things in 2023. This small, wonky patch of earth needed my attention — contractually and regeneratively. And so my priorities shifted, spending evenings and weekends tending to soil and seedlings, instead of my 積ん読 (tsundoku). That need and desire to read sits sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly in my body — the teetering stack by my bedside both a helpful reminder to read and a guilty reminder of not-reading. But gardening would slow with the cold, and I imagined making the long winter months cosy, slow, and joyful by retreating to bed early, eager to read. In some ways that happened. And in some ways it didn’t.

Many of the audiobooks below, I listened to while gardening. Both fiction and non-fiction proving useful and enjoyable companions during hours of repetitive digging. Only How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century and Doughnut Economics were specific to work. Everything else was driven by curiosity, pleasure, and the seasons.


Documented by order with medium specified.


[A] audio
[T] tangible


1 [A] Asylum Road, Olivia Sudjic
2 [T] Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi
3 [A] The City We Became, N. K. Jemisin
4 [T] no one is talking about this, Patricia Lockwood (shared by Lizzie Stafford while home in AU)
5 [T] New Australian Fiction 2020, Kill Your Darlings
6 [T] Earthrunner and the war of water, Simon and Constantine Pakavakis (shared by Em Hui)
7 [A] How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell
8 [A] Black Earth Wisdom, Leah Penniman
9 [A] Sympathy, Olivia Sudjic
10 [A] Saving Time, Jenny Odell
11 [A] Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit
12 [A] The Right to Sex, Ama Srinivasan
13 [A] August Blue, Deborah Levy
14 [A] This Ragged Grace, Octavia Bright
15 [T] Drop Bear, Evelyn Araluen
16 [A] Pageboy, Elliot Page
17 [A] Swimming Home, Deborah Levy
18 [A] Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit
19 [T] At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies' Pond
20 [T] Supplement to the Italian Dictionary, Bruno Munari
21 [A] How to Be Both, Ali Smith
22 [A] The Voice to Parliament Handbook, Thomas Mayo & Kerry O'Brien
23 [A] Public Library and Other Stories, Ali Smith
24 [A] Foreign Soil, Maxine Beneba Clarke
25 [T] How to be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century, Erik Olin Wright
26 [A+T] Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth
27 [T] The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K Le Guin
28 [T] Designerly ways of knowing, Danah Abdulla
29 [T] Dawn, Octavia Butler
30 [A] Wintering, Katherine May
31 [A] Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel
32 [A] Unexpected Stories, Octavia Butler
33 [T] I Didn't Do The Thing Today, Madeleine Dore
34 [T] The Xenofeminist Manifesto, Laboria Cuboniks
35 [T] Paradise Rot, Jenny Hval
36 [A] The Ethical Slut, Janet W Hardy and Dossie Easton
Mark