Everything I’ve Read So Far This Year
Update on Big-Ass Classics, Reading with My Kids, Plus Other Fiction and Nonfiction
When I was a teenager, I attended a Reformed church. Whenever the pastor would read a passage of scripture before preaching, he would close by saying, “Thus far”—big emphasis—“the reading of God’s word,” implying that the reading was never done, only paused for the present. With that in mind, here’s my reading this year, thus far.
The first thing to mention is my big-ass classic novel goal.
Door Stoppers
Late last year I flagged twelve classics I wanted to read in 2026, all possessing as much physical heft as reputational weight. I’ve finished five of those so far, plus a couple of extras. The year began with John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, after which I blitzed through my February selection, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White I loved them both, and you can read my reviews here and here.
I next read my March book, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and found it so captivating that when I finished I thought it was time to finally vanquish The Brothers Karamazov, a book that had defeated me five or six times before. It wasn’t on my list, but I was on a roll. I read them both in about two weeks apiece. See my reviews here and here. (The Karamazov review was fun to write—and hopefully read—because I present it as an argument with myself about the book.)
So far, I was finding these door-stopping classics a breeze! Long, yes, but not particularly difficult. They almost read themselves! What had I been afraid of all these years? I found out when I opened my April book.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens nearly murdered me. I know people love it; many of you have recommended it to me. Up to this point, I’d only read one other Dickens novel, Hard Times, which was a hoot. But David Copperfield? I trudged through it like half-dried cement and despaired of ever reaching the end.
Halfway through, goaded by the suggestion of many of you, I leapt into A Tale of Two Cities. Like my second Dostoevsky, reading Dickens’s tale of the French Revolution wasn’t on my list, but it had all the verve and intrigue I expected to find when reading David Copperfield. After racing through the more riveting read, I returned to the slog and finished it—thankfully, discovering some redeeming qualities along the way. I ended up liking it. You can see my reviews for these two here and here.
By now I was deep into May and behind on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the book I’d selected for that month. Late April and May were tricky for me; my mother got very ill, and I spent more than three unplanned weeks in California helping to take care of her. I waited till I returned home mid-month to begin, and while Tom Jones was a delight to read (see my review here), I was beginning to run into one of the unforeseen tradeoffs of this project.
The Problem of Time
I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me when I set the goal. At the time, my only trepidation was that some of these hulking tomes would prove difficult. So far only David Copperfield had managed to materialize my worry. But now I faced the more obvious problem: long books take time and attention that shorter books don’t require; that means not only would interruptions in my schedule imperil completing one or another book, but I would have less time to read anything else. Why is that problematic? If you’re like me, variety matters, and I’d inadvertently created a scenario with less potential novelty. Oops.
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is where I felt the agony most. It’s my June book and so far remains unfinished. It’s somehow both endlessly hilarious and insufferably tedious, and the length poses two mutually reinforcing obstacles. It’s a lot to manage on its own, and it’s harder to find respite in something else because of my self-imposed time pressure—one big-ass classic per month.
As I both grinned and grimaced through the first couple hundred pages, I ran out of steam. I’ll come back to it, but I didn’t want to let my tardy completion jeopardize my July book, Don Quixote—which, incidentally, I’m enjoying immensely. Expect my review of Cervantes’s classics later in July or early August. And my review of Tristram Shandy?
Reading with My Kids
Though interrupted this year with my mom’s illness, my daughter Naomi and I have continued our practice of reading most nights. Much to our mutual delight, we’ve been working our way through The Chronicles of Narnia. In December we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe while she was in the hospital with an acute drug reaction (I’ve spent entirely too much time in hospitals recently). Beginning in January, we jumped into the rest of the series. She’s loved every minute, and so have I.
At this point, we’re through all but The Last Battle. We’re on Narnia hiatus at the moment, reading Grace Lin’s When the Sea Turned to Silver. We also interrupted Lucy, Scrubb, Prince Rilian, and the rest, to read Lynne Reid Banks’s The Indian in the Cupboard, which we both enjoyed quite a bit. We’ll get back to The Last Battle later this month or early August.
While all this was going on, my youngest son was (excitedly? anxiously?) turning sixteen and learning to drive. While driving hither and yon through Middle Tennessee, helping him master the motor, we listened to two P.J. O’Rourke titles: A Cry from the Far Middle and How the Hell Did This Happen? Whatever you might learn about U.S. government in high-school civics, it takes a backseat to O’Rourke.
