(in order of how long after finishing the book i realised how good it was. one book per author, only first-time reads)
middlemarch — george eliot (from like page 250 onwards)
the remains of the day — kazuo ishiguro (while reading the ending)
exit west — mohsin hamid (about a day after finishing)
for whom the bell tolls- ernest hemingway (again, about a day after finishing, even if it took another few hours to realise i actually enjoyed a book by earnest)
their eyes were watching god — zora neale hurston (i finished these on the same train journey and realised how good they were in my room the next evening, while watching only connect)
the portrait of a lady — henry james (two or three days, although read over the course of a long while)
a portrait of the artist as a young man — james joyce (i can’t remember how long but about here seems correct.)
on the road — jack kerouac (about a week to really love it)
torpor — chris kraus (similarly, about a week to realise what a good companion piece the book is to i love dick)
autobiography — morrissey (took until i finished my a-levels to make peace with what i thought were the bad bits, but are now actually the windows into the soul of a man who DJs the national front disco)
to the lighthouse — virginia woolf (i liked it when i first read it, but writing about it five months later made me really like it)
and, as a treat, five books that don’t fit there but i wanted to mention anyway, for better and for worse
favourite non-fiction read: no, not some sociological marx, or the wretched of the earth, but the american way of death — jessica mitford. probably the best way to deepen one’s understanding of the wretched country we call america.
most improved after a reread: the plague — albert camus (it may have displaced the outsider as my favourite camus)
most in need of a re-read in a decade or so: beloved — toni morrison (i liked it, but i felt that i didn’t get much out of it on my first read)
most disappointing: love in the time of cholera — gabriel garcia marquez (it wasn’t terrible but i didn’t like it either, and it made the problems i had with one hundred years of solitude [which i had read before] worse)
most surprising: the secret history — donna tartt (you may think, surprising in a good way. no no, more that i was surprised that a book can be overlong yet have its actual plot development be rushed, have problematic aspects while also being intensely boring, and be so cookie-cutter as to encapsulate the “dark academia” aesthetic while also being roman a clef to a fault — and i have chris kraus on this list.)
