What I'm Reading: January to March 2026

Honestly kind of a run of banger books these last few months. That’s good, because I’ve been cooped up with a persistent foot injury more or less the entire time.

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: Having bounced off Go Tell it on the Mountain, I worried that I was going to find Baldwin impenetrable. I’ve loved what little I’ve read of his nonfiction, but maybe I just wasn’t going to click with his fiction? No need to worry, this novel is a fucking masterpiece. We follow a deeply repressed New Yorker on his gay awakening in Paris, through a doomed affair with the titular Giovanni. There’s a lot going on here, about class and desirability and gender and sexuality and violence. In some ways it’s sad to read what will probably be my favorite book of the season (the year?) first.
• Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky: I think because Mattie is best known for her four-panel gag comics^[1], her satire and science fiction is under-appreciated. Simplicity sends us a hundred years in the future, past the fall of the United States, to a small religious community in upstate New York called Simplicity. Our protagonist is an anthropologist from the corpo-fascist state that the City has evolved into; he’s been dispatched to study the people of the community. But would it shock you to know that his bosses have less-than-perfect intentions?
• The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavirel Kay: I think I’m forever going to be chasing the high of Under Heaven, Kay’s historical fantasy novel set in a Tang dynasty analogue. Where River of Stars, the centuries-later-set sequel to Under Heaven, ended up something of a disappointment for me, I did enjoy this novel. Al-Rassan is set in Reconquest-era Spain with the serial numbers filed off. The characters are standouts, the setting feels alive, and the pacing balances personal drama and glimpses of a much broader war story. Still, some of Kay’s propensities wear on me. Some are prose tricks, like the narrator dipping into a portentous voice (“little did he know, it was the last time he would look upon his home” and things like that). Some are structural decisions: while I’m glad Kay writes women as people (unlike some of his contemporaries), I’m tired of his women being relegated to pursuit and support of the Great Men of History.
• The Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold: Speaking of women protagonists in fantasy, the library arranged my holds to create a little comparative reading assignment. Paladin returns to Bujold’s medieval-Spain-infused fantasy setting from The Curse of Chalion, now following the Royina Ista. She was a side character in Chalion, so we spend little time setting up her frustrated situation and instead get to dive into her PoV. Again we tumble through a fantasy mystery, though this time with decidedly less court intrigue and decidedly more frontier vulnerability. In this book, women are characters who drive the plot (giving me what I was missing from Kay), but they’re also bound by patriarchal pressures. And those pressures differ greatly by class position and age! Great stuff, I should try more of Bujold’s work.
• Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata: One of the scariest books I’ve ever read. It’s about a woman who completely sublimates herself into the soothing routine of being a convenience store worker. As a “dead-end” job it allows her to escape most social obligation and prying from her family. Then the novel picks up as that becomes complicated, and her placid routine is shaken up. There are some uncomfortable in here parallels to my feelings about my own profession. To what extent am I good software developer because it has a pleasingly self-annihilative quality?
• A Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M John Harrison: This book feels like reading litfic underwater. It’s like a murky dream about being a downwardly mobile millennial but also something… else is happening (in a Lovecraftian, Weird Fiction kind of way). I think it’s not my favorite Harrison, and honestly the qualities in his work that annoy me are apparent enough that I think I’m good on his ouvre now.
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: This is a deeply paranoid and agoraphobic novel that feels kind of like an inverse haunted house? There’s a murder mystery that everyone outside the house cares about, but not so much the characters inside the house. The narrative voice is unique and our protagonist is compellingly strange. Go read this one, it’s worth your time (though The Haunting of Hill House is better, so start there if you haven’t).