Calum Barnes

8. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. The end of the world is already here but never before has it felt so visceral. A sui generis masterpiece.

my book of the year has arrived

7. Service by John Tottenham. A novel of labour in which Bartleby the Bookseller finds himself in 21st Century LA and rails at the minor idiocies of contemporary consumer culture. The most I’ve laughed at a book in years but mostly out of awkward recognition.

6. Nada by Jean-Patrick Manchette (tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith). Another novel about bumbling nihilistic terrorists! Slick and stylish noir about ultra-leftists kidnapping the US ambassador in Paris and meeting their match in the similarly incompetent machinations of the state.

book described

5. Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky (tr. Pevear & Volohkonsky ofc). Hello, darkness, my old friend. So ahead of its time, often have to remind yourself when it was written. Can really see how formative this is for Krasznahorkai, a masterclass in relentlessly building dread.

signed and dedicated Satantango

finally reunited with my now most valuable book

love this for Edinburgh

have you seen his film, Game 6? almost self parody but entertaining nonetheless

down for this! not read Amazons, worth reading? i do have a copy and am quickly running out of DeLillo to read. might read the one about Nazi porn next whenever it appears out of a box from my flat move.

4. Jesus Christ Kinski by @benjaminmyers76.bsky.social. As is the gift of a writer, Myers mines an idiosyncratic obsession, Kinski’s Jesus performance, for universal reflections on our relationship with horrible artists and the pandemic experience, particularly its paranoia and emotional turbulence.

3. The Dead by Christian Kracht (tr. Daniel Bowles). A trans-continental Sunset Boulevard under the shadow of fascism, the germination of screen-abetted horrors to come.

wearing this today for a real one

gutted to hear of the passing of Béla Tarr. in tribute, here’s the time we recreated the bar scene from Werckmeister Harmonies for my 30th birthday in 2019

the Africa section does feel a bit tacked on, a tonally jarring denouement, but still gave me most of the pleasures i’d expect from a Spark novel even if overall lighter

Book described

2. Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark. Like Pynchon and Ballard in their later years, Spark turns to the detective genre to similarly investigate the national psyche and explore her perennial themes of belief, destiny and the permeable border between reality and fiction.

1. The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams. An assured novel of ideas unlike anything else in the mainstream, a dark academia in a very real sense written with supple verve.

belmondo reading in the bath

reading thread, 2026 edition

well, i guess that’s that for another year

it was indeed a great one to finish on. i ordered it into Argonaut and i think you bought our copy before i had a chance to look at it!

Book described.

63. Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth (tr. @ottiliemulzet.bsky.social). A thoroughly engrossing and visceral journey into the lives under the shadow of authoritarian rule, shown in it all its inhumane brutality.

Chalamet must be getting wary of typecasting as that’s the second year in a row he’s played a smug but talented upstart Jew scamming his way to the top of his field in post-war NYC

i first got obsessed with Getting Killed as opposed to his solo album but love them both these days. Long Island City Here I Come is what got me hooked to the former.

i’d never heard the term co-worker music until it was applied to Geese, who i’m aptly going to see with one of my co-workers…

Alasdair Gray’s sardonic definition of postmodernism now reads like a prescient description of tech bros’ AI triumphalism

62. Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger. It’s a tough act to historicise the present but this is a succinct diagnosis of the current conjuncture, offering a helpful rubric of recent political forms but avoiding any glib prescriptions, as desperately as we might want them.

61. Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz (tr. Max Lawton). A mind-expanding, bravura work that I am still trying to figure out the implications of; an interrogation of the very foundations of representation in European culture: is the word the picture or is the picture the word?

60. On the Calculation of Volume Book IV by Solvej Balle (tr. Sophie Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell). As compulsive and scintillating as the previous volumes while deftly weaving hitherto unexplored collective anxieties into its idiosyncratic conceptual architecture.

59. I Don’t Care by Ágota Kristóf (tr. Chris Andrews). I simply inhaled these strange vignettes one evening this summer and their peculiar atmospheres still haunt me.

58. House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-White). This early novel brilliantly encapsulates the themes and tropes that define Tokarczuk’s later works: eccentric religious figures, esoteric knowledge and how technologies affect our sense of self.

excuse me, what are the 10% bad books?!