Quick Lit: Short and Sweet Reviews — January 2026
A grumpy bookseller novel, Lydia Millet’s razor-sharp short stories, Joy Harjo as the wise auntie we all need, and a strange new Roxane Gay–imprint release about grief, obsession, and the soul of a dog.
New Books I’m Looking Foward To This Year (First Half of 2026)
Books that arrive already humming with questions: about how we live, what we inherit, what we automate, what we grieve, and what we still hope books can do for us when the news is unbearable and the group chat is tired.
Best Books I Read in 2025
A curated list of fiction and nonfiction exploring burnout, work, grief, attention, and belonging. Personal notes on books that helped me think more clearly about modern life.
Serviceberry Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The book argues that joy and justice are not separate pursuits, and that caring for the earth is less about sacrifice than participation. By treating the world as a gift rather than a resource, Kimmerer reframes responsibility as relationship—and asks what becomes possible when we take only what we need and let the rest circulate.
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkehead
My conversations helped me recognise a deeper issue, too, which is the way our ceaseless efforts to get into the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place.
Most Recent Additions to My Bookshelf
My Top Ten Tuesday Post-Christmas book haul reveals: translated Nobel Prize winner I keep abandoning, writing guides that might finally crack my note-taking chaos, a bookseller so bitter it might be too mean even for me, and the best neighborhood book box score of 2025.
Ten Books I'd Love to Be Gifted This Year
Top Ten Tuesday - From the only cookbook Marcella Hazan brought to America to Pynchon's 'great cheese novel,' this year's wishlist has some stories to tell. (Plus: the housing market horror novel that might hurt too much to read.)
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The fact was that Annabel was so disgusted by greed, by the ruination of the natural world because of it, that, like ascetics before her, the only action she could take was to remove herself, bit by bit, from the obscenity of this excess. 'Her suffering was an existential and a moral problem,' he said. 'Not a medical one.'
The Road to Tender Hearts
Some people will always ignore the sign, no matter how clear and direct it is.
The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
I asked him if he was going to British Honduras on vacation and he said, 'Vacation! Do you think I'm the kind of man who takes vacations?'
The Antidote by Karen Russel
The plow that broke these plains was the plow that broke my family back in German-occupied Poland: the plow of empire. The plow that displaces and murders people, tearing them from their homes. The plow that levels more than tallgrass. The plow pushed by people like me.
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal
For too long, most Americans didn't take oral history seriously, creating a mystery where there never was one. The question of who built these places and where they went are no mystery, O'odham elders and historians repeat: 'We've always lived here.'