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 (Audible). Beautiful writing.  Too quick an ending.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life . Review pending--phenomenal.

Jayber Crow (currently reading).

New Boy (on the list)

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.