Book 9: The Starseekers by Nicole Glover

Well, sometimes you read a book for book club and every single person shows up and says that didn't work for me!!! and it's a good time. This book is kind of like Hidden Figures but it's also a murder mystery and magic and also Indiana Jones and also allegedly a romance? And if you think that sounds like too many genres it sure is; there are seven different plots and not a lick of narrative urgency in any of them, unfortunately. The best I can say for it is that it was nice to read a contemporary piece of speculative fiction that wasn't a dystopia but also boy I wanted this to be better. 

Grade: C

Reread: The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author socially. 

A reread for my book club! Honestly I loved it even more on reread. I thought the agony of the neverending nature of the conflict came through even more this time around, and boy I just really want the resolution to work for everyone!! Just a beautifully constructed story. 

Grade: A

Book 8: Benefit by Siobhan Phillips

A book that made me realize how much a story set in the 2000s really is a period piece now. Which is fine! It's nice to know that I'm not alone in looking back at the decade of my twenties and reflecting on how it has shaped, oh, all of current American society. This one is also about the false promise of academia, which is a topic many many books out there tackle at the moment for obvious reasons, and about what it means to be a part of the elite culture and what it's built on. The chapters on the history and present day realities of sugar production really took my breath away, and the specific depiction of the main character's lesbian friend Greta and her marriage and child-rearing felt almost unbearably recognizable. It's extremely first novel-y, in that you can feel how many of the chapters could have been short stories, and they're explicitly playing with form and structure and tone so you're always aware of the shift, but I don't mean that in a pejorative way, especially because it fits the themes of the novel so well. I haven't been reading a ton of literary fiction these days, but this is one of the good ones. 

Grade: B

Book 7: The Shots You Take by Rachel Reid

Another vacation book! This one is a perfect post-retirement hockey romance by the author of the Game Changers series, but it's a standalone in a separate universe. Adam and Riley were a d-man pairing and best friends and roommates who were also more than all that, until Adam freaked out and married a woman and broke Riley's heart. So Riley requested a trade and then retired early from hockey, and they didn't see each other for over a decade until Riley's dad died and Adam showed up at the funeral in Riley's tiny Nova Scotian seaside village, where Riley spent five summers when they were young players together. 

I really enjoyed both the second chance romance and the fantasy of owning a small house right on the water with a garden and having a wonderful queer friends group. The conflict of when they were players together made perfect sense, and if some of the resolution felt a bit too easy, especially coming so fast after Riley losing his beloved father, the characterization and chemistry is strong enough for me to buy it. A lovely read on a rainy weekend away. 

Grade: A

Book 6: Fall Into You by Dylan Morrison

Time for some vacation reads at a house in the woods! The first one is this extremely classic gay romance about a guy named Will who fled his parents' farm when he was 18 and never looked back, until his father died and left him a farm. When he returns, he meets Casey, who had been taking care of the apple farm for the final 6 years of Will's dad's life, and sparks fly! Is selling the farm to the real estate developer the right move? Was Will ever really happy living in the big city? I bet you know the answers to those questions, and as always, the fun is in the telling of it. I would have liked a bit more development of the romance between Will and Casey, but overall I really liked this story of someone finding the right version of home for them. 

Grade: B

Book 5: Sheep Calm and Merry On by Ashlyn Kane

This is a perfectly adequate Christmas romance novella in which two retired hockey players end up in a bit of a Canadian shack situation and realize that maybe they're meant to be together! It's cute but doesn't do anything more than what's on the tin, and even at a novella length still had to invent a reason for a second location/is he going to call me bit of drama. It's fine!

Grade: B

2026 Master List

I am posting my 2026 Master List in May, which honestly feels pretty appropriate for this year! But it's sunny and warm out, so maybe this is the start I actually need for this project this year.  

