I long to read only one book at a time, but this ambition seems somehow beyond me and rarely do I have fewer than four on the go. I experiment with limitations. For instance, feeling overwhelmed by the endless onslaught of new books and the debates around these, I recently decided I would read only books written by dead people. True academics excel at this, but I’m not one of these, and so the vow didn’t hold. I started off well though, if haphazardly: re-visiting Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and then Proust, when I found a gorgeous old American hardcopy in a second hand bookshop in Oxford. But, ultimately, I’ve been enticed back into the fold. This is partly because I’m on sabbatical and so have more time to read (and snoop around bookshops) than I do when teaching.

Generally, my reading is divided up according to what projects I’m working on, so, first off, there are the books I’m reading for review. At the moment these are Linda Grant’s The Dark Circle and Elena Ferrante’s extraordinary non-fiction collection Frantumaglia. Then there are things I’m reading in preparation for a talk I’m giving at the Life Writing Centre at Oxford University—at the top of this pile sit Virginia Woolf’s late diaries and letters, along with Albert Camus’ Lyrical and Critical Essays. Then there are the things I dip in and out of at the beginning and end of the day: Lauren Elkin’s spirited inquiry into the history of the female flâneur, Flaneuse: Women Walk the City, and Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café. And in the fashion of a good tonic I read Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove. As you might guess, finishing books is not high on my list of priorities. I’m happy, often enough, for them to go on living alongside me: what do I need something to end for? That said, there are three books that I’ve been compelled to finish and neglect all else in order to do so.