Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, about so much more than mistaken identity but that story is brilliantly told, while also providing incisive ways of thinking about almost everything - Israel/Palestine, autism and neurodiversity, COVID denial and mask mandates, social media, fascism...A brilliant and important book; Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables, another perfect strange novel from one of my favourite writers, about living alone with a parrot, then, uncomfortably, with a Gen Z stranger/flatmate, but also about friendship between women and featuring a lot of floral names; Irvin Yalom, Creatures of a Day, case stories, which I'm pretty sure I've read before but didn't at all mind reading again; Irvin Yalom and Marilyn Yalom, A Matter of Life and Death, about Marilyn's death from cancer at age 87, told initially in alternating chapters then, after her death, by Irvin as he recounts his grieving.  I loved this book and read it compulsively, feeling soothed by it in much the same way Yalom described, after Marilyn's death, reading his own novels to soothe himself and then going on to read his own case histories, soothed and riveted. I read it with curiosity about the dying, the grieving, but also the marriage, wondering what it would be like to have a marriage like theirs; Alain de Botton, The Course of Love, about exactly this question of what it is to have a marriage, told leadenly, as a kind of made-up case history, not a novel exactly, yet fiction, and for all its leaden narrative, or somehow distanced narrative - you never forget you are reading a made up case history to illustrate a point - it is still interesting and sometimes illuminating - as when he writes about sulking that it comes from a place of trust and love, an expectation you can be held as you were as a pre-verbal child and your needs met and understood without you needing to articulate them - although this doesn't account for the anger, except that it does, because the sulk doesn't represent the wish so much as the disappointment in the other's failure, as well as a refusal to accept this failure; The 100% Solution, Solomon Goldstein-Rose, a solution to climate change within the economic framework of late capitalism, so a green growth rather than a degrowth solution, which begins with the fact that to solve climate change, nothing less than a 100% reduction of emissions - i.e. none at all, plus carbon sequestration - is going to solve the problem, that any amount of reduction less than total reduction to zero only slows the worsening of a problem, doesn't even begin to improve it - and once you accept this fact, then you have to accept that only green growth offers a realistic or even possible pathway to a solution, even if it might be combined with some form of degrowth or rationing of power; Vital Signs, a Junior Doctor's first year, Izzy Lomax-Sawyer, because it is always interesting to get the day to day details of any job really, and especially a job as interesting as medicine;  Monsters: A fan's dilemma, by Claire Dederer, about how to read (watch, listen to) work by artists whose immorality disturbs you even as the work enthralls you, a complicated, interesting, probing discussion that I also just really liked reading because it was so narratively set out, as a kind of story about the thinking she was doing; Art Thief, Michael Finkel, about the compulsive art stealing by a young French man who kept all the art in his attic, until it all begins to go wrong, a sad story, in the end, as it probably had to be; The Other Bennet Sister, Janice Hadlow, the story of Mary Bennet, who is quite as absurd, as least to start with, as she is in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but whose side we are on, in a book I hurried home to keep reading; A Lady's Guide to Scandal, Sophie Irwin, which could be read as a kind of take on Austen's Persuasion, and a good take on it at that; Alias Emma, Ava Glass, a thriller without a single plot twist;  Face to the Sky, Michele Leggott, showing how a poet's voice can deepen and find both more clarity and more resonance, full of echoes and memories and chambers, on the other side of nowhere; The Lonely, ed Natalie Eve Garrett, stories of solitude, some weirdly compelling and why is it that some writers are so interesting whatever they write about? Lev Grossman on being alone trying to write for instance is just as fantastic as when he is writing about magicians and imaginary worlds; Going Om, stories about yoga, on the other hand, was uniformly boring; Claire Dederer, My Life in Twenty six Poses, flickers in and out of being interesting but maybe yoga isn't interesting, maybe the point of it really isn't to be interesting; Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine, a kind of braided novel, made up out of short stories but coming together in a really richly textured way, and beautifully, novelistically written - not the good writing of poetry, the good writing of fiction, not at all the same thing I think; Fault Lines, Emily Itami, a novel about a woman in Tokyo having an affair, which I read thinking I was reading a translation but I think it was written in English and the voice is very vivid and makes the novel, but "voice" is also made up of what is seen and spoken of and how the narrative moves and the mind moves from one thing to another - something I want to think more about.  