📚 Books read in 2026

February

Cato: A Tragedy, by Joseph Addison

A brief play covering the last few days of Cato's life. Caesar is at the gates and Rome's fall seems inevitable. The play follows Cato, his family and closest advisors as they navigate their own conundrums and loyalties. This was written in 1713 and holds up quite well.

Vita Nostra, by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

I read an English translation of this strange Russian fantasy. The story follows a promising student's rise in a school of surreal magic. I loved the sense of unknowable complexity of the world the students are trying to pierce, the unexplainable cruelty of the teaching methond, and the limits of human language in conveying something that the mind cannot conceive.

January

Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny

An enjoyable speculative sci-fi tale of a far future where an advanced group has solved re-incarnation and elevated themselves to godhood, styling themselves after the Hindu Gods. They govern humanity by controlling thir karmic cycle and offering godhood as a faraway boon. Their reign is challenged by one of their own, who has a promethean desire to accelerate it to the masses.

What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan

Midway through the book I was not sure if I should keep going, and if this was my kind of fiction. But I'm glad I stuck with it. In the near future, a historian looks at an 'Immortal Lunch' hosted by a poet, that contained the only known rendition of a lost poem. A thoughtful look at how history remembers its heroes.