My 2026 Reading List
Looking back…
I read fewer books in 2025 than I had in previous years, but I’d say I read both more deeply and more widely. It was great!
I set my reading goal to 50 books (see tracker here) at the beginning of the year, and that smaller number let me move at a slower pace. I also had a growing watchlist of films and TV shows I meant to catch up on, so it felt practical not to overextend myself. You make time for what you love, and I love movies and books.
A question I get asked a lot is how I manage to read so many books or watch so many movies. The short answer is that you make time for what you love. The longer, more practical answer is that attention benefits from structure. There is too much culture available to us now—too many books, films, shows, essays, clips, recommendations—and if you have varied interests, without some kind of system, you can easily get overwhelmed. So I keep lists and sort them by urgency: most interested, curious, fine to miss.
Lately I’ve been sharing my lists, and some people found them helpful last year. I’m working on this year’s reading and watch list too, and I’ll share them in a week. For easy reference, they are always here at the bottom of the page.
I find that the secret to being interesting, if there is one, is to remain interested. It’s not tricky. It’s not about being the most well read, most intelligent, or most “alternative” person. It’s about being curious about the world and yourself. In today’s attention-dwindling world, it’s about going beyond the sound bite and other people’s opinions about the supposedly interesting thing, and encountering the thing itself. Thinking about it and deciding what it says to you—what you love about it and what you don’t. Taste is not a performance of having consumed the correct objects. It is a record of attention.
I was also offline for much of 2025, which helped. In 2026, many of my goals require me to be more visible and more front-facing—more online. I imagine that will bring its own challenges. I’m choosing to meet them without surrendering too much of my quiet.
The Books Ahead
Last year, I finished six of the seven books on my most-anticipated list; the exception was R. F. Kuang’s Katabasis. This year, I’ve raised my goal to 60 books. It’s ambitious, but there’s too much I want to read—and I want the challenge. Keeping my TBR under 100 also leaves room for unplanned reads, unexpected releases, and mood picks.
My short list for 2026 includes Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life, John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis, Katabasis, Kennedy Ryan’s Can’t Get Enough, and Sonali Dev’s There’s Something About Mira. But many of the books I most want to read this year aren’t new. Anticipation doesn’t have to obey the publishing calendar.
There’s Lara S. Ormiston’s Unequal Affections, a Pride and Prejudice variation in which Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s first proposal despite not loving him. The lengths I went to for a physical copy have probably intensified my attachment; at this point, the book and I may be trauma-bonded.
I also want to read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which has hovered at the edge of my awareness for years: the young bride, the grand estate, the dead first wife whose presence governs the living. I’m ready, finally, to enter Manderley.
Kennedy Ryan’s Score is another priority. It follows Reel, which I read in 2024 and loved with the kind of enthusiasm that makes a sequel feel less like a new release than a long-awaited reunion.
Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy grows out of the territory they’ve explored in their newsletter, The Isolation Journals, to which I’ve been subscribed for about a year and a half: creativity as a way of moving through illness, loss, love, discomfort, and new beginnings. I’m drawn to books that treat art not as ornament but as a method of survival.
Ella Risbridger’s In Love With Love, next on my TBR, examines romantic fiction stretching from pre-Austen to today’s fan fiction. Romance is one of those genres people think they understand until they try to explain why it matters. I’m always interested in what other readers and researchers see in it, partly because my own attachments often become clear only after the fact. Sometimes a book moves you first and tells you why much later.
Then there’s Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell, about a Mormon man who dies and discovers that hell is an apparently infinite library—one he can escape only by finding the book that contains the story of his life. As premises go, it understands that paradise and punishment are often separated by scale.
I also intend to return to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I read My Brilliant Friend in 2024 and loved it, then somehow let the rest of the quartet fall off my list. This is the year I pick it back up, perhaps after a strategic skim of the first book.
The adaptation calendar has created a second, more urgent syllabus: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation, and Nicholas Sparks’s Remain. Reading them all before their film versions arrive may be a tall order, but staggered release dates create the illusion—and perhaps the reality—of time.
Finally, I want to read The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi. Last year I read its companion, The Courage to Be Happy, a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man about psychology, freedom, approval, and the possibility of refusing to let the past dictate the future. I found it genuinely affecting.
This year, I will also be trying audiobooks.
In the end, a reading plan is a plan for living. If you don’t make room for it—if you don’t put something pleasurable on the calendar, even something ordinary—the days will pass, and all you’ll have to show for them is work.
This doesn’t just apply to reading btw!
I want to achieve many things. I assume you do too. But I will keep screaming, even as they drag me into the void, that we are here to live: to enjoy and to be enjoyed. Those moments can feel few and far between. Life is unfair and unpredictable; it is also lucky, beautiful, horrid, happy, and sad—often in the same week.
So much remains outside our control. What we can do is become more intentional about how we choose to experience it: what we notice and what we make time for.
Happy new year! 🎉 🤎
