Looking back at the past year’s reading, I notice a shift from range to concentration. Each year I begin with the idea of returning to writers whose work continues to matter, reading more deeply rather than adding new names. This time that idea became practice. I returned to Coetzee, Woolf, Sebald, Mann. Even the lesser-known works contained something exacting and worth the effort.

There were also new writers. Brigid Brophy, Denton Welch, Tomas Espedal stood out. Each of them shaped how I approached other books. I will continue reading them. Other writers stayed in view. Han Kang, Giorgio Agamben, Wolfgang Hilbig, Pascal Quignard, Ivan Vladislavic all offered work that remained with me. These were not brief impressions. Their books reordered my sense of what matters.

Much of my attention has turned toward classical antiquity. I ended the year with Agamben’s collaboration with Monica Ferrando and with Quignard’s study of violence and myth. These books altered the scale of my reading. They brought older frameworks into reach and made them necessary.

I may begin reading Chapman’s translation of Homer, which influenced Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. That play stayed with me longer than expected. I have also begun reading the Loeb editions and some Greek drama. These are not resolutions. They are a way of adjusting the pace and order of what comes next. There is still a part of Shakespeare I have not explored closely. I want to change that.

There will be interruptions. That is always the case. But if the year brings even one discovery as strong as those I made with Brophy or Espedal, the direction will have been worth continuing. The aim is not to cover more ground but to read more precisely and to carry fewer books further.