The top of the to-read pile, in roughly the order I expect to pick them up.
- Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures — Mark Fisher (2014). Essays from the second half of Fisher’s blog years, organised around hauntology — the cultural sense of being haunted by futures that were promised and never arrived. Covers music, film, and his own depression in a register that refuses to separate them. Doubles as a personal account of the period the Capitalist Realism argument was reaching for.
- The Compound — Aisling Rawle (2025). A reality-TV-on-a-desert-island setup; reviews suggest it’s doing something colder than the Bachelor-meets-Lord-of-the-Flies hook implies. Curious whether the Irish-author angle changes the texture; English-language reality-show satire is dominated by US references and they always read slightly off.
- These Memories Do Not Belong to Us — Yiming Ma (2025). Premise: false memories implanted as commodity. The conceit is a well-trod one (Dick, Gibson, Strange Days) but the we in the title is doing work — collective false memory rather than individual. Worth seeing whether the execution earns it.
- Luminous — Silvia Park (2025). AI-companion novel that the early reviews are calling literary rather than genre. The pile keeps acquiring books in this category; not sure yet whether the trend is producing distinct work or whether they all converge.
The honest pattern in the queue is that it grows faster than I read. The bookmarking habit applies here too: capture broadly, judge later, accept that most will be carried indefinitely without complaint.