I am flying back to Sydney for a little bit, and will be self-isolating from Thursday onwards. Given that I will not be able to do any bookselling at @mcnallyjackson for the next month or so, allow me a last gasp as I recommend to you the good things I have read lately:

They gave this a very ‘book for your Mum’ cover but it is one of the most excellent books I have read about acting and mother/daughter relationships, and I should have listened when everyone told me Anne Enright was very good. Quite immersive. Good for long stretches at home.

A very excellent book about all the insidious ways minimalism has infiltrated contemporary life by @chaykak. I especially identified with the section about silence, and sensory deprivation tanks.

It’s Eimear McBride. She is one of the world’s greatest living writers. Just bloody read it.

Truly excellent and sometimes upsetting writing about sex and violence, which I found to be unputdownable but also something I could read only in a small, unpeopled space on my breaks at work.

I’ve already enthused a lot about this book but if you would like to read poems about love or sex or the West or rivers or bodies or the contemporary indigenous American condition, please read this gorgeous book by @NatalieGDiaz

Extremely immersive and beautifully written, but the perspective and tone of @annawiener’s book is what makes people describe it as Didion-esque. The distance and clarity with which she writes is wonderful. You suddenly see the current moment as historical condition.

The recent history of both Northern Ireland and @Oniropolis’s own family, as told through fragments, material objects. Reminded me a lot of @briangdillon. I read nearly all of it on a transatlantic flight. Just beautiful.

Women’s history as it happened in one Bloomsbury Square, elegantly written by @francescawade. Be prepared to hunt down everything H.D. ever wrote immediately afterwards.

The queering of the forests! Sex and the woods! Trees and deviance! I bought this book by @LukeTurnerEsq on a whim in London last year and it was one of my wisest ever purchases.

I mean it’s Sebald so it’s very fucking good but also if you haven’t read Sebald might I recommend you start with this one?

Uncanny plants and malevolent landscape, excellent climate change writing, excellent nature writing full stop.

I didn’t read this for ages because I thought a book about a dog would be boring, but @madelaine_lucas was right, and it is in fact a beautiful fragment novel (think Hardwick and Adler) about grief and mourning and care. And beautiful New York writing. There is also a dog.

Astonishingly moving for being a collection of essays about books, Gornick here is writing for those of us who live our lives in books, who exist at all times half in text. I underlined something on every page.

If you too would like to be appalled about the Catholic Church.

One of the best essay collections of the year, out just over a week ago from @jordan_kisner.

This might be the novel I was most moved by, a series of vignettes and moments occurring in rural East Prussia as Germany begins to lose the war. Beautiful writing about denial, but also domesticity and nature. Has a similar slow immersive atmosphere as John Williams’s Stoner.

Granted you should probably read The Children’s Bach and Monkey Grip and watch The Last Days of Chez Nous before reading this, a heavily constructed diary-novel, which is really for the Garner completist, but it is brilliant.

I have difficulty talking about the effect this forthcoming book by @burtonsusan had on me. Beautiful writing about the pernicious ideology of white, female American adolescence. But it’s mostly about food and eating, and the difficult relationship our bodies have with them.

This book by @jessicajlee about swimming in Berlin’s lakes year-round has been added to the case file of why I might wind up moving to Berlin.

If Calvino wrote about the contemporary workplace...

A beautiful debut by @JezewskaJ on art and perception and dissociation, out a little over a week ago.

It’s about Sharks. And death. And surfers. And how they all intertwine and mingle in the mind, what it means to inhabit the inbetween place, the surface of the water, not able to see what lurks below. Incredible.

Weird and lovely stories, utterly appropriate for these harrowing times, touches of Saunders and Lipsyte, by @marysouth and out just this week.

One of the smartest books I’ve read all year by @cathyparkhong, so immersive I missed a subway stop this week, of all weeks, the worst week ever to be getting the subway. Cultural criticism written by poets is nearly always the best, in the same vein as Moten, Rankine, Nelson.

A very underrated and lovely essay-novel about love and museums and loss. As I am a big fan of fragments I was extremely excited about this one, and it pulled through.

Like Raymond Carver writing about the Lebanese community in Western Sydney.

It’s about the weather!

OK, I’m done. See you all in May.

I was meant to come home to New York today but my flight was canceled and travel plans are on hold, so in the meantime here are the good books I have read lately, and which I recommend.

A re-read, and probably the closest I have come to feeling comforted during this entire ideal. Housekeeping is a perfect book. Every page is underlined and annotated now. And I have been unsurprised that many friends have told me they have also found cause to return to it now.

I read this all on a 24 hour plane ride and a subsequent 2 hour train trip and it is at once very absorbing and extremely smart. A reimagining of everything good about the 19th century novel, a Flaubertian take on early 20th century Palestinian experience.

It’s not incredible, prose-wise, but I really loved this book on Olive Cotton, an incredible Sydney photographer who was stalled by marriage and life as a farmer’s wife. Excellent for contemplating all your attendant anxieties about being a woman in a creative field.

