wonderland

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

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+ Pride & Prejudice the re-read *X?

Memento Mori - Murial Spark

Flesh - David Szalay

Daughter of Time - Josephine Tey

Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf

Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

London Fileds - Martin Amis

Movern Callar - Alan Warner

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

Cassandra at the Wedding - Dorothy Barker

All the Light we Cannot See - Anthony Doeer

Berlin Alexanderplatz - Alfred Doblin

Perfection - Vincenzo Latronico

Confusion - Elizabeth Jane Howard

The House That Spoke - Antonia Fraser

Absolutely & Forever - Rose Tremain

Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party - Graham Green

Not the official ranking: Pride & Prejudice the re-read *X?

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Giant

Till The Stars Come Down

The Merchant of Venice

Woman in Mind

Oedipus

The Years

Into The Woods

Mrs Warrens Profession

Richard II

Elektra

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You have to go through and feel it.

I wanted change so much. I tried to rid myself of place and support to force the change. But I had to feel the sorrow to make change. I couldn't go around it or use my tenacity to power through. I had to feel its depths.

All the trite advise is true: it comes to you when you''re willing to welcome it. To put down preconceptions and fantasy. Accept where you are and who you are.

2024.

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You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometime you'll find. You get what you need.

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68% Women in 2024

All Fours - Miranda July

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

The Razors Edge - W. Somerset Maugham

Scaffolding - Lauren Elkin

The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot

Trespass - Rose Tremaine

The End of the Affair - Graham Green

Close to Home - Michael Magee

The Bass Rock - Evie Wyld

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

Olive, Again - Elizabeth Stroud

Kairos - Jenny Erpenbeck

Ordinary Human Failings - Meghan Nolan

The Rachel Incident - Caroline O'Donoghue

Divine Might - Natalie Haynes

Penance - Elizabeth Clark

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

The Children of Men - PD James

Leaving Atocha Station - Ben Learner

Tiananmen Square - Lai Wen

The Ground Beneath Her Feet - Salman Rushdie

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The inaugural

The Effect

Phaedra

The Little Foxes

Slave Play (for the conversation)

People, Places & Things

Enemy of the People

The Real Thing

Nachland (for the question)

The Hills of California

Mnemonic

Rock n' Roll

Oedipus

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English National Ballet in Akram Khan's "Giselle" 

Most beautiful thing I saw on stage

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It's not just because he's died

The Pregnant Widow - Martin Amis

The Crow Road - Iain Banks

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

Assembly - Natasha Brown

My Cousin Rachel - Daphne du Maurier

The Go Between - LP Hartley

Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout

The Course of Love - Alain de Botton

Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov

Good Material - Dolly Alderton

Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson

Gather Together in my Name - Maya Angelou

Brick Lane - Monica Ali

Wilt - Tom Sharpe

The Debt to Pleasure - John Lanchester

Siblings - Brigitte Reimann

Lost on Me - Veronica Raimo

Notes to Self - Emilie Pine

The Good Life - Robert Waltdonger, Marc Schulz

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Small Kindnesses, by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

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Any real challenge will make you want to quit.

George the Poet

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Sexing The Cherry

A man or woman sunk in dreams that cannot be spoken, about a life they do not possess, comes to a door in the wall. They open it. Beyond the door is that life and a man or a woman to whom it is already natural. It may not be possessions they want, it may well be the lack of them, but the secret life is suddenly revealed. This is their true home and this is their beloved.

I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover’s dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse may be enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn’t understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

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Martin Amis on the Genius of Jane Austen (and What the Adaptations Get Wrong)

This essay originally appeared in 1998. Jane Austen, as they might say in Los Angeles, is suddenly hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before

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A Year of Gifts

It’s actually hard to write and I’ve been resisting doing so as I fear consolidation of a year in which the experiences and work of many years came to personal fruition. I was granted so many gifts: acceptance, happiness, validation and the obligatory heart wrenching pain. The former cannot come without the later: grief is the price we pay for love. 

Radul was the greatest gift for my heart. To be held, to be immediately connected, to share the whole experience, talking on the hill watching the sunset and rise. ‘Perhaps we’ll meet on the dance floor’. What a beautiful experience I was granted. 

My beautiful, kind brother on his wedding day and the lovely things he said: ‘in good times and in bad, we’re always there for one another’. How happy that days was with their lovely friends and seeing how cherished they are. 

I was brave (and terrified): I went to Venice and Finland alone, I danced alone, I’ve lived alone, I’ve moved to bi-weekly therapy, I had a procedure which was a solo experience: the astonishing privilege to have access to it and for it to have been a success. 

It’s important to acknowledge the start of the year, there was great happiness there. I was confident and myself with a man. I was chosen and admired. The pain tore me in two. The pain of the loss and disappointment combined with a pain thirty years old. 

It was a good year. 

2022.

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22 for 2022

1. Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

2. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - Vladimir Nabakov

3. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver 

4. Managing Expectations - Minnie Driver 

5. The Employees - Olga Ravn 

6. Emma - Jane Austen 

7. Anna Karenin - Leo Tolstoy 

8. The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin 

9. Threshold - Rob Doyle 

10. Luster - Raven Leilani 

11. Nutshell - Ian McEwan 

12. Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata 

13. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 

14. The Pumpkin Eater - Penelope Mortimer 

15. The Chrysalids - John Wyndham 

16. A Ghost in the Throat - Doireann Ni Ghiriofa 

17. Sense and Sensibility Diaries - Emma Thomson 

18. Stone Blind - Natalie Haynes 

19. The Island of Missing Trees - Elif Shafak 

20. Enid - Robert Wainwright 

21. Watermarks - Lenka Janiurek

22. Animal - Sara Pascoe

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I assure you, it's always the same: it was settled by looks and smiles...

Anna Karenin, Leo Tolstoy