Readings completed for research or pleasure. Favourites in bold.
2026
- Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume III (trans. Jennifer Russell)
- Geoffrey D. Morrison, The Coffin of Honey
- B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates
2025
- Rinko Kawauchi, At the edge of the everyday world
- Hervé Guibert, To the Friend who did not Save My Life (trans. Linda Cloverdale)
- Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar (trans. William Weaver)
- Issa Quincy, Absence
- Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff; reread)
- Atsuko Sakaki, The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature
- Aperture, Special Issue on Japan, 2015
- Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, The Time of Photography
- Mark Haber, Lesser Ruins
- Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (trans. David McLintock)
- Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters (trans. Ewald Osers)
- Mieko Kanai, Oh, Tama! (trans. Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy)
- Mathieu Lindon, Hervelino (trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman)
- Esther Kinsky, Seeing Further (trans. Caroline Schmidt)
- Mark Haber, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (re-read)
- Mai Ishizawa, The Place of Shells (trans. Polly Barton)
- Annie Ernaux, The Uses of Photography (trans. Alison L. Strayer)
- I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, Pauline Vermare & Leslie A. Martin eds.
- Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (trans. Ann Goldstein)
- Cees Nooteboom, Mokusei (trans. Adrienne Dixon)
- Anne Serre, A Leopard-Skin Hat (trans. Mark Hutchinson)
- Benjamin Swett, The Picture Not Taken
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Inseparables (trans. Sandra Smith)
- Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume I (trans. Barbara J. Haveland)
- Philippe Jaccottet, The Pilgrim’s Bowl (trans. John Taylor)
- Isabelle Graw, On the Benefits of Friendship (trans. Ben Caton)
- Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume II (trans. Barbara J. Haveland)
- Carole Maso, The Art Lover
- Annie Ernaux, Exteriors (re-read; trans. Tanya Leslie)
- Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection (trans. Sophie Hughes)
- Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here is Everything (re-read; trans. Penny Hueston)
- Kate Palmer Albers, The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (re-read)
- Lisa Tuttle, My Death
- Sergio Chejfec, My Two Worlds (trans. Margaret B. Carson)
- Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour (script; trans. Richard Seaver)
- Sergio Chejfec, The Planets (trans. Heather Cleary)
- Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1
- Contact: Theory
- Anna Atkins, Blue Prints
- Yoko Tawada, Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda)
- Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T (trans. Christopher Middleton)
- Marlen Haushofer, Killing Stella (trans. Shaun Whiteside)
- Augusto Higa Oshiro, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu (trans. Jennifer Shyue)
- Luigi Ghirri, The Complete Essays, 1973-1991 (trans. Ben Bazalgette and Marguerite Shore)
- Ben Tufnell, The North Shore
- Barbara E. Thornbury, Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves
- Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows, ed. Amanda Maddox
- Taiyo Matsumoto, Tokyo These Days
- Kobo Abe, Friends (trans. Donald Keene)
- Keizo Hino, Isle of Dreams (trans. Charles de Wolf)
- Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays
- Emily Hall, The Longcut (re-read)
- Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni (trans. Tim Parks)
- Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo (trans. William Weaver)
- Giorgio Agamben, Self-Portrait in the Studio (trans. Kevin Attell)
- Chu T’ien-Wen, Notes of a Desolate Man (trans. Howard Goldblatt)
- Natsume Soseki, The Gate (trans. William F. Sibley)
- Jenny Erpenbeck, Things that Disappear (trans. Kurt Beals)
- Giorgio Agamben, Studiolo (trans. Alberto Toscano)
- Daniele Del Giudice, A Fictional Inquiry (trans. Anne Milano Appel)
2024
- Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker)
- Junichiro Tanizaki, A Cat, A Man, and Two Women (trans. Paul McCarthy)
- Karl Thomas Smith, Now Go: On Grief and Studio Ghibli
- Tacita Dean, Monet Hates Me
- Kobo Abe, The Face of Another (trans. E. Dale Saunders)
- Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment
- Amalie Smith, Marble (trans. Jennifer Russell)
- Werner Herzog, Of Walking in Ice (trans. Marje Herzog and Alan Greenberg)
- Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye
- Dasa Drndic, Trieste (trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac)
- Daido Moriyama, How I Take Photographs (trans. Lucy North)
- Thyago Nogueira, ed. Daido Moriyama, A Retrospective
- Jazmina Barrera, Cross Stitch (trans. Christina MacSweeney)
- Kyoko Nakajima, The Little House (Ginny Tapley Takemori)
- Wim Wenders, The Act of Seeing (trans. Michael Hofmann)
