booklist

in 2026, i finished

• the wind-up bird chronicle / haruki murakami / february
  • i set this proudly on my desk at work, hoping to talk about literature with someone. a few chapters later i reached the violent and perverted parts and regretted having advertised that i was reading it. i lived an entire life as the narrator of this book and then stopped reading entirely for the rest of winter, spring, and early summer.

in 2025, i finished

• daisy miller / henry james / january

• a visit from the goon squad / jennifer egan / march

  • in new york i heard the voice of my conscience clearly for the first time in a year. i knew i had to find different work + a better way of life. M gave me this book and i read it on the train home.

    i'm always half-asleep on the lake shore limited. on the westward route you slide through the night as through a black tunnel, interrupted periodically by industrial parks, truckyards, naval training bases. i dreamed while i read & saw the neon images from the book projected out over lake erie.

    egan writes accurately about cruelty. i felt totally pulled in and totally doomed.

    at union station i stumbled around with an evil headache; i had come down with covid on the train.

• a room of her own / chris casson madden / march

  • an adult picture book of women's private spaces. i bought this at the bookstore in s---------. after i read it L & i established our own bedrooms.

• to the lighthouse / virginia woolf / june

  • this is funny because i don't remember being inspired to read this by the previous title, but there's no other explanation.

    far & away my favorite this year!

• pygmalion / george bernard shaw / july

  • talked to L about voice training while reading this.

• uncle vanya / anton chekhov / august

  • even with all the wedding stress we found time to read this aloud in the park.

• first person singular / haruki murakami / september

• breakfast of champions / kurt vonnegut / september

  • read mostly in the early (->late) hours of one morning during a painful little insomniac spell.

• the factory / hiroko oyamada / september

• mort / terry pratchett / october

  • so i got stressed from being unemployed and read a little discworld! what about it!

• entangled life / merlin sheldrake / november

  • this book got into my brain and stirred it around! i hope to write an essay on it soon.

    my favorite nonfiction read of the year. & only nonfiction read of the year, unless i count 1/2 of braiding sweetgrass, which sheldrake incidentally references a couple times.

    i borrowed m.'s copy. it was a little sticky on the outside. when i touched it i thought about it collecting dust, good smells, + cat humours in her sweet apartment.

    it made me want to do mushrooms, see mushrooms, eat mushrooms, be eaten by mushrooms, and (respectfully) go on a date with the author.

• weasels in the attic / hiroko oyamada / november

  • disorienting, teeming with detail like a fishtank or a city. a horror novel if you read it while feeling like you might not want to have kids.

    read while procrastinating making a pecan pie. my heart pounded through the whole final chapter. and the pie turned out well.