What are you reading in 2026?

[Eyes of Nine]

Where would you recommend a McGuire noob start? I’d always heard vaguely negative things; I think from people annoyed at her dominance at the Hugos (?) a few years back. But clearly there’s a lot of folks who think she’s the bee’s knees.

Wayward Children is good, and they are novellas, so short. I've read the first 2 or 3 and enjoyed.

I recently finished book 19 of the October Daye series, and those are coming to a close. I really loved them for a while, and now am ready for the final reveal of who Maeve is and showdown/war between Titania, Evening Rose, the unnamed Queen on one side and October and co, The Luidaeg, and maybe Maeve showing up. Hopefully will be more climactic and interesting than the end of the Twilight series


All of which to say, McGuire was in early on the urban fantasy stuff, and the series still holds up. Also, there's all flavors of love and gender just taken as a no-big-deal part of the story, which I am here for all day every day.

 

[jian]

Wayward Children is good, and they are novellas, so short. I've read the first 2 or 3 and enjoyed.

I recently finished book 19 of the October Daye series, and those are coming to a close. I really loved them for a while, and now am ready for the final reveal of who Maeve is and showdown/war between Titania, Evening Rose, the unnamed Queen on one side and October and co, The Luidaeg, and maybe Maeve showing up. Hopefully will be more climactic and interesting than the end of the Twilight series


All of which to say, McGuire was in early on the urban fantasy stuff, and the series still holds up. Also, there's all flavors of love and gender just taken as a no-big-deal part of the story, which I am here for all day every day.

Word is that the early October Daye books were based on a Changeling game she was in, and that certainly makes sense.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Speaking of Humblous Bundlous, 22 Scalzi books, if you are curious and can stand to read in electronic format. Highly recommend Old Man's War series at the very least. His later books (like Starter Villain) very much are in a similar voice to his blog.

Humble Book Bundle: The John Scalzi Collection: Old Man's War & More by TOR Books

Discover your new favorite author with this bundle of books from sci-fi humorist John Scalzi! Pay what you want and support World Central Kitchen!

www.humblebundle.com

 

[Retros_x]

You all might enjoy my morning read that was suggested by my phone today:

The End of Reading Is Here

(I could read one the atlantic article for free on my phone, on PC it seems to require opening an account. So maybe try on your phone)
Postliteracy is an interesting term and I wonder what you all make out of it.


On another reading related news: Kobo now has integration with Storygraph, the better version of Goodreads. I did not see that coming and was pleasantly surprised. No need for manual reading updates in my Storygraph-Account anymore, at least for my e-books (which are 80% of my reading)

I am currently struggling with "Malibu Rising" by Taylor Jenkinds Reid. I did enjoy "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo" A LOT. But this book has a bit of a bland main cast and too much of a simple theme or story for me. The first half I did enjoy, but maybe because I was on vacation. Now I am back at home and I struggle with the second half that plays completely in one big party night. Dozens of unimportant characters get introduced, even with POVs. I am not sure if I struggle cause a decline of quality in the book or because I am not sweating in 35° C at the shores of Korsika anymore but have a clear head in cool rainy North Germany. It seems to be a decent beach read but nothing beyond that. But I dont want to DNF, I am too far in the book to give up and its only 120 pages or something like that left. Sunk cost fallacy working a lot in my brain here haha.

 

[Umbran]

Recently...
Network Effect
Fugitive Telemetry
System Collapse
all by Martha Wells in her "Murderbot Diaries" series.

The first of those is a novel, but I finished it while on a trip, and so I needed to quickly find more to read so I just grabbed the novellas that followed.

Now...
This Inevitable Ruin, by Matt Dinniman

 

[Autumnal]

I think postliteracy claims are as overstated now as they were when I was a kid half a century ago. There’s still a lot of reading going on. What we do need is a lot of media literacy training.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Spouse and I listened to Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer on our drive this weekend. Thoroughly enjoyed. Not sure it needed sequels; but we’ve got another 10 hour drive in a couple of weeks, so we’re looking forward to listening to the next.

Exceptional unreliable narrator - if anyone was teaching a class on that specific technique, well worth using this as a text.

Annihilation (VanderMeer novel) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[jian]

Read Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) by Olufemi Taiwo, which is a short punchy read. I’m indebted to it for filling in some important recent history about Cabo Verde (which, along with Guinea-Bissau, freed itself from the Portuguese Empire as late as 1973, which helped precipitate the fall of the fascist government in Portugal in 1975). Highly recommended.

I also liked the insight that conservative immigrants (such as South Asians in the U.K., or Nigerians* in the US) seeking security and validation are extremely important to elite capture of identity politics, and that many of those immigrants move to richer countries because of the post-colonial failures in their home nations precipitated by the imperialist actions of those countries.

*Taiwo himself is a Nigerian-American immigrant who talks about his family background in this context.

 

[Autumnal]

Angel’s Inferno, by William Hjortsberg. It’s not often I say “I suggest you don’t read this book. But I suggest you don’t read this book.

It’s the sequel to Falling Angel, which was the basis for the movie Angel Heart. Both stories are set in 1959, narrated by struggling New York private eye Harry Angel. He’s hired by a Mr. Louis Cyphere to find an up and coming jazz singer who dropped out of sight during World War II. Complications ensue.

The movie ends with that amazing sequence during the end credits. Falling Angel the book ends a bit before that, with Angel and lots of cops and other complications in his office. So Angel’s Inferno picks up right there, with Angel going on the lam.

Most of this book takes place in Paris, once Angel rounds up money from an interesting source and builds up the tools of a viable fake identity. There a lot of good attention to detail - Hjortsberg has a talent for conveying the experience of living and moving there and then. There are side trips to Rome, and they’re good, too. I was delighted to find William Burroughs being a minor character, significant in several scenes.

But.

First of all, there’s a lot of untranslated or partially translated French dialogue. I have never used the Kindle’s translation so much as I did for this book.

Second, this book gets just plain gross, physically and emotionally. Okay, sure, big surprise, most of the major characters are Satanists but there are too many elements that distracted me from the actual story, and made me (as the meme has it) root for injuries. I finished partly out of outright morbid curiosity. The story gets increasingly downright bizarre. It makes something like The Ninth Gate seem very mundane and mild. The ending is not good, but it’s certainly memorable, like your first impacted wisdom tooth.

On to something else. I’m in a genuinely unhappy mood at having this book rattling around in my head.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Finished Shirley's Eclipse Penumbra. Frightfully prescient. But, like Parable of the Sower, I take comfort that if they envisioned the rise of fascism in the US, they also envisioned its end.

I also read Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup. Enjoyed it quite a bit - it's fast and tight, far less sprawling than Synners.

Now I'm re-reading Neuromancer. Got a fancy Folio Society edition to enjoy, and the latest teaser trailer for the Apple TV series is as good a reason as any to give it another read.