2026 Reading List

Check out our readings lists from 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014  

The Playground.  After reading Powers' incredible The Overstory (my fanboy review is here) my hopes were sky high for his 2024 globe-spanning novel on the coral reefs of the Pacific.  I was ready to have my mind blown and expanded on coral reefs in the same way he had down with trees. While I enjoyed the novel, my mind was not blown--I did not set the book down and become a raving lunatic about coral reefs in the way I did trees to the point where I've permanently scarred my children's psyche with my manic exclamations about how incredible trees and tree systems are and the way they communicate and speak and nurture and repair one another...you get the picture. Don't let my unrealistic expectations dissuade you though! PICK UP  A COPY though--Playground is a great book that follows the maybe-intersecting arc of a tech billionaire with a mysterious degenerative disease, his childhood friend turned frenemy and a pioneering female marine biologist set against the backdrop of the Pacific island of Makatea. Powers also drops an AI angle in there which I can't decide if it's distracting or prescient.

Before the Night Comes (Brazil)  I first learned about Matt Roper’s work through a friend who is setting up an American arm of Meninadanca to help fundraise and spread awareness about child prostituion/trafficking problem along Brazil’s 2800 mile long BR-116 highway. To date he’s written 4 books about his decades-long journey to set up “Pink Houses” in towns along this highway.  These safe houses are more than that but become lighthouses for young girls who previously had no hope. The book is powerful reminder that EVERY girl has invaluable worth and is WORTH fighting for.  If you’d like to get involved, please shoot me an email, comment or clink on the link!   My full review is here. 

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague: (Audible and then the movie). First thing to set straight:  during Shakespeare's time, the names "Hamnet" and "Hamlet" were used interchangeably.  That threw me at first.  Before you read Hamnet, you'd be well served to review Shakespeare's play "Hamlet"--not required of course--but it would enrich your reading of the novel. Second thing to set straight: the book came out in 2020 but I somehow missed it then--it obviously resurged this year due to the phenomenal movie.  

Now that that is out of the way, Author Maggie O'Farrell can write.  She crafts a fictional-ish narrative that connects Shakespeare's 11-year-old son Hamnet's death to his writing of his famous play.  She stacks that narrative with layers of lush writing, conversations, and descriptions that transport you to the middle of that bubonic time period on the macro level while at the same time embedding you inside of unbearable loss.  

I won't spoil the ending but I will say that movie's ending is far more satisfying than the book.  There's a moment there in the movie as Hamnet's mother watches her husband's play that hangs on the screen as your heart breaks.  The power of Shakespeare lives on 426 years later!

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Found this book sitting on my book shelf–what a welcome surprise! This was one of my pre-bedtime reads and I finished it off in a week–Anne Lamott can write! I’d never read her before and loved her 1994 primer on writing. It’s chock full of funny, self-deprecating anecdotes and advice for not only aspiring writers but also literature lovers in general. My full review is here.

New Boy.  Written by 1979 Woodberry Forest School Senior Prefect Murphy Evans, the novel take place at the fictional "Randolph School" and focuses on the lives of the adolescent boys at an all-boys boarding school (it was a trip down memory lane for me as a Senior Prefect myself). The crux of the story focuses on the idea of what honor truly means.  Does it sit squarely within the confines of ‘Woodberry boys do not lie, cheat, or steal’ or does it (or should it) encompass more than that?  What role does friendship and loyalty play?  These are questions which I haven’t truly pondered in some 30 years and Evans’ deft, thoughtful writing gave me ample opportunity to consider my own history and upbringing and its impact on my life.

Jayber Crow (Kindle).  

Jayber Crow is the name of the main character and covers the arc of his life from a young orphaned boy to an aging, partially retired town barber looking back on his life. His life takes a wandering route from the orphanage barber apprentice to seminary dropout to prison chain gang to eventual Port Williams barber, gravedigger, and church custodian. Jayber’s physical wanderings provide a backdrop for his own spiritual journey in which he struggles with and internalizes what it means to believe in Jesus.

 My full review is here.

Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did (Audible).  Last year we read Comer’s “Ruthless Elimination of Hurry" (my review is here) and it was life changing.

This book is for those who read Ruthless and ask themselves:, so how do we actually implement an unhurried and contemplative life? Practicing the Way lays out a path that is less rigid implementation and legalistic system and instead is a call first and foremost to eat Jesus’ dust.  This refers to the Jewish practice of following and imitating a rabbi so closely that you literally would be walking in his dust were you a first century Jew following him on a dirt road.  This act of following was called apprenticeship and this is what we are called to as Christian.  It’s noteworthy that the term Christian appears only 3 times in the New Testament, while the word for "Apprentice" (mathētēs)appears 269 times. In this case words matter because they translate to actions (or inactions) in our daily lives. My full review is here. 

My Life as a Student and Teacher at Woodberry Forest School: A Memoir (finished). Written by reknowned professor and administrator Paul Huber. This reads less as biography and more as loose recollection and scattered history of the prestigious all boys boarding school founded in 1889 of which I am a proud 1997 grad. I didn't know Mr. Huber well when I was at Woodberry but he writes well and clearly and has a keen sense of humor that I'm sorry I never got to experience first hand.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (finished).  Pullitzer Prize Winner.  Read with my oldest daughter. Jewish-American author Nathan Thrall first wrote this story as a long form journalistic piece for the New York Review of Books and I can’t imagine this made him any friends within the Israeli government. He expanded that article into this book that earned him a Pulitzer in 2024 for general nonfiction. Thrall is a masterful researcher and story-teller–my daughter didn’t realize that it wasn’t fiction until she’d nearly finished it.  

