As you may have read from my post about my favorite books of 2025, I’ve decided to start writing a post about the books I’m reading in 2026 now, throughout the year, as I read them. This way I’m hoping to have more immediate feedback on the books, not struggling through some hazy memory of 8-12 months ago. It’s also hard not to be more influenced by books I read more recently as opposed to ones I read early in the year. I don’t do reviews and I don’t keep notes or make ratings, maybe I should but maybe this will fill the void, at least for now.

As I stated, my intention for 2025 was to read more non fiction and I think I accomplished that. I’ll try to run the numbers and provide some hard evidence. My intention for 2026 is to read more literature, the classics if you will. We’ll see how that goes. I’m going to try to stick with more non fiction as well.

At the end of 2025 and into the beginning of 2026, I made an effort (and am continuing to make an effort) to read some of the “Best of 2025” books, mostly as voted on my Goodreads readers. Here’s the winners from last year:

So far, I’ve read My Friends, Atmosphere, Not Quite Dead Yet, Onyx Storm, and Everything is Tuberculosis. The Compound is next up. While not a winner per se, a lot of people seemed to be talking about The Dream Hotel. I started it, got maybe half way through and just couldn’t finish. To depressing, to real life for right now. I feel like there are a lot of 1984-esque books out there right now and I just don’t need to read them.

As I mentioned in my favorites of 2025, My Friends is right up there with Atmosphere and could have been my favorite book of 2025. I just finished it, so it’s up for 2026 and will be very hard to knock off. It’s the first book by Fredrik Backman I’ve read and it was brilliant. The story was deep and rich but the best part is the characters, you feel a strong connection with them and it doesn’t take long to want to know what happens next.

I’ve also read the Emily Tesh books, both of which I thought were great. One if very Logan’s Run like while the other is Harry Potter like. Interesting that a sci-fi and then fantasy came from the same person and both are great, I love to see that kind of diversity.

Finally finished The Compound a few days ago. It was pretty touch and go there, as I “turned it off” several times. I kept waiting for something to happen but it never did. Not sure why it won “best of 2025” and particularly not sure why it won in the sci-fi category. It’s basically a Survivor like reality show type thing. Hmm. To top it off, I’ve started John Grisham’s The Widow, his latest book. I’m threatened to stop listening to it several times already, geez. I’ve only ever read The Firm and that was obviously a long time ago. Not sure what to do at this point.

I paused on The Widow and read Mary Roach’s Replaceable You. She is upfront in the prologue about what the book is about (and not about). I would have preferred some of the stuff it wasn’t about but it ended up being not bad overall.

I actually finished The Widow. It was a bit of a slog but it gets better in the last third. Not really worth it in the long run if you are just starting but I had invested some time, so finished it.