In 2026, I’ve started reading a lot more & yes, I both read trash & supplement with audiobooks & I feel no shame in either. 

Since I’ve started listening to audiobooks, my anxiety recovery journey has drastically improved. I no longer mindlessly scroll or seek out politics/new Youtube videos at the frequency I used to. I get more done around my house because I can read while I’m cleaning. I’ve started making dents in piles of my fiber arts “to-dos” that have been laying on every surface in my living room (at certain times I’ve been prolific with both knitting & embroidery, but I tend to be inconsistent with both). & I’m able to get hours of free audiobooks through my public library. I would highly recommend audiobooks to any & everyone.

That said I still love holding a book in my hand & managed several of those in Feb. as well. I don’t suppose that will always be the case, because like my fiber arts attention span, my capacity to sit & read uninterrupted ebbs & flows.

“Beloved” Toni Morrison (Lit / Horror) – Book club pick

“Beloved” was by far my favorite book of the month, as difficult as it was. The prose is dense & shadowy, I finished each chapter sure I was missing something. & while the style, story, & characters were engaging, there was an emotional undercurrent to it that made it hard to continue. If I hadn’t been reading this book for book club it probably would have taken me twice as long. The damage done to the characters, to their identities, & their own ideas of themselves as individual human beings was absolutely devastating. & though I’d typically put down a book or stop a movie that kills a child or a pet for the plot, the root of this story is heartbreaking & entirely understandable.

I was expecting greatness going into this book having read Toni Morrison in the past, but honestly even that was underestimating what it was. My favorite books of last year were old classics – “The Count of Monte Cristo” & “Frankenstein” – & my more usual horror picks – “Slewfoot” & “Diavola” – “Beloved” bested them all. Ultimately, this was the perfect book for me, a combination of the dense literary fiction with a horror theme & sharp social & political commentary. 

“Rogue Protocol,” “Artificial Condition,” & “All Systems Red” Martha Wells (Sci-fi)

Okay but while Martha Wells’ “Murderbot Diaries” are hardly dense & meaningful works of fiction, I think this series got me to fall back in love not only with scifi as a reader but as a writer. The narrative coming from a human/AI construct is an interesting choice that doesn’t always work. As much as I love Star Trek TNG & its android Data, I’d hardly want to read a novel from Data’s viewpoint. He’s just too artificial, too predictable to an extent. Murderbot’s viewpoint is dynamic, peppered with statistics but weighing decisions in a way that isn’t so much human but reactive, expansive, engaging. Murderbot even says it has no desire to become more human, but the way it thinks, interacts with the people & machines around it & weighs experience against machine statistics is engaging to read. Even though I’m not usually a fan of action-based sci-fi I’m hooked on this series.

“We Used to Live Here” Marcus Kliewer (Horror)

Reading this book pretty much in tandem with “Spooky Action at a Distance” was a fucking experience. The ideas of reality & time being not as solid as one may think wove through both books & pushed the edges of my own thoughts all the way back to a draft I’d abandoned a few years ago. Not only did the book entertain me while I read it, it made me consider the different ways to plot through inconsistent space & time in a story. I don’t know if I would have felt so connected to it without the extenuating circumstances of my other reading & project but I do think it’s a solid horror read regardless. I’ve definitely read much worse.

“The Women” Kristin Hannah (Historical fiction) – Book club pick

This is a sore subject for me for a weird reason so I approached this book with my hackles raised. My dad’s family was similar to the McGrath’s without their money and social status – military service was the backbone of the family’s mythos. My grandparents met in the Marines, Papa lied about his age to serve in Korea & retired in the ‘80s as a Gy Sgt. He also served in Vietnam. In the 18 years I knew him, he never said anything to me about his time in the service aside from asserting his pride in the Corps & his rank as a Gunny. However, my father has apparently long been big butthurt over his perception of disrespect & slights at his dad’s service & has lost his everloving fucking mind in old age. So whenever he’s mad at me for telling him to take his pills or just existing, he starts in about how I’m a communist (true but that’s not the point) who would have spit on my grandfather for his service in Vietnam (I was born in 1985 & while I have read about the conflict & have opinions, I’m pretty disconnected from the Vietnam era zeitgeist & as a poor who came from poors I tend not to judge servicepeople, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds). I have been screamed at about Vietnam protesters for the last 15 years whenever I refused to buy my dad full sugar soda (he’s a diabetic) or exasperatedly rearranged my day last second to pick up medicine that he should have refilled a week earlier. So it’s not that I couldn’t empathize with Frankie’s storyline (funny af that her name is Frances too), but I was rolling my eyes at some of the reactions, her expectations, maybe unfairly. 