The author uses a singular event–a horrific school bus accident–to extrapolate the dizzying, dehumanizing level of bureaucracy and indignities Palestinians endure living in the West Bank.  Along the way, he delves into the broader history of the conflict at a surface level.  In peeling back the myriad onion layers that led to a Palestinian father losing his son, Thrall offers the reader a truncated history of how the current system was created.   My full review is here.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Kindle) (currently reading). National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.

Letters by a Modern Mystic: Excerpts from Letters Written at Dansalan, Lake Lanao, Philippine Islands, to His Father (currently reading as morning devotional)

Meh

Tomcat in Love & America Fantastica. So do I recommend Tomcat in Love or its philosophical sequel/Trump takedown America Fantastica?  Well, after I finished Tomcat and jotted down some key quotes from it that captured some superb writing, I tossed it in the trash.  It had previously sat on my bookshelf for the last decade unread.  Aside from great technical writing there was little of redeeming value in its pages.  It’s billed as laugh out loud funny, and it is humorous satire, but the overall  narrative describes a sad, disturbed, self-absorbed, unrepentant man’s life.  A man who is unable to holster his own desires, both mental, and otherwise–as the novel wears on, it becomes apparent that the central character is clinically sick. It’s hard to read a novel where there’s no one to cheer for.  I was reminded of Anne Lamott’s advice in her incredible book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life in which she quotes author Ethan Canin’s seminal advice: “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.”  Read my full review here.

Kruse's Key: Skip Obrien's "Tomcat in Love" and "America Fantastica" Unless You Enjoy Unlikable Narrators

 Check out our readings lists from 2026, 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014  

Tim O’Brien can write.  His sentence and dialogue and paragraph flow masterfully–he’s a quick read–there’s no Faulkner chewing of paragraphs required to digest.  He’s been recognized through numerous awards such as the National Book Award for fiction and France’s foreign book award as well as the James Finnemore Cooper Brooks award.  I recall reading his seminal Vietnam short story collection “The Things They Carried” in high school and being awestruck that someone could write so well. 

But after every book I read, I consider the fundamental readers’ question in life: would I recommend it.  Or, more precisely, for whom would I recommend it?

So do I recommend Tomcat in Love or its philosophical sequel/Trump takedown America Fantastica?  Well, after I finished Tomcat and jotted down some key quotes from it that captured some superb writing, I tossed it in the trash.  It had previously sat on my bookshelf for the last decade unread.  Aside from great technical writing there was little of redeeming value in its pages.  It’s billed as laugh out loud funny, and it is humorous satire, but the overall  narrative describes a sad, disturbed, self-absorbed, unrepentant man’s life.  A man who is unable to holster his own desires, both mental, and otherwise–as the novel wears on, it becomes apparent that the central character is clinically sick. It’s hard to read a novel where there’s no one to cheer for.  I was reminded of Anne Lamott’s advice in her incredible book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life in which she quotes author Ethan Canin’s seminal advice: “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator. Nothing holds a story together better.”  Note to reader: I had no idea who Ethan Canin was prior to reading Bird by Bird.  Another author to add to the list–a quick research tells me I should start with A Doubter’s Almanac.  

In America Fantastica O’Brien widens his scope and tackles a host of characters–all seemingly without a moral compass.  I suppose he means for the story and the characters to symbolize America’s wider moral decay under Trump’s first term, along with his mythomania take on the concurrent rise of fake news and that symbology largely works.  But with characters that are largely unlikable, it’s hard to recommend the book.  The story was eminently readable–great pacing, and dialogue, and movement–but halfway through I found myself just wanting to get it over with.  If you are looking for high brow left-leaning satire though, this book may be just what you are looking for.   

Key Tomcat Quotes:

Page 18

Does language contain history the way plywood contains a flight“ as we bruised each day of our lives by solo collisions or spirit slashed by combinations of vowel and consonant at a cocktail party say or at a ball game or at your daughter‘s wedding would you feel death slide between your ribs if someone were to utter the name of your ex-husband? Can a color cause bad dreams? Can a cornfield make you cry? Do we radiate language by the lies we lead?… Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?”

Page 158

“each of us I firmly believe is propelled to life by a restless inexhaustible need for affection. What else do we charge off to work every morning or withhold farts or decorate our bodies with precious gems or attention, church or smile at strangers or pluck out body here send valentines or glanced to mirrors or forgive or try to forgive or national her teeth at betrayal or prayer, promise or any of 1 trillion large and small behaviors that constitute the totality of the human trial on this planet, all for love all to be loved”

Then we finally discover this weird ledger thing that the narrator has and this is where you really start to not like despise feel loathsome toward the main character, which we can the novel by not having a likable main character. The only thing that keeps you in it is the idea of that he seems mentally ill this ledger list of not necessarily women who slept with because that is only four but women that he’s flirted with or kissed all organized by various metrics.

169

His love interest Mrs. Cushaw finally discovers his ledger and reads it “privates not the word I mean listen to this handholding’s 421 nuzzling 233 valentines 98 marriages one meaningful cases 1788… The whole thing, Thomas it’s revolting”

Page 174

He uses his flirtations as “innocent dolls” this is part of the problem

181

Here’s Thomas' central thesis: "The trick with women I have learned is to keep upping the ante, lose a hand, double the stakes, lose another, double to infinity like any gambling junkie. The female animal wants it all along dash your first strings, your heart, your spirit, the very breath of your lungs“