The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,
that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves,
that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in
a forest remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as an axe
for the frozen sea within us.
- Franz Kafka

This page is undergoing a major revamp - apologies to all site visitors, but I decided that the previous page was perhaps just a little too misleading about my current literary tastes and reading material! In the meantime, to whet your appetite, here are a few tidbits of recommended reads, what's on my bookshelf at the moment and so on.

Books Currently Reading:
- The Interior Castle (Teresa of Avila) (deferred)
- Fear And Trembling (Soren Kierkegaard)
- Seven Pillars of Wisdom (T.E Lawrence) (deferred)
This was a book I chose for a long flight but I found reading it quite mentally taxing in the rarefied cabin air. ;)

Books Recently Read:
- Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Andrew Wilson) A very riveting biography, although too laden with facts, would have preferred more in-depth analysis. Still compelling despite this.
- Camera Logica (Roland Barthes)
- First Light: A Landscape Photographer's Journey (Joe Cornish) A coffee table book!
- Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth (Chris Ware) Utterly brilliant graphic novel drawn in painstaking detail. Moving, melancholy narrative. Only drawback is that it cannot really be read twice!
- Caricature (Daniel Clowes) I believe this is the best of all Clowes' work I've read - a selection of short stories on the meaning of life, adolescent angst and coming-of-age. Pity his only female protagonist seems so shallow.
- David Boring (Daniel Clowes) I seem to be in graphic novel mode at the moment. This does not live up to his other graphic novels.
- The Violent Bear It Away (Flannery O'Connor)
- Wise Blood (Flannery O'Connor)
- Small g: A Summer Idyll (Patricia Highsmith) The last book she wrote before she died, not up to the standard of her other books, but with a completely different theme.
- Necessary Secrets (Journal) (Elizabeth Smart)
- On Photography (Susan Sontag)
- The Outsider (Albert Camus)
- Ellen Foster (Kaye Gibbons) Imaginative writing but this is no Holden Caulfield as the cover blurb may suggest.
- The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (Patricia Highsmith) - marvellous light reading, the depth of her misanthropy knows no bounds!
- Simone Weil: A Life (Simone Petrement)
- Edith's Diary (Patricia Highsmith) Good depiction of the gradual dissolution of a trapped middle-class intellectual woman?
- The End Of The Modern World (Romano Guardini)
- Either/Or (Soren Kierkegaard) - this is a re-read, Crop Rotation still never fails to amuse and provoke.
- The Symposium (Plato) - a Greek treatise on love