Books in 2026

I probably spend nearly as much time arranging and rearranging my lists (mental and written-out) for what I plan to read as the time spent reading.

I actually don't go hunting around for new books to read, though I do look at what the NY Times and Guardian are promoting.  From this Guardian list, I added Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House (though from the write-up her previous novel My Phantom won't be my cup of tea at all).  And if it is truly his last novel/memoir, I will probably eventually get around to Julian Barnes's Departure(s), though I expect it might be a year or two before I get to it, and I am much more likely to reread Flaubert's Parrot beforehand.

I don't track poetry nearly as much, though I probably should pull together a post on relatively new discoveries.  I may have mentioned that I just missed out on a reading that Ronna Bloom did at Queen Books, and that I would probably have been inspired to look her up (in time) had I read Public Works before her other work, as this collection really spoke to me.  She goes to a fair number of readings and book launches around Toronto, so I will probably manage to see her in 2026.  She is starting off with a Zoom reading of In a Riptide in late Jan., and I can probably make that.  I'll see if there are any other in-person readings in the coming months.  (I do see that the Queen Books reading also included John Barton reading from Compulsory Figures, which got a shout out from this CBC story on the best Canadian poetry from 2025.  Sigh.)  As I think I mentioned, I was able to get a signed copy of Public Works, which is the one I wanted the most, and I have a copy of In a Riptide, which I will bring along if I make it to any of her upcoming readings.  It sounds like Who is your mercy contact? was quite a good chapbook, but it is completely sold out and sadly no copies made their way into Robarts or the Toronto Library system.  There was another chapbook that caught my eye (The New Alphabets by Virginia Konchan) but it also was impossible to source.*  I have to say that I do think poets ought to consider more seriously putting rarities like this up for sale as digital e-books after the original run sells out, as these poems usually don't then make their way into later collections, unless the poets are quite famous (which is an oxymoron for sure...).

Anyway, from the CBC story, I picked out roughly half of the books and put in a request for them, including Barton's Compulsory Figures, Amber Dawn's Buzzkill Clamshell, Katherena Vermette's Procession and Karen Solie's Wellwater.  (I have read some of Solie's previous collections, though I hadn't thought about her for a while.)  It turns out that Konchan also has a new collection, Requiem, so I put in a request for that as well.  So I'll be reading a fair bit of poetry in 2026.

I sort of think of my reading for 2026 in tranches, with the first tranche ending in March.  I expect one of the last things to be Nabokov's Ada, which I will start on the train to Ottawa, and then Shteyngart's Vera.

The first things I expect to read in 2026 will be rereading Narayan's The Financial Expert and then reading The Painter of Signs.

Other books that will likely be read between those two markers are Mahfouz's The Beggar, Russell Smith's Self Care, Gide's The Immoralist, Ehateśāma's The Tale of the Missing Man (something from my TPL lists), Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, Jelloun's The Last Friend, Offil's Weather, Thien's The Book of Records, Skorvecky's An Inexplicable Story, Amis's The Information and maybe Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y.

In the 2nd tranche, I will probably finally return to William Maxwell and read some of his later short stories, as well as So Long, See You Tomorrow.  And probably Faulkner's The Wild Palms, Reva's Endling, Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, Azuela's The Underdogs, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (also on TPL hold shelf), Forster's Howard's End (finally, months after seeing The Inheritance) and McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. And perhaps Hunter by Shuang Xuetao and maybe Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and something by Edna O'Brien (though I haven't decided what that might be).

I'm sure there will be plenty of deviations from this (and I need to squeeze Mavis's Montreal Stories in somewhere), but it seems like a reasonable place to start, and it should be a decent balancing of reading stone-cold classics and books that are piled up that just need to be read and released back into the wild.  If I get through these and I'm still in the first half of 2026, I'll pull something else from this list.  If I end up making longer trips, I really ought to consider Fontane's After the Storm.  I think 2026 will be the year when I read Melville's Pierre (which is now the only major work of his I've never read), but I haven't decided on the order.  I am leaning towards the Kraken edition (with the Maurice Sendak illustrations!) and then at some point after that reading the originally published version.

I will say in general, I have been cutting way back on the buying of new books and even used ones, so I don't have lots of books coming in and gathering dust (as in this spot-on Tom Gauld cartoon).  Ah, dopamine!

 

I did make an exception a while back to get Bechdel's The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (which I have at least browsed through) and John Guare's Plays from Library of America (which I haven't cracked, but this seemed like something so niche it would never turn up for less used, particularly given the outrageous shipping to Canada).  However, I still pick up DVDs and Blu-ray sets that I may not watch for years, so this is something I should try to work on more, and not buy these items until I have gotten through more of my video backlog...

 

* Interestingly, I did another search and Konchan's The New Alphabets has ended up at the Fisher Rare Book Library, so I will set some time aside one of these days to read it.  I wonder if her connection to rob mclennan (who also has a new book out that I want to read) lead to this donation.  I managed to contact mclennan a few years back and picked up Konchan's Empire of Dirt and several of his chapbooks, a few of which I ultimately donated to Fisher.  I guess I might as well email Ronna Bloom and encourage her to donate a copy of Who is your mercy contact? to Fisher.