- Kobo Abe, The Box Man (trans. E. Dale Saunders)
- Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes (trans. E. Dale Saunders)
- Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose
- Daido Moriyama, Record
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver; re-read)
- Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo (trans. Douglas J. Weatherford)
- Ia Genberg, The Details (trans. Kira Josefsson)
- Joanna Walsh, My Life as a Godard Film
- Brian Dillon, Affinities: On Art and Fascination
- Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations (trans. Michael Hofmann)
- Tomas Espedal, Bergeners (trans. James Anderson)
- Kate Zambreno and Sofia Samatar, Tone
- Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (trans. William Weaver)
- Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (trans. Geoffrey Brock)
- Stig Dagerman, A Moth to a Flame (trans. Benjamin Mier-Cruz)
- Looking Writing Reading Looking: Writers on Art from the Louisiana Collection
- Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human (trans. Donald Keene)
- Hervé Guibert, Ghost Image (trans. Robert Bononno)
- Sophie Calle, True Stories
- László Krasznahorkai, A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (trans. Ottilie Mulzet)
- Ayşegül Savaş, The Anthropologists
- Atsuhiro Yoshida, Goodnight Tokyo (trans. Haydn Trowell)
- Stephen Mansfield, Tokyo: A Biography
- Donald Richie, Tokyo: A View of the City
- André Kertész, The Polaroids
- Tomas Espedal, Tramp (trans. James Anderson)
- Jenny Erpenbeck, The End of Days (trans. Susan Bernofsky)
- Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (trans. Marc Lowenthal)
- Valérie Mréjen, Black Forest (trans. Katie Shireen Assef)
- Yoko Ogawa, Mina’s Matchbox (trans. Stephen B. Snyder)
- Sofia Samatar, Opacities
- Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes (trans. Edward G. Seidensticker)
- Hideo Furukawa, Horses, Horses, In the End the Light Remains Pure (trans. Doug Slaymaker and Akiko Takenaka)
- Yoko Tawada, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (trans. Susan Bernofsky)
- Toshiyuki Horie, The Bear and the Paving Stone (trans. Geraint Howells)
- Daniela Hodrova, Prague, I See a City (trans. David Short)
- Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessican Ernst Powell)
- Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (trans. Ruth L. C. Simms)
2023
- Qiu Miaojin, Notes of a Crocodile (trans. Bonnie Huie)
- Kathryn Scanlan, Kick the Latch
- Enrique Vila-Matas, Never Any End to Paris (trans. Anne McLean)
- Hiroko Oyamada, Weasels in the Attic (trans. David Boyd)
- Chiu T’ien-Hsin, Old Capital (trans. Howard Goldblatt)
- Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte (trans. Will Stone)
- Cal Flynn, Islands of Abandonment
- Kate Zambreno, To Write As If Already Dead
- Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd (trans. Christina MacSweeney; re-read)
- Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks (trans. Christina MacSweeney; re-read)
- Marguerite Duras, On Writing (trans. Mark Polizzotti)
- Tony Duvert, District (trans. S. C. Delaney)
- Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
- Ella Baxter, New Animal
- Bennett Sims, Other Minds and Other Stories (out Nov. 2023)
- Sophie Calle, Hotel
- Esther Kinsky, Rombo (trans. Caroline Schmidt)
- Alba De Cespedes, Forbidden Notebook (trans. Ann Goldstein)
- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (trans. Edward Snow; re-read)
- CS Richardson, All the Colour in the World
- Tezer Özlü, Cold Nights of Childhood (trans. Maureen Freely)
- Elisa Shua Dusapin, The Pachinko Parlor (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)
- Kathryn Bromwich, At the Edge of the Woods
- Jeff Deutsch, In Praise of Good Bookstores
- Takashi Hiraide, The Guest Cat (trans. Eric Selland)
- Ivan Vladislavić, Double Negative
- Pedro Mairal, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (trans. Nick Castor)
- Joseph Brodsky, Watermark (re-read)
- Mieko Kanai, Mild Vertigo (trans. Polly Barton)
- Pico Iyer, A Beginner’s Guide to Japan
- Stephen Marche, On Writing and Failure
- Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (trans. Nicolas Pasternak Slater)
- Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms (trans. Maria Jolas)
- Geoffrey D. Morrison, Falling Hour
- Ben Lerner, 10:04
- Michael Marder, Chernobyl Herbarium
- Vegetation under Power (Bauhaus Taschenbuch 26)
- Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos (trans. Michael Hofmann)
- Travis Holloway, How to Live at the End of the World: Theory, Art, and Politics for the Anthropocene
- Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (trans. Michael Henry Heim)
- Emmanuel Iduma, A Stranger’s Pose
- Mairead Small Staid, The Traces
- Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver (trans. Thomas Teal)
- Dubravka Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (trans. Celia Hawkesworth)
- Qiu Miaojin, Last Words from Montmartre (trans. Ari Larissa Heinrich)
- Babak Lakghomi, South
- Teju Cole, Tremor
Christine Lai 