10 books for 2015
There will be many others I don’t yet know about. And I’m sure I will not read everything listed below. But here are 10 books to be published in 2015 I’m looking forward to, summarised in alphabetical order.
Philosophy
Yes/No, Southern Gothic and the Architecture of Doom
I usually close out my blog for the year with a simple roundup of books I’ve particularly enjoyed. But 2014 has seemed a rather strange, transitional period, for reasons I’m still trying to define, so I thought I’d write a somewhat longer retrospective in the hope of making some sense of it.
London, past and future city
The stars finally came into alignment and I was able to take a brief trip to London last week to see a couple of exhibitions. They were excellent, and I’ll have a few things to say about them here when thoughts crystalise. But as ever with London, I also wanted to go just to wander and watch, to sink into the city.
Into the future, cautiously
The considered view is that Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour Party conference in Manchester last week was rather dull: a prosaic outline of the goals a Labour government will pursue if elected next year, and the concrete measures by which it will try to meet them.
John Ruskin’s celestial city
The John Ruskin: Artist and Observer exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery includes many of his most famous illustrations of the city he idealised, Venice.
Kosmonaut Zero
Richard Evans’ science fiction novel Kosmonaut Zero is a clever commentary on the perennial human desire to transcend the limitations of the body.