Here we are, reader, at the end of a year that taught us many things, most importantly perhaps about the lesson of time. Both its reality and its fantastical qualities. At its most persevering moments, time is glacial and slow and extremely painful because it demands of us what we feel most restless about: trust. It requires us to trust that regardless of our feelings it will pass. In that it is our most ruthless co-inhabitant. In the flat I currently live, stacks of books line one of walls. There is no method to these stacks. By way of the time spent reading them, they reflect a portion of time I have spent in this room. To that extent they are an evidence of time.

The Russian novelist Victor Serge wrote existence is memory. A claim that came out of his examination of writing fiction. Through writing, he writes, one escapes the ‘ordinary limits of the self’. I could say the same about reading (fiction or non). Reading troubles the tangibility of our existence. It tests as much as it transports.

But, I digress.

I want to preface my list of recommendations with a caveat. The books recommended here are not necessarily ones I absolutely loved, but they are ones that in some way linger in my mind, such that your questions trigger a remembrance. Thus, here are ten responses to ten requests without any explanation. I recommend them purely from a memory of my feelings.

Yoko Ogawa’s Housekeeper and the Professor (trans. Stephen Snyder).

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (Translated by Thomas Teal).

Die, my love by Ariana Harwicz (translated by Sarah Moses).

Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing.

M train by Patti Smith.

Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet by Maël Renouard.

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux.

Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Frances Frenaye).

Sidewalks by Valeria Luiselli.

Memory-forming is an unintended consequence of reading, the more I read, the more I feel my memory become less mine and more a property of the descriptions I find my way to. The more I exist the more I want to be gathered by the people around me. The more I fear being unintelligible. Irrelevant. That passing time will somehow render me inexistent even in my presence. So reading becomes a snake that cannot be unfurled; it both providing and taking away the independence of my being. It both comforting and scaring. Both necessary, I feel. Do you feel that, reader?