Another year, another list representing another pile of books I read and mostly failed to review. Which I regret every year, but this year in particular, I read a few books early on that I know I really liked but, sadly, I can't remember enough about them to say if they should be on this list or not. Maybe 2026 will be better?
But even with that caveat, it was very hard to trim my list down to the best books I read this year. My initial list of stuff I really liked was around 35 books, and I didn't read anything I really hated. My list this year includes a few new countries, some comics, some weird stuff, and lots and lots of great literature. Every year, when it's time to write these up, I look at all the relatively new stuff on my list, and think back to all the people I see online daily lamenting the lack of quality new books and, with all due respect, it's a skill issue. There's more beautiful, moving, funny, brilliant work published in the last 50 years than anyone could read in a lifetime. So without further ado, my best reads of the year.
Honorable Mentions:
Women of Sand and Myrrh, Hanan al-Shakyh
Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness, Jennifer Tseng
The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick
We the Survivors, Tash Aw
The Man in High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Territory of Light, Yuko Tsushima
The Hearing Trumpet, Leonore Carrington
Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, Rick Perlstein
The Iliad, Emily Wilson
Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay
Best Books of 2026 in rough but not necessarily exact order:
Bone, Jeff Smith
If J. R. R. Tolkien had been a cartoonist, he might have written something like Bone. The entire work weighs in at a hefty 1360 pages, and every one of them is packed with Smith's beautiful black and white artwork. The story Bone tells is serious, dipping its toes in religion, colonialism, generational trauma, and dispossession, but you'd be forgiven for not noticing most of that on a first read. Smith somehow managed to create epic where most sequences manage a punchline and pay sly homage to the last 100 years of American newspaper strips and cartooning. A real treat.
The Scapegoat, Daphne Du Maurier
Du Maurier has much to recommend her, but perhaps her most enviable trait is the way she generates momentum from seemingly mundane situations, piling anodyne happenings and biolerplate plot points on top of each other until they assume a nature unlike anything else. The Scapegoat takes a premise as old as Shalespeare--what if a regular guy secretly traded places with a rich dude?--and takes it in directions no one else would ever.
Flights, Olga Tokarczuk
This is one of the books I really regret not reviewing. Framed by a narrator writing from a series of airports, it's a modernist-style work comprised of mini-essays on travel and place interspersed with loosely-linked short stories that underline those themes. But that doesn't do justice to the writing, which is beautiful, or the structure, that makes it hard to classify. Is it a novel? A short story collection? New Journalism? Maybe all of those, and more.
Sun City, Tove Jansson
Another writer who seemingly never made a misstep, Jansson is always brilliantly funny and subtly pathotic, even, maybe especially, here, telling a story of a bunch of old folks who've moved to the liminal space of South Florida and dying or trying not to. It's got everything--a pirate ship, a Jesus freak, a pair of twins who die simultaneously, etc, etc. Quite a bit better than actually visiting Florida.
The Blind Owl, Sadegeh Hadayat
A bleak, cynical book, one of the most famous Iranian novels of all time, about a man trying to dispose of a corpse that he might've killed. Surreal, gross, poetic, a little scary, it's not like anything else I read this year, or maybe ever.
Lila, Marilynne Robinson
Possibly the best of the Gilead novels, Lila is the story of Lila Ames, wife of Rev. Boughton from Gilead. Robinson is, on the sentence level, one of the best writers I've ever read. Seemingly every page of her novels and essays contains a sentence or two that are perfect. And her stories, though not always neat or "nice", always give me a bit of comfort, even at their darkest. It says something that Robinson is a Calvinist and integrates it so beautifully into her work that I wish I was one too.
Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante
And speaking of bleak and cynical, let's move on the Ferrante, one of the angriest and most honest authors I've ever read. A middle aged woman's husband leaves her and her two children suddenly for a younger woman, and she's left to pick up the pieces--which she's completely incapable of doing. Reading the summary of this book doesn't even begin to tell you what it's about. Perhaps my most harrowing read of the year.
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño
I tried reading this a few years back and bounced off about 180pp in, when the story switches from a first-person narrative by an young poet to an oral history of the movement that poet was part of, Visceral Realism. But this time, after reading some of Bolano's shorter works, I understood what I was reading and it's brilliant. A sort-of biography of the two men behind the movement told entirely through the eyes of their friends, enemies, and predecessors, it creates an entire world only to ask, in the end, if there was really anything there at all. Also multiple people get stabbed for liking the wrong poets.
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
This was the first book I read this year, the only one I reviewed, and the one I've thought about the most. Easily the darkest of Dostoevsky's major works, The Idiot tells the story of Myshkin, an innocent, and asks the question, "What would happen if a human being was actually just like Jesus?" And the answer is, uh, not what you'd expect. More The Last Temptation of Christ then In His Steps, The Idiot asks questions for which there are still no easy answers, and asks them boldly.
And that's a wrap for this year. Thanks to everyone who reads this blog, even though you're mostly reading Chris's excellent reviews, and I hope you stick around for this year. I know I will.
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