Well, it’s yet another year, and in some ways nothing much has changed. There are, still, many books to read, and many more stories to tell. What was it that the young Tancredi Falconeri said?
I look forward mostly to starting a new writing project, perhaps more than one, and writing my regular columns and essays to put food on the table – which means I have to dip in and out of readings on political economy.
Along with re-starting Joanne Joseph’s Children of the Sugarcane, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s The World: A Family History is at the top of my reading list for 2023.
I am still traveling and have already bought 20 books that I will have to schlep all the way back to Cape Town. I am not prepared for the excess baggage costs. Anyway, while most of my reading will be around the writing I will do this year, research, it’s called, I will relax with some of the fiction recommended by the Guardian’s list of the Top 10 novels about Turkey:
- Suat Dervis – In the Shadow of the Yali
- Ayfer Tunç – Highly Unreliable Account of the History of a Madhouse
- Elif Shafak – The Flea Palace
- Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex
- Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar – A Mind at Peace
- Ayşe Kulin – Last Train to Istanbul
- Yusuf Atilgan – Motherland Hotel
- Sait Faik Abasiyanik – A Useless Man: Selected Stories
- Oğuz Atay – Waiting for Fear
Istanbul has been an area of exploration for more than a decade, and will be part of my writing in the coming period. I can only hope these books are available in South Africa…
Whereas these texts and fields are part of my research, so to speak. My bedtime reading, bedtime because it’s damn difficult (and anyway I don’t read in bed), will include texts on physics and astronomy and cosmology.