Idea shamelessly nicked from Nina Allan! You know where you do the thing, where you see someone else’s list of good books, and you go down the list, and it turns out you’ve only read one of them? Well, that’s a reasonable feeling to have. Sometimes I come out of my independent cinema convinced that I’ve never seen a film in my life.

So I thought I’d write my own list the same, since I do keep a list of things I’ve read: and then you can tell me how few of these you’ve ever got to. Here they are, in order of reading, all 29 of them – and disclaimer first that this is about what I read, not when it was written, and also I’ve not included short stories, nonfiction, or rereads.

HHhH – Laurent Binet

Doomsday Book – Connie Willis

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

A Monster Calls – Patrick Ness

North & South – Elizabeth Gaskell

Red Shift – Alan Garner

Gaudy Night – Dorothy Sayers

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August – Claire North

Bête – Adam Roberts

The Affirmation – Christopher Priest

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Marquez

Flemington – Violet Jacob

Osama – Lavie Tidhar

To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

The Good People – Hannah Kent

Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea – Adam Roberts

Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark

The Disorderly Knights – Dorothy Dunnett

One is Enough – Flora Nwapa

Living Alone – Stella Benson

Solaris – Stanisław Lem

The Corner That Held Them – Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Ballad of Black Tom – Victor LaValle

The Navidad Incident – Natsuki Ikezawa

Villette – Charlotte Brontë

Quicksand – Nella Larsen

The Man of Property – John Galsworthy

Just for the stats nerds: that’s 16 by women, 15 by men; 4 in translation (I’ve not noted the translators because I only started keeping track of that in 2019); and, what’s most interesting to me, only 9 written after the year 2000. Two authors with double entries: I’m not much of a completionist when it comes to authors’ works, so this doesn’t surprise me very much. Over those five years, I reread 21 books, quite a lot of which were either nonfiction, or by Muriel Spark. What can I say? Everyone should reread some Spark at one time or another.

Cutting that down to the final ten wasn’t actually too difficult, but at the same time it underlines for me why I’d be a terrible critic: so much of my memories of these comes from where I was mentally and physically when I read them. Let’s have the final list then.

Doomsday Book – Connie Willis

Gaudy Night – Dorothy Sayers

Bête – Adam Roberts

Lolly Willowes – Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Disorderly Knights – Dorothy Dunnett

Living Alone – Stella Benson

Solaris – Stanisław Lem

The Navidad Incident – Natsuki Ikezawa

Quicksand – Nella Larsen

The Man of Property – John Galsworthy

Three from 2016, three from 2020, and the remaining four from 2017 through 2019. I hardly read anything during those three years. And I do remember where I was for most of them! I read Bête in a succession of airport lounges and hotel rooms, that time I went to a feminist business conference in California three months before Trump got elected. I don’t think I knew at the time why angry impotence in a rapidly crumbling world resonated with me so much. That autumn I read four Dorothy Sayers books in succession because it was about all I could manage to hold on to, and then transitioned to Lolly Willowes – which I have since bought as a birthday present for four separate people. I read the Dunnett on a trip to Berlin, then put it aside, and read the entire second half breathlessly in three days about six months later – there’s a climactic scene at the end in St Giles’ Church in Edinburgh, from which I was approximately 100 yards as the crow flies when I read it. (It’s a breathlessly fast chase scene, and it’s only when you go back and look that you realise the thing is 30 pages long. How did she keep the suspense up?! Dorothy Dunnett is a master.) And in 2019, when I got out of hospital, I read Stella Benson, and stole a chapter title from Living Alone to name a book I wrote the first draft of in five feverish weeks. (I’ve nearly finished editing it now, I swear.)

I’m working my way through the remains of the Forsyte Saga right now, for similar reasons to all that Sayers in 2016. And I want you to know that since I said all that stuff about Natsuki Ikezawa at Christmas – how I couldn’t find anything else about him or his work – I’ve acquired a hardback of The Navidad Incident and a beautiful short story pamphlet of his from two different people who evidently have better truffle-hunting skills than me, and also know exactly how to make a girl happy.

Just for fun, I went back through the nonfiction I read in 2016-20 as well, which was how I remembered I’ve read some absolute blinders of NF in the last couple of years. But this is already long enough (and indulgent enough) so I’ll save it for another time.