I spend a lot of time writing – music and book reviews, fiction, blogs rants and all the rest. But when I’m not writing, I’d much rather hunker down with a good book than watch television, and generally favour books over films. Lunch breaks and train journeys and well as the wind-down before sleep will invariably find my immersed in a book. Inevitably, some of the material I’ve read will influence or inspire my own writing in some way or another, immediately or much, much later. These are the books I read in 2015, in chronological order. Some I enjoyed more than others, some I read for research or review purposes, some I’d read previously, others I’d started but abandoned and decided to revisit. Sometimes I read two books at a time, switching between sessions. Regardless of the circumstances, these are the texts which provided the literary backdrop to the last 12 months of my life – for anyone who may be interested. Mostly, it’s a record I like to keep which I tend to make public, just because.
Nick Jones – 9987
Ray Bradbury – Farenheit 451
Paul Ewen – Francis Plug: How to be a Public Author
JG Ballard – Running Wild
Chuck Palahniuk – Doomed
Danny King – The Pornographer Diaries
Megan Milks (ed) – &Now 3
Ed McBain – Like Love
Ed McBain – Killer’s Payoff
Jim Thompson – The Grifters
Bill Shields – Lifetaker
Jeff Noon – Vurt
Paul Auster – In The Country of Last Things
John Niven – Straight White Male
David Gionfriddo – The Good Worlds are All Taken
Derek Raymond – He Died With His Eyes Open
John J. Niven – Cold Hands
Cormac McCarthy – The Road
JG Ballard – Super-Cannes
Supervert – Post-Depravity
PA Morbid – Gorged on Light
Reuben Woolley – Dying Notes
JG Ballard – Hello America
Mike Meraz – She Poems
Charles Bukowski – The Bell Tolls for No-One
Mark Fisher – Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
Sue Fox – The Visceral Tear
Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club
David Peace – Nineteen Seventy Four
JG Ballard – The Kindness of Women
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