Readings
Noted here since 2023
I’ve always been an avid reader, and in my twenties I edited a small lit mag in London and the books-and-culture section of a print magazine in Kuala Lumpur. At the time, I loved that reading books and watching movies actually made up a core part of my job, in a way that made life, work, and leisure feel seamless. But in the following years, I found myself constantly yearning to be out in the world, to be inside it, to see it firsthand—cue: freelance journalism—reasoning that I could always go back to the world of books when I was older, when I might be less inclined to roam while living out of painstakingly stuffed backpacks, when I might be less equipped for bodily discomfort.
I’m not saying that time has come—still young, still mobile, all things considered!—but we all have our seasons, and I have been returning to the fold of books with a new relish. I was already a keen reader before, but my reading choices were mostly directed by my work interests, and I wasn’t reading so much fiction (what first ignited my love for books as a child) anymore. Now, I’m trying to experiment in my writing: to find new paths, to unlearn old habits—I had become so used to reaching for maximum clarity in journalism, to reduce the range of reader interpretations possible in order to avoid being misunderstood, or avoid my sources being misunderstood. So I’m trying to be more loose, less controlling, and to that end I also find myself reading more eclectically and with renewed curiosity, not just with the idea of utility in mind, but also pleasure. It has felt incredibly gratifying, and I feel a hunger to orient more of my life around books once more.
Below is a list I started compiling from 2023. Unless a book is very good or very bad, I don’t generally think of books as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. I usually pick up books that purport to answer a question I have, emotional or intellectual, so I genuinely get something almost out of every book I read—which is also why I never rate them on Goodreads: it feels too reductive. But asterix-ed books* I would particularly recommend: whether it’s because the writer writes beautifully, transports a reader completely, tells me something about the world I didn’t know, or simply asks thought-provoking questions.
2026
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (novel)*
Prima Facie, Suzie Miller (novel)
The Future of Travel, Daniel Maurer (nonfiction)
The Unrepentant, Sharmini Aphrodite (short story collection)
Trust, Hernan Diaz (novel)*
Mother Tongue, Hilda Hoy (memoir)
English in Berlin: Exclusions in a Cosmopolitan Society, Moshtari Hilal & Sinthujan Varatharajah (nonfiction; bilingual, also in German)
Eurotrash, Christian Kracht (novel, translated by Daniel Bowles)*
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, Belle Burden (memoir)
Berlin Now: The Rise of the City and the Fall of the Wall, Peter Schneider (nonfiction; translated by Sophie Schlondorff)
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, Patrick Radden Keefe (nonfiction)*
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin (novel)*
Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad, Eliza Filby (nonfiction)
The Little Virtues, Natalia Ginzburg (essays)*
China Rich Girlfriend, Kevin Kwan (novel)
Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte (short stories)
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, Ruby Tandoh (nonfiction)
Good and Evil and Other Stories, Samanta Schweblin (short fiction)*
2025
Sister Snake, Amanda Lee Koe (novel)
A Sabbatical in Leipzig, Adrian Duncan (novel)
Knife, Salman Rushdie (nonfiction)*
Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck (novel, translated by Michael Hofmann; I’m attempting this in German too!)
The World After Gaza, Pankaj Mishra (nonfiction)
The South, Tash Aw (novel)
Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico (novel, translated by Sophie Hughes)*
Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner (novel)
Not a Novel, Jenny Erpenbeck (essays)
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk (novel)*
Audition, Katie Kitamura (novel)
Tremor, Teju Cole (novel)*
Coventry, Rachel Cusk (essays)
Poor Ghost!, Gabriel Flynn (novel)
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad (nonfic)
The Anthropologists, Ayşegul Savaş (novel)*
Walking on the Ceiling, Ayşegul Savaş (novel)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (novel)*
The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman (novel)
Flesh, David Szalay (novel)*
Crudo, Olivia Laing (novel)
The Wall Jumper, Peter Schneider (novel)*
Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine, Omer Bartov (nonfiction)
A Small Place, Jamaica Kincaid (nonfiction)*
2024
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Rashid Khalidi (nonfiction)*
Trouble with Lichen, John Wyndham (novel)*
The Memory Police, Yōko Ogawa (novel)
Drifts, Kate Zambreno (novel)
Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, Elisa Hu (nonfiction)
The Lives of Animals, J.M. Coetzee (novel)*
Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee (novel)*
The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman (novel)
The Great Reclamation, Rachel Heng (novel)*
How to Hunger, Grace Chia* (short fiction)
The Storm We Made, Vanessa Chan (novel)
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, in Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading, and Life, George Saunders (life manual via short fiction)*
Long Island, Colm Tóibín (novel, sequel to Brooklyn)
The List, Yomi Adegoke (novel)
No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-based Eating, Alicia Kennedy (nonfiction)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke (novel)*
The New Tourist: Waking up to the Power and Perils of Travel, Paige McClanahan (nonfiction)
The Friend Zone Experiment, Zen Cho (novel)
Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli (essays)
All Fours, Miranda July (novel)
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney (novel)*
No Judgement, Lauren Oyler (essays)
Impossible Creatures, Katherine Rundell (novel)
Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, Katherine Rundell (manifesto)
Living Things, Munir Hachemi (novel)
The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke (illustrated short story)
Intimacies, Katie Kitamura (novel)*
Malayland, Dina Zaman (nonfiction)
Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan (novel)
2023
Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel (novel)
How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, Florentyna Leow (memoir)
What My Bones Know, Stephanie Foo (memoir)*
Matrix, Lauren Groff (novel)
Yellowface, R.F. Kuang (novel)
Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin (novel)*
The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy (memoir; last of the ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy)*
Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola to Beyond, Sonia Shah (nonfiction)*
The Women of Troy, Pat Barker (novel)
Stay True, Hua Hsu (memoir)*
I Want to Die But I Want to eat Tteokpokki, Baek Se-hee (memoir)
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, Raja Shehadeh (memoir)
Language of War, Language of Peace, Raja Shehadeh (nonfiction)*
Golden Apple of the Sun, Teju Cole (photobook)*