"A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories:” and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation." - Jonathan Swift, "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet"

Books I've read

2014

The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton
A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki
Curtsies & Conspiracies - Gail Carriger

2013

Etiquette & Espionage - Gail Carriger
A Time to Keep Silence - Patrick Leigh Fermor
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress - Dai Sijie
The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka
Divergent - Veronica Roth
Reached - Ally Condie
Crossed  - Ally Condie
Matched - Ally Condie

Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon
Honour - Elif Shafak
In Her Majesty's Secret Service - Ian Fleming
Gods Without Men - Hari Kunzru
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
V. - Thomas Pynchon
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Specimen Days - Michael Cunningham
Cosmopolitan Style - Rebecca Walkowitz
Cosmopolitan Fiction - Katherine Stanton
Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
The Costmopolitan Novel - Berthold Schoene
Ghostwritten - David Mitchell
Number9Dream - David Mitchell
Beloved - Toni Morrison
If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino
Number9Dream - David Mitchell
Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, salons, and social stratification in seventeenth-century France - Carolyn C. Lougee
An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears
Sharpe's Tiger - Bernard Cornwell
Out of Sheer Rage - Geoff Dyer
Sacred Hearts - Sarah Dunant
The Rings of Saturn - W. G. Sebald
Shame - Salman Rushdie
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
Waverly, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since - Sir Walter Scott

2012

The Ambassadors - Henry James
The Emigrants - W. G. Sebald

Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The Trial - Franz Kafka
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Unnamable - Samuel Beckett
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth
Corregidora - Gayl Jones
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov
Disgrace - Vladimir Nabokov
Gilead - Marylinne Robinson
Sweet Tooth - Ian McEwan
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet - David Mitchell
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl - John Quinn
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Blue Dragon - Robert Lepage
Pulse - Julian Barnes
Die Physiker - Dürrenmatt
Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson
The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Borrowers - Mary Norton
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (re-read)
Fairy Tales, Sexuality, and Gender in France, 1690-1715 - Louis Seifert
A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
The Classic Fairy Tales - Norton Critical Edition, edited by Maria Tatar
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
The Elements of Style - Strunk and White
A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
The Honourable Schoolboy - John le Carre