This year, two favourites have been brilliant translations from the French originals by Emma Ramadan: Anne Garréta’s Sphynx, an Oulipian novel written without any gender markers to refer to the protagonist or the love interest, and Barbara Molinard’s Panics, a collection of stories saved by Duras (Molinard would destroy nearly everything she wrote).

I loved K. Patrick's Mrs. S, the best novel about longing I've read in ages, and I always return to Gavin Lambert's The Goodby People and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse – these really compliment summer languishing.

My two reading spots are emblematic of the dichotomy that is Los Angeles. If it's temperate: Hollywood Forever Cemetery, in the shade, by the swans. When it's too hot to be outside: the rotating bar at the brutalist Bonaventure Hotel downtown. It's a completely bewildering space, and I always leave with a revised position on whether the building is a condemnation or celebration of capitalist consumerism (read Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis on the building!).

When it's hot, I love wearing EN PLEIN AIR. I'm not normally crazy about citrus, but this one really compliments the jasmine and orange blossom you encounter walking around in the summer.