Sixty-four books read last year. A normal reading year by number, though by itself that means little. One can read sixty-four books and be unmoved, or just four and be transformed. Women edged ahead this year: 54%. Not a conscious quota, that’s not the way I read. Franco-British axis dominates, eighteen from UK and fourteen from France. Seven Americans, three each from Ireland and Finland and a scattering from Japan, Korea, Denmark, Yugoslavia, Dominica and elsewhere. Half my reading passed through a translator’s voice. This feels right. Four genuinely contemporary writers. Fiction leads, but fourteen essays and twelve memoirs. Nine authors account for twenty three books. Let’s summarise as a year of European experimentalism, translation, women working at the margins of form, exile and displacement and completist tendencies. Whether any of this constitutes a coherent sensibility or set of persistent biases I’ll leave to you to judge. I expect 2026 to be rather different.