I read between stretches of work, and I also love to procrastinate by reading. I just read The Walk by Robert Walser, which, after a gloomy day, had a soothing affect on me, and felt like an afternoon-long procrastinator’s daydream—beguiling and infuriating—full of surprises. With regards to my reading, I have no system so I’m sharing a few things here I’ve read this year in no order.

Earlier this year I read Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. It’s a school text in Russia but I’d never gotten around to reading it. Some time later I had a dream where Pushkin was camping out in a forest in late summer, hiding from an unknown enemy and re-writing The Captain’s Daughter. In this dream, I was sort-of-Pushkin. It rained and his bookshelf was wet; he flicked through the soaking pages. This dream delighted me. I thought about how this adventure tale—set in the Caucasus, and romanticising the events of a popular insurrection led by the Cossack rebel Yemelyan Pugachev in the late 18^th century—had slipped into my mind and unravelled there without my awareness; how Pushkin must have fertilised hundreds of thousands of hopefully-occasional pleasure-filled dreams. A Russian critic said there are few writers in the world who are as worshipped in their own country as Pushkin is in Russia, and as little known outside of it.