The best thing about reading with your kids—even, by the way, the books you’re not supposed to read—is that you get to spend time with them, bonding over stories and ideas.
Other Fiction
Despite my complaint about the big-ass classics chewing up my margin for other books, I have managed to squeeze in several others—mostly small. The one outlier is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (which I read in March, appropriately enough). I could count Augie, originally published in 1953, as a bonus big-ass classic. Especially in this outing, Bellow operates like an anti-Hemingway, layering up phrases and descriptions, asides and digressions like someone purposefully flouting the supposed superiority of sparse prose. It mostly works, and it’s a riot to read.
Earlier, in January, I read Yoko Tawada’s novella The Emissary, alongside her Scattered all Over the Earth trilogy (Scattered all over the Earth, Suggested in the Stars, and Archipelago of the Sun). Taken together, these slim books form a quartet exploring a tension we’re currently wrestling with: How open should our societies be? At what point does shutting ourselves off from the world become problematic? What does openness cost us? You can read my combined review of all four here.
I also started Solvej Balle’s projected seven-volume series, On the Calculation of Volume. Four of the series have been published so far, and I’ve now read two. They’re quite good, and I’m eager to continue—as I am with Seishi Yokomizo’s mysteries. I’ve completed two so far, The Devil’s Flute Murders and The Honjin Murders. Yokomizo’s dandruffy detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, reminds me of Columbo in a kimono. He’s batty, baffling, and brilliant. Yokomizo has several others, all reissued by Pushkin Vertigo in the last few years.
Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room) presents an unconventional mystery series. Auster published each novella separately in the middle 1980s, but the three stories comprise one novel and are usually packaged that way today. The trio plays with the form of a detective story but actually present an exploration of the self and our mysterious, murky motives. Why do we do what we do? Why are we the way we are? Can we ever know? What’s the cost of the discovery? See my review here.
Rounding out the fiction I’ve read thus far this year, a trio of sci-fi classics: R.C. Sherriff’s The Hopkins Manuscript and two by Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle and The Penultimate Truth. All three offer entertainments of their own, while speaking to present concerns (environmental disaster, toxic populism, deep fakes, AI, and so on) in fascinating ways. You can see my reviews of Sherriff here and Dick here and here.
Stranger than Fiction?
I’ve always read a lot of nonfiction, and 2026 is similar to every year prior, going back to just after I was an embryo. First for the year? Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One in which he contrasts what he calls the maintenance mind and the neglect mind. Brand’s famous for many things, including founding the Whole Earth Catalog. Volume One of his new series stands as one of the best books I’ve read this year; see my review here. I chased it with John Markoff’s excellent biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.
In February I read C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. I wrote about it in a piece on Lewis’s scholarship (here) and again when talking about the so-called reading crisis (here).
In April, while going to and from the hospital for my mom, I listened to Tim Berners-Lee history of the web, This Is for Everyone, which is crammed with the sorts of background details that make you appreciate something we more or less take for granted today. Recommended.
And speaking of taking things for granted . . . books themselves! That was something I was eager to rectify with The Idea Machine. Running a parallel track comes Joel Halldorf’s excellent treatment, Reading Matters, a history of the book for the digital age. I devoured most of it in a single flight from Sacramento to Nashville and had the honor of reviewing it for Reason magazine. You can check that out here. I hope to write more about Halldorf’s fantastic book soon.
Sometime in May I read Adam Szetela’s That Book Is Dangerous—about the effort to cancel or censor “problematic” books. I hope to review it soon as well.
Finally, in June I read Damon Root’s fantastic Civil War history, The Emancipation War, about the journey to pass the thirteenth amendment (review here); Luke Burgis’s The One and the Ninety-Nine, about individual differentiation amid social toxicity (review here); and Ada Palmer’s mammoth history, Inventing the Renaissance (review coming this weekend).
Add it all up, and that’s thirty-nine books. Thus far, my reading for the year. And I’m just getting started, really.
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What a year you've had!
Family first. Always. But I love how you are able to read and listen with your family, traveling to distant lands from a hospital bed. We're a pretty forgiving audience, and would be disappointed if we found out you weren't human like the rest of us.