A truly perfect, intricate book about one lake in Brandenburg, taking you through all of the histories that have happened beside it. One of the best meditations on place I have ever read, and also a book that made me miss walking around lakes outside Berlin in February.

This has an atrocious cover, but Dusty Answer is excellent if you want something hyperbolically English where characters describe things as ‘absolutely ripping’. Also this is secretly a queer love story, definitely more about being in love with one’s female best friend.

Such a beautiful book, my favourite of Elizabeth Jolley’s novels, and the first in an autobiographical trilogy. Like Jean Rhys with a soupçon of Proust.

A 19 year old decides to walk across Europe in 1933, making his way to Istanbul. For kicks. Very beautiful writing, and exactly the kind of escapism that I wanted. Truly there has never been a better time to read ‘travel writing.’

Very, very funny, and very absorbing, about an unlikable Edwardian girl-novelist with not an ounce of humour to her. I read this mostly when I thought I might have coronavirus (I don’t! Just a bad cold!) and it worked perfectly as sickbed reading

I was looking forward to @laurajeanmckay’s debut for ages, and it was not disappointing. A world where animals and humans can communicate with one another. It is lovely! The animals speak in poetry! I was a terrible bore recounting the sayings of mice and horses and birds.

Such a strange, beautiful book by @WillEaves, based on the life of Alan Turing, about the nature of consciousness and desire and artificial intelligence. To be read slowly, and savoured. A wonderful gift from @vijaykhurana.

I took one of @aaprocter’s tours of the Tate Britain last year in London and it was one of the best museum experiences I’ve ever had. Her book, all about the legacy of colonialism in our museums, is wonderful. Entire pages of this copy are underlined and exclaimed upon.

To be fair I’m not quite finished with the last volume of the USA Trilogy, because when I am finished there will be no more USA Trilogy to read, and then I will be bereft. If you have not read it, I strongly urge you to read this, one of the greatest works of American modernism.

On the eve of finally flying home, an elaboration of this thread:

Without a doubt, this was the best Australian novel I’ve read recently - a story about a broken family and a missing daughter shot through with Virginia Woolf-like structures and rhythms, very watery, very sad. Could not stop reading it. Hoping it makes its way to US publishers.

Read on the basis that Vivian Gornick raved about it at an event at my workplace earlier this year before the end of the world. It has been remarkably consoling and wise reading for end-times. Very good for when your world comes apart.

A reissue of a German memoir from my UK publisher @PushkinPress, a story of a woman who goes to join her husband in a rickety shack to weather a year in the Arctic circle. There are beautiful descriptions of desolate landscapes and loneliness here, and small moments of happiness.

Might I recommend spending cold nights taking 2-hour long baths with a hefty glass of whiskey and reading Faulkner.

This is such a beautiful and unique book about place. It’s a biography of a landscape more than it’s a biography of Coleridge and Wordsworth, or even the years 1797-1798. It’s a book about how our places shape us, how environment is indivisible from our culture and personal life.

One of the best works of creative nonfiction I’ve read this year, it is a book about all the strange museums and private collections to be found in Iceland - penises, witchcraft, birds eggs, stones. Like a Cornell-box for the soul.

I have tried to get through The Shipping News several times before, but it was only when I spent time on the edge of the Southern Ocean in midwinter that it resonated and finally clicked. Like Patrick White writing about Newfoundland (which is how it should have been sold to me)

A beautiful short story collection I missed in my long absence from Australia, shot through with vivid descriptions of the landscape - water most poignantly, to me at least.

A strange and very unsettling book about childhood, there is a whole sequence in The Discomfort of Evening where a pin is deliberately inserted in the protagonists bellybutton, which made me more viscerally uncomfortable than I can recall any other book making me.

Early Beverley Farmer, so vastly different to late Beverley Farmer. Lasting take, as per @josephinerowe: ffs throw out the damned cabbage.

A dark, apocalyptic book about climate change, America, the desert, and the human conception of end times, by @BenEhrenreich. I had to read this very slowly over a period of six months, avoiding periods of maximum emotional fragility. An incredibly important and necessary book.

Read a Sam Shepard every morning with coffee in a patch of sun and your day will he set to rights.

This was a particularly intense re-read. I first read Braiding Sweetgrass in my Brooklyn apartment, my plants the only green things around. Coming to it again a few years later when I was profoundly more isolated but surrounded by nature was revalatory, deeply consoling.

A truly excellent book by @Jaztronomia about lighthouses, and humankind’s fascination with their solitary symbolism. Finished just yesterday after a hike up to Barrenjoey Lighthouse on the very northern edge of Sydney, a particularly good accompaniment.

A gift from my stepmother. I gave her The Cost of Living last Christmas. It was an apparently weighty gift: ‘it’s the kind of book only a young woman would give an older woman thinking it wouldn’t be shattering.’ Anyway, The Man Who Saw Everything shattered me, so we’re even.

