I am not particularly happy with having spent much of 2025 without a consistent reading routine; I could only come back on track in November. Apart from the short stories and essays, I’ve done all of the reading on my Kindle. Being able to select from a plethora of book options at the convenience of one light, handy device is a luxury of our times. I’m not for a gratuitous romanticization of physical books, as some do; "Oh, to be able to hold the book and touch its pages! Oh, the smell of it!" But I sure do love the idea of building a physical library of all the books I enjoyed reading as digital copies.

When I finish reading a piece, specifically when it’s something that I enjoyed, I prefer to have a short period of marination, instead of jumping onto the next read, to sort of let what I have read soak in and place its roots in my mind, and heart. I’d usually do a lookup, read more about the author, see where and when they’ve lived, the critics, anything that may seem interesting to me at that point. After I read 1984 and Animal Farm, I went on to watch their motion picture adaptations, and also went through some of George Orwell’s essays, which I also listed below. I think it comes naturally to want to know more.

Fiction

I’ve read Animal Farm & 1984 (in Turkish) maybe 8-10 years ago, at a time when I was not exactly mentally fit to grasp what they were about. I picked them up again, and good thing I did, because only now it rang some bells and meant something to be reading them.

• Animal Farm - George Orwell
• 1984 - George Orwell
• Strange Weather in Tokyo - Hiromi Kawakami
• Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
• Don’t Look Now - Daphne du Maurier
• The Old Man and The Sea - Ernst Hemingway

Memoirs

I think I kind of compensated for the long period of non-reading by getting introduced to John Steinbeck at last. He drove through America with Rocinante, and I accompanied him as much as Charley did. Such a master in handling the English language that I could not drop the book.

I retained the original title for the book "Trip to Russia" because I read it in German.

• Travels with Charley - John Steinbeck
• Reise nach Russland - Stefan Zweig

Short Stories

I love short stories for the fact that I can absorb a piece of literature in one seat. Perfect for in-between longer reads.

• A Transgression - Anton Chekhov
• The Lady with the Little Dog - Anton Chekhov
• Vanka - Anton Chekhov
• A Chameleon - Anton Chekhov
• The Orator - Anton Chekhov
• Morella - Edgar Allan Poe
• The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
• The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones - Stephen Leacock
• A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Ernest Hemingway
• A Natural History of the Dead - Ernest Hemingway
• The Killers - Ernest Hemingway
• A Way You’ll Never Be - Ernest Hemingway
• A Hunger Artist - Franz Kafka
• The Judgement - Franz Kafka
• The Terrible Old Man - H. P. Lovecraft
• 2BR02B - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• About Barbers - Mark Twain
• Work, Death and Sickness - Leo Tolstoy
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Araby - James Joyce
• Cathedral - Raymond Carver
• The Last Question - Isaac Asimov
• The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - Ambrose Bierce
• The Horla - Guy de Maupassant

Essays

I’ve read (or skimmed through) a lot of articles, essays, and blog posts online, but here I am listing those that I would go back and reread.

• Politics and the English Language - George Orwell
• Good Bad Books - George Orwell
• Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
• Why I Write - George Orwell
• Antisemitism in Britain - George Orwell
• Resist Summary - Simon Sarris
• Reading Well - Simon Sarris
• In Praise of the Gods - Simon Sarris
• Viscerality - Simon Sarris
• Looking for Alice - Henrik Karlsson