I also didn't read a ton of books in the first third of the year, largely because all of my narrative brain space was taken up by two television shows I remain obsessed with, the writing I want to do for both of them, the Olympics, and two other ongoing sports leagues. To put it bluntly, my ability to focus on new books was pretty bad, but less because of everything going on in the world in 2026 and more because I had too much else to focus on. So! I'm not mad about that, even though I do want to read a lot more than I did in the first part of the year. 

Other things! Last year felt like an off year for me reading-wise, but I read 45 new books and 6 rereads, and that's almost one book a week! As is true most years, I read mostly in chunks, and about half of the books on my list were books that had already been on my list at the beginning of the year, and half of them were new additions. That doesn't bode well for the idea of me making a dent in my current list, but well that's the nature of this project. I am also getting better at not finishing books or even just taking a book off the list before even starting it if I feel like it's just not actually what I'm interested in anymore. 

Anyway, here is this year's list! I'm starting with 235 books, and while I do not expect to get to bookcase zero by the end of the year, I would like to end the year with closer to a hundred rather than two hundred. 

Book 4: The Larks Still Bravely Singing by Aster Glenn Gray

Set in the dying days of World War I, two former public school boy friends find each other again while convalescing from the front. One has lost a leg, the other an arm, and they begin to rekindle the romance that never quite bloomed while they were at school together. 

I really loved so much of this - it's an era that I keep going back to, in part because the brutality of that war destroyed so much and never quite got dealt with. That's a bit of an issue with this novel, for me. I appreciated the lack of a quick fix for either of them, but I also wanted an ending and a resolution that presented at least a clearer way forward, if not a complete emotional and mental recovery for both of them. I don't entirely know how to do that beyond a magical cure for PTSD before anyone really knew what that was, but I felt more off-balance by the ending than I had hoped.

Grade: B

Book 3: Deck the Halls with Secret Agents by Astor Glenn Gray

What a charming bite sized Christmas novella! This is actually much more in line with what I expected Honeypot to be like - it's two secret agents who have been secretly fucking whenever they encountered each other on opposite sides of the Cold War who find themselves without a clear purpose in the early 1990s. They've both been sent to an English country house to steal incriminating letters at a Christmas party, and wouldn't you know there's just the right kind of bed for them to fall into together. This had almost no real conflict and I had a great time reading it. 

Grade: A  

Reread: A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay

The last of my GGK rereads before I finally read his most recent two novels! This book is such a curious one - it takes place only fifty years prior to the events of Children of Earth and Sky, and it connects to them but in the kind of way where as soon as I finished this one I wanted to reread that one again, so I could better slot it all in. It's also curious in that it's deliberately to the side of major world events - the fall of Sarantium (aka Constantinople) and the remaking of the world's order, is out of focus while the almost petty citystate wars of Batiara (aka Italy) take center stage. This book takes a long time to fully immerse myself in the stakes of the story, and as soon as it does everyone is hit from the side by much more important developments. Which I suppose is reflective of living through the world in real time; I can formulate many reasons why a Canadian author might have written this in the aftermath of Trump's first election. It does however mean that it's the least sticky of all of GGK's novels for me, and while I had a lovely time becoming reacquainted with these characters, none of them burrowed deep into my chest as others have. It was still a remarkable book to finish while visiting Istanbul for the first time, however. 

Grade: B

Book 2: Honeytrap by Aster Glenn Gray

This is a gay romance novel that spans multiple decades and follows the romance of a soviet spy and an American spy who are partnered to solve a mystery of sorts and embark on a roadtrip across late 1950s America. It's both a charming romance in which both of them are hiding a secret (Gennady is supposed to be honey trapping Daniel, and Daniel has been demoted for having a gay affair with another FBI agent), and a look at how the closet hurts people's lives over many decades. I expected something different from this novel--less of a historical examination and more of a classic romance novel in which two characters decide their love requires them to risk it all--and it took me a bit to come around to the slower, more agonized love depicted. But maybe we need a slightly more honest version of this story right now. 

