I finished reading 28 novels this year. There are 27 listed below, because the 28th is an unpublished one by someone who asked me to help edit it. In addition, I started to read and then stopped reading several novels, notably George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which I got 25% of the way through, then waited six-plus months, and then started over from the beginning, and I’m now about 13% of the way through. It’s funny to come across highlighted passages and be like, “What did this mean to me?” In any case, I’ve found a through line of interest, and even if Eliot’s attention to courtship gets monotonous, I trust I’ll finish it in 2026. Moby Dick and Blood Meridian, both of which I did complete, were part of an ongoing attempt to tackle classics I haven’t dug much in the past, the same process that got me into Middlemarch. I got through those two, but I can’t say they particularly registered with me. Two of the novels listed here are re-reads: Cryptonomicon (my fourth time through) and The Good Soldier (for the first time since my teens). I may have read The Talented Mr. Ripley previously, decades back, but even if so I had zero particular memory of it this time around. I read the first of the two Elmer Kelton books because I read True Grit, by Charles Portis, last year and then was making my way through the absurdly nihilistic Blood Meridian this year, and recognized I had never read a “real” western, and asked a friend to recommend several. After reading, and really digging, one Kelton, I immediately read a second. I’ve put + signs next to a selection of books I particularly recommend, though take those with a grain of salt. If you ask me in a few months, the recommendations will likely shift.
- C.S. Lewis — The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- Jakob Kerr — Dead Money
- + Neal Stephenson — Cryptonomicon
- Ford Madox Ford — The Good Soldier
- Cory Doctorow — Walkaway
- Ali Smith — Autumn
- + Joan Didion — Play It as It Lays
- + Adrian Tchaikovsky — Children of Time
- Michael Connelly — The Black Echo (Bosch Vol. 1)
- Stephen King — The Long Walk
- Patricia Highsmith — The Talented Mr. Ripley
- Michael Connelly — The Black Ice (Bosch, Vol. 2)
- Sandro Veronesi — The Hummingbird
- Marie-Helene Bertino — Beautyland
- C. A. Higgins — Lightness
- Ray Nayler — The Mountain in the Sea
- Elmer Kelton — The Day the Cowboys Quit
- + Elmer Kelton — The Good Old Boys
- + Rudy Rucker — Software
- + Mick Herron — Clown Town
- + Laurie Colwin — Goodbye Without Leaving
- Herman Melville — Moby Dick
- Cormac McCarthy — Blood Meridian
- Ian McEwan — What We Can Know
- Sarah Gailey — Spread Me
- Jon Fosse — Morning and Evening
- Jinwoo Park — Oxford Soju Club
The above doesn’t include non-fiction or graphic novels, which I track less closely. Maybe I’ll be more attentive to documenting those reads in 2026.