This is not an exhaustive list, sometimes I get lazy about tracking my reading, sometimes I read something so boring I'll forget about it, and sometimes a random book will turn out to be so weird that I'd rather not tell people I read it.
I don't think I want to add a review (or even just an opinion) to every book listed here, but I probably will highlight some that I thought were interesting, important or just pleasant.
Recently
- Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
- A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates
- Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
- In the Bunker with Hitler by Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven
- Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Sixty Harvests Left by Philip Lymbery
- A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
- The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuścyński
- Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
- Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
- Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- In Stahlgewittern by Ernst Jünger
- I Heard the Owl Call my Name by Margaret Craven
- Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
- Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane
- The Plague by Albert Camus
- The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
- The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
- In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
- The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
- Pimp by Iceberg Slim
- The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
- Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
- The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
- Normal People by Sally Rooney
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Mao II by Don DeLillo
- Die Brüder Himmler by Kathrin Himmler
- Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed
- Private Island by James Meek
- Shogun by James Clavell
- Imperium by Christian Kracht
- Die Wohlgesinnten by Jonathan Littell
- Solaris by Stanislav Lem
- The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau
- Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- Am Freitag schlief der Rabbi lang by Harry Kemelman
- The Shining by Stephen King
- The Great Divide by Joseph Stiglitz
- Namen die keiner mehr nennt by Marion Gräfin Dönhoff
- The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour
- Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Islamist by Ed Husain
- A Hero Of Our Time by Lermontov
- Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Line In The Sand by James Barr
- Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
- Unity Mitford by David Pryce-Jones
- Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder by Wolfgang Leonhard
- Das Boot by Lothar-Günther Buchheim
- The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
Standouts
Buddenbrooks by Herman Hesse. I'd been meaning to read this for ages (when I was a child my mum read it to my older sisters and told me I was too young for it). The story of the rise and fall of a bourgeois family of Northern German merchants, told over three generations. Lots of interesting characters, and I quite enjoyed the slightly outmoded language as well.
We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson.
Consider The Lilies by Iain Crichton Smith. A story about a woman going through a religious crisis during the Highland Clearances.
Neuromancer by William Gibson. I keep coming back to this, not because it's particularly well written (in fact it's quite hammy in places) but because it so perfectly captures the 80s ideas around technology and the future. It's more style than substance, but I quite like a few aspects of that. For example, every item he describes has a nationality attached to indicate its quality (Italian marble, French cigarettes, German steel etc.)
Liebe Schwester, Wir Müssen Hier Siegen Oder Sterben by Marie Moutier. An annotated compilation of letters sent from German soldiers on the Eastern Front of World War II.