Grade: B

Book 1: A Physical Education by Casey Johnston

First book of the year! This is a memoir by an author whose lifting newsletter I've been a reader of for many years at this point. It's a really interesting accounting of how she came to integrate her sense of self with her sense of having a physical body as an adult. It's not a self-help book, but it's also a book that made me think a lot about my own relationship to my body, and how I do and don't consider it to be the same thing as Me. It's hard not to read a book like this without searching for the answer, for the key to fixing my own relationship to my body, and it's too honest to peddle that kind of absolution. I both respect it more for not and wish it had, for obvious reasons. But it did make me think that it's at least possible to change, which is worth a lot. 

Grade: A 

Book 45: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

A delightful little novella about what happens with Queen Elizabeth II stops off at the lending library van near the palace and starts reading novels for the first time in her life. Involves a friendship with a gay servant from the kitchens who gives her reading recommendations and a discovery of what you can learn from books even if you've been everywhere and met everyone as a nation's sovereign. Just extremely enjoyable in the specific gay British way of Bennett. 

Grade: A 

Book 44: All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles

An absolutely delightful gothic manor house murder mystery with bonus gay love story book! I really, really enjoyed what this story did with the conventions of both genres, and how it both delivered on the promise of those kinds of stories while also deconstructing elements of it. Definitely among my favorites of this author's, who's long been a favorite of mine! 

Grade: A 

Book 43: Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Final book club book of the year! A lovely little novella about a future version of California that has split off from the U.S., and the food service bots who form their own restaurant collective and build their own community of bots and humans. It's very sweet and enjoyable, with some fairly obvious but still effective allegories, and I enjoyed my time with it a lot.

Grade: B

Book 42: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

An incredible book. I read this because I wanted to have experienced the book before I saw the movie, and the way the story is told in this medium is just a triumph. Agnes is such a fascinating, compelling character, but everyone we meet is; this is historical fiction that somehow fully conveys how foreign a land the past is while also reminding us of the fact that people have always been people. The slight of hand with the capital S Shakespeare of it all is expertly done, and the fact that I knew going in what would happen didn't affect how it landed for me at all. Just a book that made me remember why books are good, actually.

Grade: A 

Book 41: The Gentleman and his Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide

I confess that this was almost a DNF for me, but I decided that I wanted to know how it would resolve badly enough to stick with it. Do I regret that? A bit, but only because I am trying to become more ruthless in not spending my time with media I don't truly care about, because it turns out there is plenty out there that I genuinely love and why give my life over to things that don't work that well for me. It's a regency m/m romantasy and neither the romance nor the magic nor the setting really worked for me. Oh well!

Grade: C  

Book 40: The Summer War by Naomi Novik

Note: I know the author socially. 

A delightful little novella, about a girl with magic who accidentally uses it in the most cruel way imaginable against her beloved older brother because of her hurt, and has to go on an adventure to the fairyworld to save him, and does so in a remarkable if roundabout way. Bite-sized but has stuck with me and I want to revisit it already. 

Grade: A  

Book 39: Katabasis by RF Kuang

A book club book! We've got dark oxbridge academia, we've got Dante, we've got two protagonists with Secrets and a Past, we've got a story that is kind of surprise set in the 1980s, we've got chalk logic arguments as a magical system - we've got so much! And yet, for me, this is something less than the sum of its parts. It's not bad, and the book certainly does the thing, and there are elements of the metaphor that really work for me (did you know that surviving grad school is like walking backwards out of hell, etc.). But it didn't really coalesce for me, and I confess that there's a certain level of fatigue for me in reading about a woman who's determined to not be like those other women who only complain about how hard it is to be a successful woman within patriarchy and then realizes that she's not actually immune to all the same bullshit. It's not bad, but I also couldn't stop myself from arguing with both the characters and the story as a whole.

Grade: B 

Book 38: Golden Age

Note: I know the author socially. 

A delightful book of short stories, drabbles and visual art in the Temeraire universe! Something like methadone for me as I attempt to recover post-series. I don't have many deep thoughts about any of this other than what a nice time! 

Grade: A