As readers we assemble an inventory of writers, those authors we conclude are reliably compelling. Over time this inventory serves as a reflection of our mind. This inventory is recast as we discover new authors and outgrow others. Occasionally, perhaps often, a compulsion can set in for completeness, a need to read everything by a particular author.

Today, this is my inventory: Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Thomas Bernhard, Roberto Bolaño, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Carson, Anton Chekhov, J. M. Coetzee, Roger Deakin, Fiódor Dostoiévski, Marguerite Duras, Geoff Dyer, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Handke, Gabriel Josipovici, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Søren Kierkegaard, László Krasznahorkai, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Powers, Marcel Proust, Philip Roth, Jean-Paul Sartre, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, Stendhal,  Enrique Vila-Matas, Robert Walser and Virginia Woolf.

Though this blog is mostly about the books I read I occasionally refer to other passions: opera, film, music (mostly jazz, classical and post-punk), art and photography.

This blog was chosen as the 3:AM Blog of the Year 2011. In February 2012 David Winters and I conducted a conversation in 3:AM magazine about ‘Modernism Then and Now’.

I can also be found on Twitter, LibraryThing, last.fm, Vimeo and Letterboxd. Join in the conversation; I enjoy few things more than midnight discussions.

Please feel free to send me an email at timesflowstemmed AT gmail DOT com.

Temperament: INTP

Review policy

I have accepted a couple of publisher-provided books before and can’t say I like the pressure (admittedly self-imposed) to read and review them. It is rare that I find enough reading time, and I want to be able to drift from book to book as the mood grabs me. I admire any author able to write a whole book and wish them all success.