These are some of the books I'm reading (since 2016), with the year's favourites in italic.

2025

Roadwork by Stephen King

Rage by Stephen King

Waiting by Ha Jin

But What Can I Do? by Alastair Campbell

Wicked by Gregory Maguire

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

Chess by Stefan Zweig

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

2024

Ghost Town by Kevin Chen

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Butter by Asako Yuzuki

Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

The Epigenetics Revolution by Nessa Carey

Foster by Claire Keegan

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Free For All by Gavin Francis

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Breast and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

2023

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami

11 Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates

Beyond the Aquila Rift by Alastair Reynolds

But What If We're Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman

Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Into the Woods by John Yorke

On Writing by Stephen King

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman

Memoirs of a Space Traveler by Stanislaw Lem

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

To Live by Yu Hua

2022

The Broken Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse

The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (and other short stories) by Leo Tolstoy

Solitude by Ursula K. Le Guin

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Stoner by John Williams

The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Invisible Planets by Ken Liu

Press Reset by Jason Schreier

2021

My Life as a Quant by Emanuel Derman

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

Making Sense of the Troubles by David McKittrick and David McVea

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Martin Eden by Jack London

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Bhagavad Gita

Broken Lives by Konrad H. Jarausch

Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

2020

The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

This Is Your Brain On Music by Daniel Levitin

Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Germinal by Émile Zola

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Through the Woods by Emily Carrol

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

2019

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Talking To My Daughter About The Economy by Yanis Varoufakis

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino

The Mating Season by P.G. Wodehouse

The Wandering Earth (and other short stories) by Liu Cixin

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

2018

Mythos by Stephen Fry

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow by Aurélien Géron

The Plague by Albert Camus

The Gene by Siddharta Mukherjee

The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Ukridge's Accident Syndicate by P.G. Wodehouse

Ukridge's Dog College by P.G. Wodehouse

Goodbye to All Cats by P.G. Wodehouse

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier

Developer's Dilemma by Casey O'Donnell

Nine Tomorrows by Isaac Asmiov

Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

What Men Live By by Leo Tolstoy

How Much Land Does a Man Need? by Leo Tolstoy

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Death's End by Liu Cixin

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

2017

The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

Anthem by Ayn Rand

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

American Psycho By Bret Ellis

Ask the Dust by John Fante

Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein

Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Phantoms In The Brain by V.S. Ramachandran

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

Neurotribes by Steve Silberman

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

2016

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond

Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

The Elements of UX by Jesse Garrett

Masters of Doom by David Kushner

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Landlady by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Gentle Creature by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Mr Ma and Son by Lao She

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami

Norweigan Wood by Haruki Murakami