I spent a good portion of the 2010s saying I hated Rachel Cusk’s books because they were ‘too evasive’ (to be told that I was also arguably ‘too evasive’). In the last year I’ve returned to Cusk’s books, and my mind is changed. A Sebald-y, profound book about a holiday in Italy.

Read upon seeing @JonnyDiamond recommend, and stumbling upon it in a used bookstore in Fyshwick the next day. The title novella by @DeliaFalconer about a soldier who fought with Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn is spare and poetic and an unsentimental reassessment.

A book I read over a period of eight months because I simply did not want it to end. Surely the best book about swimming that has ever been written?

The first reread of Giovanni’s Room since I was a teenager (same copy, thanks to a visit to my mother’s house). Such a slow and painful and heartbreaking examination of sex and desire.

A gift from my father. Only non-Australians (and my father) have ever told me to read this book. A formally beautiful but deeply problematic travelogue by a Welshman on Aboriginal dreaming, I would love to read a contemporary indigenous response and reappraisal of The Songlines.

Strangely this was exactly what I wanted to read when I was couch-bound post-wisdom teeth removal, blissed out on codeine and the after-effects of a general anesthetic. A novel about Life!

I feel a little abashed that I had never read Alice Munro before, but as it turns out Alice Munro is excellent. The three linked stories in Runaway are some of the best I have ever read. (Apologies to everyone I talked at re: a particular menstruation scene in ‘Chance’).

Further to that, Alice Munro is an excellent writer of sex and desire. Nobody told me that. I thought it was all dull New Yorkery stories about family. But the sex writing in this book!

I didn’t love this book as much as I had hoped (too novely for me perhaps) but I really appreciate this book’s engagment with ecocentric ways of thinking, a hugely interesting book to read in light of ‘climate change literature’ discussions.

A wonderful book about grief and lost husbands and fathers that might have been devastating under the circumstances but was in fact very consoling. Esther Kinsky is one of most formally exciting writers I’ve discovered in the last few years, this is a good place to start.

An excellent book by @TanyaTalaga on the ways that colonialism has wrought such similar damage on indigenous populations the world over. The same systematic violence, the same paternalism, the same traumatic effects. This felt revelatory, I read it all in a single evening.

A heady week spent reading Zami and watching the documentary Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years. A beautiful, very sexy book, which made me homesick for New York.

Fathoms by @rebeccagiggs is simply the best environmental writing you will read this year. If all literature about nature in the face of climate change was this incisive and beautiful at once, I would be happy.

I loved this biography of Helen Garner by @dettebrennan because it does something so few biographies of women in the arts ever do: examines, analyses, and deepens our appreciation of the work, without lingering in the gossipy weeds of her personal life.

Another re-read, this joint biography of Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith by @Drumodje is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read about art practice, the choice to have a family, and women’s work. A travesty that it is not more widely available!

One of my favorite books this year, a new translation of the work of Sanmao, a Taiwanese writer who spent the 1970s living with her Spanish husband in the Western Sahara. Her prose has the breezy, incisive lyricism of Eve Babitz, if Babitz had given up Hollywood for the desert.

Another of best books I’ve read this year. An absolutely incredibly essay collection by Ellena Savage, which radically rearranged my own thinking, ambitions, ideas of myself. To be read through the night during a period of insomnia for similar effect.

Why this trilogy is not yet available in the US is beyond me. I read this backwards, but this is the first volume in Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen trilogy, books about girlhood, writing, and the Danish working classes, which have the addictive quality of Ferrante’s quartet.

A niche recommendation perhaps, but an excellent book for anybody interested in Australia’s natural history and the intersection of colonial violence with ideologies of landscape.

Possibly the best book I’ve read lately on the theme ‘lonely woman in a majestic landscape’ which is the genre of book I most want to read right now.

A new translation of a book from the 1940s, it is a story about a man alone in a harsh, wintery landscape, and it is one of the best, most consoling novels to read when stuck in quarantine in the middle of winter.

I was pleasantly surprised to see my own endorsement on the back of this essay collection before ever reading it, but can officially endorse now. It is also extremely sad. I came to Carman right before I left Australia, and returning to him right now felt like a very odd echo.

A lovely book about the West, when I was longing for the West, but also filled with a lot of problematic characterizations and expansionist ideologies which are reprehensible.

A very difficult book to track down, but these stories by Dorothy Hewett are lovely, especially the early stories about childhood and rural West Australian life. Less exciting were the stories written in Frank Hardy’s socialist realism workshops, I am sad to say.

Maybe my favorite of Annie Ernaux’s books after The Years, and her best yet on the subject of sex and desire. Thank you to @mka_ultra for getting it into my hands just days before the world fell apart.

A torrential, strangely Bernhardian murder mystery, about the murder of a ‘witch’ in a rural Mexican town, and the ways in which the murder exposes and manifests the personal and social and economic problems extant in the community.

I loved this book by @Kapka_Kassabova about two lakes at the intersection of Albania, Macedonia, and Greece, a strange book to read about porous borders and history-as-landscape when my trust in the magnanimity of open borders has been shattered.

OK, I’m done, see you all in the northern hemisphere. Save some summer for me.