The move from one point to the next sets the mind racing. Each turn makes a new path and we continue, with directions altered and every outcome marked by the journey through which it came.

Readers Archive identifies the punctuation marks along many and varied pathways of reading and research. By uncovering the links made by others, be they linear or tangential, Readers Archive offers up a list of possible turning points for further reading and departure.

Each month an invited contributor writes a text, which discusses the process of research within their personal practice as a writer, maker or musician. Further access to those followed avenues of research are given through a list of works the selector considers to have been key on that journey. For the duration of the month this selection will be available to view at Donlon Books.

Each essay and list will be available to take away during each month's selection and subsequently from this online archive.

Donlon Books
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Philip Hoare 4 June - July 2009

Hoare is the author of Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990), Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde's Last Stand (1997), Spike Island (2000), England's Lost Eden (2005) and Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), which has just been short-listed for the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. He also wrote and presented Arena: The Hunt for Moby-Dick (BBC 2, 2008), and wrote and directed Philip Hoare's Guide to Whales (BBC 4, 2008)



Essay

An Anti-Reading List

'Dress in white' one said, with quotations,
From someone's wife, a famous writer
In the nineteen-twenties

Being Boring, Pet Shop Boys

Books are relived emotions, atlases to our interior lives. For me, as a teenager, they were an act of nostalgia for a time I never lived. To be nostalgic before you'd even come of age was a particular malaise of the period in which I grew up, in suburban Southampton...

View full essay



Selected Readings

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
(Penguin paperback, 1970s)

The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald
(Penguin, film tie-in paperback, 1974)

Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh
(Penguin paperback with 'Art Deco' cover, 1970s)

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
(Any edition with John Tenniel Illustrations)

Diamond Dogs, David Bowie
(LP album cover, gatefold edition, 1974)

Roxy Music, Roxy Music
(LP album cover, 1972)

A Voice Through A Cloud, Denton Welch
(Reader's Union hardback, 1951)

The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald
(Harvill softback edition, 1998)

The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
(Rockwell Kent illustrated edition, 1930)



For help in finding or purchasing any of these titles please contact Donlon Books at mail@donlonbooks.com