Also brilliantly funny especially in the scenes with the small children acting up with wonderful irrationality; The Performance, Claire Thomas, about a performance of a Beckett play through the eyes of three women, and so really more about audience than performance, and about those three lives, their interior lives, in particular, a book that at some points I felt I would rather have written than be reading but which came to feel increasingly engrossing and also by the end quite moving; Homo Irrealis, Andre Aciman, about nostalgia for your life as you are living it and looking forward to looking back to the present, and about the impossibility of possession, of anyone or anything; Garments Against Women, Anne Boyer, re-reading this to see how it is stitched together; Deborah Levy, August Blue, a beautiful novel about a pianist not being able to play, and about memory and love, but what matters about it is how it is written, the particular way it moves from detail to explanation, from present to past, how it picks up details from earlier in the narrative and returns to details, and people, later, all the time deepening and also becoming more and more radiant; We Saw Only Happiness, Gregoire Delacourt, which I picked up accidentally and then kept on reading, driven along by the odd prose, but it was a horrible book, about a horror, but with a horrible kind of glibness to it too; Even the Darkest Stars, Heather Fawcett, quite good story-telling, clearly setting itself up for a sequel; Adult Swim, poetry by Heather Hartley, a distinctive voice, quite prosey but with an oddness, a conversational off-beat rapidity I really  like; The Hurting Kind, Ada Limon; The Carrying, Ada Limon; Every Dark Waning, A. Davida Jane's first collection, with some dazzling poems, dazzling about tiredness and not being lived in and depression, so a very subdued dazzle, but lovely and surprising all the same; Jan Morris, The Conundrum, about being transgender at a time it was very unusual and the ways she wrestles with the conundrum of it are fascinating and moving; Love and Trouble, Claire Dederer, about growing older, looking back on a teenage self - with diary excerpts, and the strangeness of it all, which I have to say I too am feeling; Stacey Teague, Plastic, very wonderful to have these magical poems, spells and dreamscapes, collected into a long awaited book; Nine Girls, Stacy Gregg's new novel, for teenagers and older children and her best yet, funny and political and full of yearning and grief and very New Zealand stories, surely a future classic of New Zealand literature; Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, Dasha Kiper, about the effects of dementia not only on the patients but also on their caregivers and how hard it is to be reasonable within an unreasonable relationship, a generous and also very readable book;  Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks, strange stories about the neurochemistry of musical appreciation; Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au's beautiful, spare, haunting novel about a woman travelling to Japan with her mother, almost all detail with little plot and little stated outright, but full of emotion all the more powerfully felt for being only implied and not explained; Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, written ten years ago now about dying the death he hasn't yet died, and about God and faith and love, in lyrical prose that is the opposite, but also in a way the equivalent, of his elliptical poetry; How to Speak Whale, Tom Mustill's inspiring account of learning about animal languages and how to speak whale, full of intriguing facts, histories and encounters; Leigh Bardugo, The Familiar, her strangest, darkest novel yet; Leanne Shapton, Important Artifacts and personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, a fictional auction catalogue telling the story of the dissolution of the relationship, an ingenious idea that left me cold, but maybe I just can't see very well; The Things We Live With, another things-based text, a collection of essays, by Gemma Nisbet, of varying interest, I liked the one about her time as a travel writer best, the one most directly about anxiety and about what we do with memory, souvenirs and diary-keeping; Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti's arrangement of diary sentences alphabetically which is so funny because the diary sentences are such recognisably diary sentences but the effect is so much more like poetry than a diary; 300 Arguments, by Sarah Manguso, a re-reading, and then another and another re-reading, of this music-like book, a patterning of aphorisms that is kind of like the net of a life; The Two Kinds of Decay, another re-reading, of Sarah Manguso's illness memoir, also made up of small pieces of prose, though more tightly threaded into narrative; re-readings also of Elisa Gabbert's The Self Unstable and Normal Distance, both wonderful; First Things, Harry Ricketts, vividly recalled "first things" from his childhood and youth, a brilliant organising principle carried out with more depth and digression than you might expect (if you didn't know Harry); Animal Talk, Tim Friend, not as good as Tom Mustill's whale song book; Raised by Wolves, 50 poets on 50 poems, wonderful short readings of a varied selection of poems; Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other - essays by Danielle Dutton, nicely experimental approaches but really the title is the better