Category: field notes

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 There are 27 listed below, because the 28th is an unpublished one by someone who asked me to help edit it.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.

I only just made the connection that the artist Pae White whose 12,000-disc sculpture currently hovers above the entrance just inside the San Jose Museum of Art is the Pae White of the “Pae White’s non-blank graphic metacard” from the Oblique Strategies deck created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. The museum piece is titled Noisy Blushes and was made between 2019 and 2020.