Christmas is a weird time of year – something to do with the discomfiting proximity of too many memories – and I always feel freer and more energised once it is over and the new year begun.

For me, one of the most keenly anticipated of January pleasures lies in contemplating the reading year ahead. I suppose it would be remiss of me not to mention that my own new novel The Dollmaker made the Guardian’s 2019 in Books line-up for April, which was a wonderful surprise. The list also includes several books I am already looking forward to. There are new story collections from Samanta Schweblin and Irenosen Okojie, new novels from Siri Hustvedt, Kevin Barry and Deborah Levy, new essay collections from Rachel Cusk and Helen Macdonald, and of course I Am Sovereign, a new novella-length work from Nicola Barker, which will go straight to the top of the reading pile when it comes out in July. Not mentioned in the Guardian’s round-up but just as eagerly awaited by me are Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel Gingerbread, due in March (and wouldn’t it be lovely to see Oyeyemi finally getting some of the award attention she so obviously deserves?) and Plume, from Will Wiles, due in May. I have adored Will’s previous two novels to date and if anything, Plume sounds even better – bigger, weirder, more ambitious. I seriously cannot wait.

Talking of prizes, I have decided that my key focus this year will be on the Gordon Burn Prize. For the past couple of years, I couldn’t help noticing that by the time the Gordon Burn longlist was announced in May I’d already read at least three of the titles on there and sometimes more. Clearly the universe is trying to tell me something and I am already excited at the thought of reading and hopefully reviewing all of this year’s contenders.

Award shenanigans aside, one of the downsides of focusing one’s reading around literary prizes is the emphasis this necessarily places on new books. New books are shiny and tempting and addictive but for the writer especially the constant indulgence of these magpie habits can be dangerous. Dangerous because they encourage us to neglect older texts – texts we somehow never got around to reading when they were new, texts that have lingered in our imagination and might better serve it, texts that have been tried and tested in the maelstrom of time and survived to tell their tale.

It is for this reason that my other reading project this year will focus upon books published before 2019. It seemed to make sense to choose nineteen of them – enough titles to have a genuine influence on my reading year but without becoming onerous or restrictive. I have tried to be instinctive rather than scientific in making this list, choosing books that seem relevant to me as a writer right now and that I genuinely want to read. In keeping with the instinctive tag, I present the books to you here in the order they occurred to me, some dropping and swapping and general fannying about notwithstanding:

  1. Middle C by William Gass. Gass has been on my reading list for a decade, so it’s time I got started. I have chosen Middle C rather than The Tunnel because of the musical thread that runs though it, which feels resonant for me now more even than usual.
  2. The Notebook by Agota Kristof. A book I have been meaning to read ever since CB Editions reissued it in 2014 . Here is a wonderful piece about it by Slavoj Zizek.
  3. Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, Another step on my journey with a writer who becomes increasingly important in my imagination, year on year.
  4. Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy. I had not heard of Jaeggy until I stumbled across her last year in the form of this fine essay in the New Yorker by Sheila Heti, whose first novel How Should a Person Be I had recently read. It turns out that Jaeggy was a close friend of Ingeborg Bachmann, which seems like the ideal excuse to add a bonus book to this list, Bachmann’s experimental novel Malina, which is being reissued by Penguin in May.
  5. Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. Tokarczuk won the 2018 Man Booker International for her novel Flights. I’d read this interview with her shortly before that and was instantly smitten. I’m drawn instinctively to Drive Your Plough because of its mystery element.
  6. Cast In Doubt by Lynne Tillman. Tony White’s list of Top Ten Experimental Thrillers went live at the back end of 2017, believe it or not, to roughly coincide with the publication of his own superb experimental thriller The Fountain in the Forest in January of last year. It’s a list I keep coming back to and I wanted to pick at least one book from it for this one. I chose the Tillman because I’d never come across the author before and because it sounds fantastic – something to keep me going while I wait for the release of the next book in White’s existential detective trilogy…
  7. Mao II by Don DeLillo. Reading Falling Man last year reminded me I really do need to read more DeLillo.
  8. Martin John by Anakana Schofield. I became interested in this book when it was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize in 2016 and it’s stayed on my to-read list ever since.
  9. Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Another novel I’ve consistently failed to read for more than a decade. I had it on my list for the Bute Noir crime reading challenge last year and never quite got to it, a fact that seems ludicrous, given my interest in off-piste crime fiction.
  10. My Sister My Love by Joyce Carol Oates. See above. Plus I like to read at least one Oates a year if I can.
  11. Zone by Mathias Enard. Another title from indispensable indie press Fitzcarraldo. A recent podcast interview reminded me I never caught up with this novel and that I really should.
  12. Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama. An off-beat crime novel from a writer who is a bestseller in his native Japan. I’ve been curious about this book since it came out.
  13. The Longshot by Katie Kitamura. Kitamura’s A Separation remains one of my favourite novels of the past few years, one I think about often and will definitely read again. While I’m waiting for her next book, I thought I’d catch up with her first, which received excellent reviews at the time and sounds tough and compelling.
  14. Every Day is for the Thief by Teju Cole. A novel that’s been on my to-read list for quite a while. I’m also hoping to include Cole’s book of essays, Known and Strange Things, which sounds fantastic.
  15. The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud. This novel is written from the point of view of the brother of the Arab man murdered by Meursault in Albert Camus’s classic text L’Etranger and was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2015, I’m intending to reread L’Etranger (for the first time in at least twenty years) immediately beforehand so I can properly appreciate the relationship between the two novels.
  16. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch. 2019 marks the centenary of Murdoch’s birth, which seems the perfect excuse to make the acquaintance of one of the three or four Murdoch novels I have yet to read. For the past several decades it’s been fashionable to sneer at Murdoch, so it’s nice to see her enjoying a tentative renaissance. I’ve been reading her since the age of sixteen and few novelists have afforded me such constant and consistent enjoyment and wonder and inspiration. It was Iris Murdoch, more than anyone, who first revealed to me the novel’s imaginative possibilities in their full madness and glory. I have read most of her novels several times and it is almost impossible for me to pick a favourite.
  17. The Plains by Gerald Murnane. One way and another, I read a lot about Murnane last year without actually reading him. Time to put that right.
  18. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Somehow I’ve never read this. See above.
  19. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner. I’ve not read Kushner either and this shortlistee from last year’s Booker is a novel I’m interested in not least because it seemed to divide opinion more than any of the others except the marvellous Milkman…

So there they are, my nineteen for nineteen. I don’t have any reading order in mind, just the broad intention to have read them all by the end of the year. I’m sure there will be books on this list that affect my reading and writing in unexpected ways, and I can’t wait to get stuck in.