We’re so back, baby. Three kids plus touring but not writing a book meant (comparatively) more time for reading. My book launch and my littlest baby being big enough to not travel with me synced up well, and meant I had plenty of flights with no one on my lap and quiet time with paper books.
That meant for the first time since 2021 (one child, pregnant with the next, pandemic-ish, 117 books), I read more than 90 books in a year (95 books, 29,739 pages). This excludes, naturally, the many board books I read (repeatedly) and getting to begin the Narnia books and Edward Eager, and The Little Prince with my five year old.
It also meant I FINISHED ALL twelve books on my 2025 reading list. As you will see below, this has caused me to tip into hubris when assembling my 2026 list.
I also like to check what’s the farthest I’ve gone outside my time in my reading, and last year, the top three are Xenophon’s Anabasis [c 370 BC], Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (with the Catherine Project!) [c 1613], and Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum [1891].
Every year I make this list (drawing only from books I already own by January 1st) to give myself permission to prioritize these books over other things (twitter, the daily newspaper, library holds, etc).
And here, in alphabetical order, is what’s on this year’s list of fourteen books:
- Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic by Jeanne Boydston
- Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary by Pamela Dean
- Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds by Mary Dunn
- School of Shards by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko
- Judging the Judges, Judging Ourselves: Truth, Reconciliation and the Apartheid Legal Order by David Dyzenhaus
- Ambigrammia: Between Creation and Discovery by Douglas Hofstadter
- Something for Nothing?: An Explanation and Defence of the Scholastic Position on Usury by David Hunt
- The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics by Andrew Willard Jones
- Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography by Émile Perreau-Saussine
- Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi
- Fantasy: A Short History by Adam Roberts
- Song of the Lamb: Sacred Music and the Heavenly Liturgy by Robert Cardinal Sarah and Peter Carter
- Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 by Sarah Schulman
- Francis of Assisi: A New Biography by Augustine Thompson