than the essays; Changing the Subject, long leisurely essays about leisurely reading, and against social media, by Sven Birkerts; Adam Phillips, On Wanting to Change, less interesting than his earlier books; Yellowface, R.F. Kuang, a deeply disturbing novel about literary fraud, in which you dread the trouble the writer is bringing upon herself, a good distraction from any shame you might yourself be feeling, if you want instead to wallow in someone else's happily entirely fictional shame; AUP New Poets 10, brilliant, fresh poetry by Tessa Keenen, romesh dissanayake and Sadie Lawrence; Unthinkable, Helen Thomson, each chapter a long narrative account of a person's extraordinary life living with rare neurological conditions which together raise such interesting questions about what it is to be a person and what a personality is, even what the world is; Holly Black, The Prisoner's Throne; "The Battle for Attention," in the New Yorker, by Nathan Heller, not the usual article about cell phones but a riveting account (well I was riveted) about the Birds, a secret society (with a saffron ribbon secret identification code!) for paying attention to artworks!; Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought, about the value of a contemplative life, a scholarly life, the sort of life we might look for in an academic career but which can be lost in the career aspects of it;  My Brilliant Sister, by Amy Brown, a novel in three novellas, one of those beautiful, luminous works that you race back to the beginnng of when you reach the end, needing to read it all over again for its patterning, having been so caught up in the lives of its characters the first time round; A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, an inspiring set of ideals and principles for town planning, including brilliant ideas for mitigating the damage cars do to the urban environment, somewhat discouraging reading given these ideas were set forth in the 70s and since then we've carried on doing pretty  much the exact opposite of everything they recommend; Animal Languages, Eva Meijer, too much of a summary of everything to be interesting; Tarot, Jake Arthur's new collection of poems which can, he demonstrated, be used as a kind of fortune telling device; Hopurangi: Song Catcher, Robert Sullivan's collection of poems that follow the rhythms of the maramataka and also just the rhythms of a life with all its momentary intersts and conversations; Rental Person Who Does Nothing: A Memoir, Shoji Morimoto, written in a wonderfully deadpan way, this recounts his adventures being a person who hires himself out (for free) to do nothing, except be present when the presence of someone is called for, and I found it completely captivating; Tiny Humans, Big Lessons, by Sue Ludwig, about working in the NICU etc; The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Katherine Ardern, a truly uncanny, disquieting, but also romantic realist fantasy set in World War 1 on the front, in the trenches and the hospitals, and in dreams and visions; Girl Online, Joanna Walsh's sparky, glitchy thinking about online identity which after two years already needs updating;  The Raven's Eye Runaways, Clare Mabey, complicated world building for a children's story, but a pacy pleasing story too, and great characters; My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, new fairy tales, ed. Kate Bernheimer, a real mixed bag, but Karen Joy Fowler's "Halfway People" was particularly wonderful; Giovanni's Room, a rereading of James Baldwin's extraordinarily beautifully crafted, tortured novel set in post-war France; Heartless, H G Parry's brilliant prequel to J M Barrie's Peter Pan, as strange and twisted a masterpiece as she calls the original, wound up like clockwork; Val McDermid, Lady Macbeth, short and intense and visceral, a radical revisionary take on Lady Macbeth's story, steeped in blood but also steeped in love and desire; Forms of Freedom, Dougal McNeill's brilliant reading of New Zealand literature contemporary and canonical through a Marxist vision that calls for a new kind of political reading and a new understanding of the value of the humanities; Levitation for Beginners, Suzannah Dunn, a novel set in the 1970s from the point of view of a ten year old child, brilliantly capturing the complex politics - and complex psychology - of the playground, in a way that is completely true to what I remember of the childhood experience, and at the same time, this reads like an adult novel, so that this conundrum had me at one remove from the story, thinking about the strangeness of the adult genre sense I was getting from a novel entirely from a child's point of view centred entirely on playground politics; A counterfeit suitor, Darcie Wilde, an historical romance/detective story and I was ready for some light genre play but this went on rather too long till I found I no longer cared who had killed Sir Reginald Thorne; Trans, A memoir, Juliet Jacques, with theoretical thinking adding depth and complexity to the autobiographical material, not that the autobiography isn't interesting in itself; Shakespeare's Sisters, Ramie Targoff, about women writing in the Renaissance, and with some vivid historical details though I find I don't remember them, it was full of interesting material, and I did like it, and I did read it all, but as story-telling it could have been shorter and sharper, and as literary history, well, there was hardly any