What are you reading in 2026?

[abazaba]

Yesterday, I picked up Clive Barker's 'Weaveworld' again. It's a book I have read multiple times (along with 'Imajica'), but this time I just couldn't get into it. Not because I did not like the story or the writing, but because (I think) I still remembered enough about it from the last time I read it (although that has been years) to not find it exiting anymore. That's something that never happened to me before when re-reading the book. Perhaps there is such a thing as re-reading a book so much that you naturally reach a point where it 'loses it's magic' or something ? Or perhaps it is just me who has changed enough over the years to have developed different likes/dislikes ?

 

[gban007]

Picking up from.where I left off in the Apothecary Diaries series, so read books 5 to 7 and started 8. Nice change of pace from the hard hitting Hive.

 

[jian]

Can't remember if I've talked about these books before, but I've just finished The Fatal Unpleasantness at Netherfield by Claudia Gray, which is the fifth and latest of the Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney mysteries, which are basically about the children of the protagonists of Pride & Prejudice and Northanger Abbey solving murders together in a shared Jane Austen universe.

These have got gradually better with each instalment, and this one has a fantastic scene with Jane Bingley (nee Bennet) finally unveiling her batteries on her Bingley sisters-in-law and Darcy, and I am totally here for it.

I was reading this one while also reading a long Bluesky thread by someone who's reading P&P for the first time and that really enhanced the experience. I never thought about the fact that Lydia is probably the child in which Mr Bennet sees most of himself, and that's why he's so forgiving towards her.

 

[Autumnal]

I don’t recall you mentioning them before. They sound like fun.

 

[jian]

I don’t recall you mentioning them before. They sound like fun.

They're pretty great, Gray is a good writer generally (mostly in sci-fi and fantasy) and she has fun with it.

She's also getting more into the research - I learned in the last book that funerals in Georgian England generally took place at night and only men attended, usually.

There was also something of a household tradition of dyeing a small selection of (preferably old) clothes black for mourning when someone died, because most people didn't have black clothes (since up to about 1800, black dyes were very expensive), and then those clothes would be handed down in the family for future mourning purposes. Since a wife was expected to wear mourning for more than a year after her husband's death, this was fairly sensible.

 

[Richards]

This week I started and finished another Lisa Jackson thriller, Lost Souls. It's about a series of girls going missing from the same small Louisiana college, all of whom attended the same small group of classes (one of them about vampirism in popular culture). Decent; I figured I'd like it based on having read a bunch of her previous novels, and the main character is the daughter of the main character of several of her other novels, apparently.

Johnathan

 

[jian]

Have also read The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin. It’s very good if rather short - compact and concentrated. Reminds me a lot of Philip K Dick.

 

[Autumnal]

It’s such a great story. Everything fits, nothing is wasted. It remains one of my favorite Le Guin books. She’d probably agree that it’s very Phildickian, and be pleased, given what good friends they were. (Funny story: they went to the same high school, at the same time, and had some mutual friends, but didn’t meet each other then. They only met after they’d both become writers.)

 

[Old Fezziwig]

I finished Lies Sleeping by Ben Aaronovitch last night. It's the eighth? book in the Rivers of London. At this point, the series is what it is, and I enjoy it as a palette cleanser, but there's not much more there. The series feels like it's beginning to groan under the weight of its own accumulated fiction, and, despite good pacing and solid craft in his prose, Aaronovitch isn't really bothering to write endings any more, which is frustrating. I did enjoy the sequence where Peter is held captive by Chorley with Foxglove as his jailer (really, just about all the Foxglove stuff was nicely done or, at least, nice to read if the difference matters).

 

[jian]

Have sped through This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews, which was a lot of fun. It’s probably the best modern Western isekai (though Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan is also a very strong contender) I’ve yet read, mostly because of its very solid and convincing worldbuilding and interesting characters.

The premise is that our protagonist Maggie is isekai’d into, basically, Game of Thrones. As you can imagine, this is a terrible predicament, especially since she isn’t reborn as an important character but as herself but naked and alone in a back alley in the main city. Rellas is just as full of vicious bastards, slavery, murder, torture, and sexual violence as Westeros. Maggie has two major magical advantages - one, she has perfect recall of the books (including being able to read and speak all the various languages), and two, she comes back to life when killed, eventually.

Maggie’s adventures and her commitment to saving as many people who are run over by the plot in the books are very enjoyable. I’m definitely going to see what else Andrews (they’re a couple, Ilona and Andrew) have written.