Linsey Rendell

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. 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) in 2021, 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 read, with medium specified. [A] audio — [T] tangible.

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