The Books That Shaped My Reading Year

A year of reading rarely forms a neat procession from January to December. Books arrive at odd moments, meet us in unsuitable places and continue working long after the final page. Some are read carefully at a desk; others are carried through airports, opened in cafés or rescued from a neglected stack beside the bed. My favourite books from the past year belong to that untidy, rewarding pattern.

This list is therefore less a ranking than a record of attention. It gathers the novels, essays, histories and strange little discoveries that stayed with me in Dublin, whether because of their language, their ideas or the particular mood in which I encountered them. A few were new releases, while others had been waiting patiently on my shelves.

Reading For The Shape Of A Year

The most memorable book of the year was Percival Everett’s James, a fierce and inventive reworking of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett gives Jim the interior life and intellectual force that Twain’s novel denied him, while preserving the speed, danger and dark humour of the original journey. The result is both a gripping story and a sharp examination of who gets to speak, who gets misrepresented and who is expected to remain silent.

What impressed me most was the novel’s control. It does not simply correct an old book from the outside; it enters its machinery and makes that machinery reveal its violence. The jokes, disguises and changes of register become part of a larger argument about literacy, performance and survival. It is the kind of historical fiction that sends you back to the source with less innocence than you had before.

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital offered a very different experience. Set during a single day aboard the International Space Station, it moves between the astronauts’ practical routines and the planet’s immense, vulnerable beauty. There is no need for melodrama when the subject is Earth seen from above: weather systems, coastlines, borders and human divisions become shifting marks on a living surface.

I liked the book’s calm intelligence. It treats scientific observation and spiritual wonder as compatible rather than competing ways of looking. Read in a year of political noise and ecological anxiety, Orbital created a rare feeling of perspective without pretending that perspective solves anything.

Fiction That Made Ordinary Life Strange

Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo was one of the books I found myself thinking about between reading sessions. Its two central brothers are surrounded by grief, money, sex and the awkward obligations of family, but the novel’s real subject is the difficulty of communicating honestly when people have learnt to protect themselves through silence.

Rooney’s emotional precision can be uncomfortable. She notices the small transactions through which affection becomes resentment and the ways people use intelligence to avoid vulnerability. The Dublin setting is familiar without being merely decorative, and the city’s houses, streets and pubs feel shaped by the characters’ private histories rather than pasted in as local colour.

For something stranger and more atmospheric, I turned to Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep. It begins with the charged unease of a post-war Dutch household and gradually develops into a story about desire, possession and the stories nations tell about their own innocence. The novel’s domestic setting grows increasingly claustrophobic, but its claustrophobia has a purpose: objects, rooms and silences all carry the pressure of a buried past.

The pleasure of the book lies in its gradual transformation. What first appears to be a tightly managed psychological novel becomes a more unsettling examination of memory and belonging. Van der Wouden understands that history is often preserved in the most ordinary places: a cupboard, a garden wall, a family anecdote repeated too often.

Books That Changed The Way I Looked Back

I read several strong books of history and reportage this year, but Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain remained the hardest to put down. Its account of the Sackler family and the commercial forces behind the opioid crisis is meticulously researched, yet it never loses sight of the human consequences hidden beneath corporate language.

Keefe is especially effective at showing how respectable institutions can make destructive behaviour appear normal. Philanthropy, medical authority, branding and legal strategy combine to create an image of responsibility while the underlying business model produces harm. The book is long, but its accumulation of detail is the point: accountability becomes difficult when responsibility is scattered across thousands of decisions.

For a broader view of public memory, I returned to Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time. Its oral histories of the collapse of the Soviet Union remain astonishing because they refuse a single official emotional response. Some speakers remember freedom, others remember order, and many remember both at once. Their contradictions are not errors to be tidied away; they are the historical record.

That quality felt particularly useful in a year when public debate often demanded instant certainty. The book allows memory to remain unstable and personal. It also reminded me that political history is not only made by leaders and institutions. It survives in kitchens, workplaces, marriages and conversations that never reach an archive.