literature in it, I wanted to know about the writers as writers; Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever, lovely structure of numbered fragments, some with titles, and I liked lots of little bits of it, but something was missing for me all the same, it didn't quite take; The World According to David Hockney, tiny fragments from his interviews, so a bit like poetry, and anyway, he's brilliant, so I loved it; Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Alison, a beautiful study of different narrative structures, good because she reads so precisely and attentively and because form really is so interesting to think about; Pictures and Tears, James Elkins, the book I've been most obsessed with lately, about the reasons people cry in front of art and why he, an art historian, doesn't; Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost, the best novel I've read all year I think, an absorbing story, so richly detailed it is one of those stories where you feel suspended in someone else's life, and because it is set in Israel and the West Bank and is about Palestinians staging a performance of Hamlet it is richly resonant in so many ways, also an education in what it is like to live as a Palestinian in Israel; Recognising the Stranger, Isabella Hammad's lecture on Palestine and Narrative, written before the 7 October attacks, with an epilogue written some months afterwards; Lorene Cary, Ladysitting, about looking after her grandmother at the end of her grandmother's life; The Talking Cure, Susan C Vaughan, a detailed account of how psychotherapy can work, case study by case study - I wonder if this model could work for other professions; Accidental Kindness, Michael Stin, a rather odd book about empathy and medical practice, odd because it is driven by the writer's own guilt at his failings but deflects this, or organises this around, the study of another doctor's (worse) (but accidental) mispractice - there is a tension between his genuine wish to account for his failings and a competing desire not only to absolve himself - a desire he is quite explicit about - but for the reader also to think well of him, not only as a writer but also as a doctor; Practice, by Rosalind Brown, a perfectly shaped novel I really loved, the story of a day in the life of a student thinking about Shakespeare's sonnets, but also day-dreaming the most private day-dreams it is strange to be allowed to look in on; The English Understand Wool, Helen DeWitt, such a brilliant, sharp, funny, tiny novel! Autoportrait, Jesse Ball, another kind of experiment in memoir, a single paragraph-long book-length (small-book length) series of things he thinks of to say about himself, so it just suddenly moves from one thing to another, in a way that was oddly exhilarating, written in a single day; The Bright Sword, books one and two, Lev Grossman, a magisterial but also quite comic and silly novel about Sir Collum, a young aspiring knight (in full clanking armour, full except for a missing screw) who turns up at the court of King Arthur only to find Arthur and most of the knights of the round table have just died and the kingdom is lost, a trilogy really  in one too large book which I had to give back to the library before reading part 3, but better anyway I think to read it as three small books, with small-book energy, that you'd want to continue over three volumes but don't necessarily want to read in one enormous unwieldy volume; Get the Picture, Bianca Bosker, this was wonderful, I loved it more and more as she comes to love contemporary art more and more, starting out bemused by the art world, which is really quite bemusing, but immersing herself in the study of art as it is practiced, and sold and viewed and exhibited, she comes to see not only art but also the world differently, and she describes it all so vividly, like an excited friend, it is like a series of really wonderful conversations; Any Self is the Only Self, Elisa Gabbert's latest collection of essays, every single one of them brilliant, on self-hood by way of library returns, Woolf, Plath, diary-writing, professional jealousy, weird time, stupid classics and tiny places; Lifescapes, Ann Wroe, about biography as a way of "catching souls" - with a nice opening story about a fish which learned to be caught and released; Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy, by Martin Gayford, like a long essay, or long series of interviews, about David Hockney's more recent work, the process and the context, full of images of David Hockney's work, that intensity of looking, that unquenchable curiosity about everything around him; The Position of Spoons, a beautiful small hardback edition of essays by Deborah Levy that Helen gave me; Beautiful Afternoon, more wonderful essays, these ones by Airini Beautrais, such an interesting thinker and thoughtful writer; What language do I dream in? Elena Lappin, a memoir  only partly about language and translation, more about the different ways of thinking about a life and the turns lives take and the relation between place and identity - full of interest, and told in appealingly constructed chapters; The Pursuit of Art, by Martin Gayford, an exhilarating account of journeys taken in the pursuit of art, about the journey as much as the art but somehow more about the art because of that, about the experience of art, or the experience of art-viewing, of being an art pilgrim, which now I want to be too.