Australian Books On A Dublin Shelf

Reading in Australia can involve a different set of practical habits from reading in Ireland. Long travel distances make audiobooks and e-readers especially useful, while a paperback bought in Melbourne or Brisbane may have travelled through a complicated local distribution chain before reaching a shop. The Australian market also gives serious space to domestic writers, from major literary publishers to independent presses and bookshops that build their own communities.

Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 was one of the year’s most distinctive books. Part memoir, part meditation on place and part reflection on catastrophe, it moves through Tasmania, Hiroshima, literature and personal memory without separating private experience from global history. Flanagan’s prose is lyrical, but the beauty is unsettled by questions about responsibility: what does it mean to inherit a landscape, a family story or a national mythology?

Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional offered a quieter form of intensity. Its narrator withdraws to a religious community, hoping for distance from the world, but the retreat becomes a place where ethical questions grow harder to avoid. Wood is brilliant on the tension between service and self-importance, and on the uncomfortable knowledge that good intentions can still contain vanity.

These books made me think about the particular value of Australian writing for readers elsewhere. Australian literature often carries a strong awareness of distance, weather, extraction, migration and fragile belonging. Those concerns are not confined to one country. They travel well, even when the landscapes and social references are unfamiliar.

The Places Around A Book

The setting in which a book is read matters more than I used to admit. A novel read in a crowded café has a different rhythm from one read late at night in a quiet house. In Dublin, coffee shops have become informal reading rooms, with their mixture of laptops, newspapers, overheard conversations and people marking pages between meetings. The city’s changing café culture has become part of my reading life; I have written about how the Dublin coffee scene now compares with larger European capitals.

That experience has an Australian equivalent. In Melbourne, the familiar ritual of taking a book to a neighbourhood café feels almost institutional, while Sydney readers may fit a chapter around ferry journeys and long train commutes. In Brisbane, a shaded veranda or air-conditioned library can be as important to a reading routine as the book itself. Heat, distance and public space shape when and how people read.

Book buying has its own geography too. A reader in Perth may wait for a title to cross the country, order through an online retailer or rely on a local bookseller’s recommendation. Someone in Adelaide might find a remarkable small press title through an independent shop that has a stronger sense of its customers than any algorithm. These small decisions influence which books become visible and which remain difficult to find.

A Shortlist For The Next Stack

The following titles are the books I would most readily pass to a friend, not because they share a style, but because each offers a memorable way of seeing. They cover grief, history, power, family and the planet without turning those subjects into homework. A good annual reading list should leave room for pleasure as well as seriousness.

I would also add The Bee Sting by Paul Murray to any expansive list of recent fiction. Its family drama is funny, painful and increasingly suspenseful, with enough social observation to feel like a portrait of contemporary Ireland rather than a sealed-off story about one household. Murray balances the ordinary and the catastrophic with remarkable confidence.

Lists can create a false sense of completion, as if reading were a matter of collecting the correct titles. In practice, the best book is often the one that meets a particular need at a particular time. A neglected paperback may be more important than the acclaimed new release waiting on the table.

What I Want To Carry Forward

The year’s reading also changed how I think about the relationship between books and public life. History, politics and cultural criticism can seem separate from the private act of reading, yet they constantly enter one another. A book gives shape to a concern; an event changes the meaning of a paragraph; a remembered scene becomes a way to understand the news.

That is why I still value long-form writing, even in a media environment built around speed. Looking back at the biggest news stories of 2018 reminds me how quickly the apparent centre of public attention moves. Books work on a slower clock. They preserve the texture of an argument and allow consequences to remain visible after the headlines have gone.

My next reading year will probably be less orderly than the list suggests. There will be library books, gifts, old paperbacks and titles recommended by strangers. There will be books abandoned after fifty pages and others read far too quickly. That unpredictability is part of the pleasure: the shelf is never a finished statement, only a record of future possibilities.

Tonight, I will put Question 7 beside the bed and begin the next book before the previous year’s reading has fully settled.