The book is written with a lot of nuance & Frankie’s flaws as a character are so relatable & endearing. The way her dilemma over Henry & Ry made me redouble over my own life & feelings was violent, I couldn’t put the book down at that point. She kept fucking up & you could see exactly how her damage had caused it, but you could also see where most of society wouldn’t sympathize, hell, where I was having trouble sympathizing. This book tore me apart a thousand different ways as I read it & engaged with Frankie’s story. 

Kristin Hannah is just excellent at writing these nuanced characters. I remember reading “The Nightingale” on the heels of “Lilac Girls” by Martha Hall Kelly. I was absolutely bristling at the rich American character being the hero & the communists who suffered alongside & helped liberate the camps being just as bad in Kasia’s mind as the Nazis. I was super annoyed with WWII books at that point & wanted to scream when the book club picked yet another. But admittedly “The Nightingale” was not so heavy handed in celebrating American moneyed liberals as the conquering heroes. & the emotional payload of that book was all the deeper for it. I’d definitely read more of her books.

“Ruth” Elizabeth Gaskell (Lit / Classics)

Not as infuriating as “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” but very similarly sad & irritating. When Louisa May Alcott wrote Beth as the old style heroine that could not survive the new world, that stuck with me – I read Little Women for the first time in 3rd grade & I keep coming back to Beth when thinking about classic novels. & Ruth is definitely one of those Beth-style heroines. She’s tragic – her beauty being both her downfall & her savior. She’s dutiful to her death, even when it involves a man who has betrayed her in the worst way, taken advantage of her inexperience and his social power imbalance. But her beauty is entwined with her goodness, her sense of duty. It’s all very conventional & annoying in that white feminism way. If I was an old time white lady & my child’s father did me like that & lay dying of some shitty illness, I would simply go into a convent & pray for his demise. If I died from fainting or coughing or some shit after that oh well, I’d just want to see that motherfucker in the ground first.

“When Among Crows” Veronica Ruth (Fiction / Mythology)

I just couldn’t get into this one, I loved the lore woven through it but it was a slog for me. I may revisit at another time.

“Longborn” Jo Baker (Historical fiction)

I really should not have read this on the heels of the obnoxious Mary Bennet mystery novel I read in January. It wasn’t fair, but I’d already checked it out. It may have been a really good book & I was just tired of the Bennets in general because of that book. My b.

Nonfiction

I don’t rate nonfiction but this is what I read…

• “Spooky Action at a Distance” George Musser (Nonfic, science)
• “Metamorphoses” Ovid (Nonfic, Mythology)
• “Cosmic Queries” Neil Degrasse Tyson (Nonfic, science)
• “The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious” C.G. Jung (Nonfic)
• “The Neville Goddard Collection” Neville Goddard (Nonfic)
• “The Serviceberry” Robin Wall Kimmerer (Nonfic)

“Spooky Action…” & “Cosmic Queries” are typical of my pop science appetite. I read a lot of astronomy & astrophysics to write poetry. I know Tyson has issues but I remembered reading a genuine apology, not as good as Dan Harmon’s apology (fucks sake I’ve read a lot of creepy men apologies just to be square with media I want to interact with) but one that seemed genuine & focused on being better even if somewhat confused (obvious bro is neurodivergent & has trouble reading a room). And ultimately, he writes engagingly about things I like to read about. Although Tyson & my childhood crush Bill Nye the Science Guy can both eat shit with their absolute inability to understand that the edges of science have been historically pushed by people that understand philosophy & metaphysics & can apply critical & creative thinking to both science & esoterica. I remember rage quitting Nye’s Netflix (I think) show over an episode arguing that people can’t ethically enjoy astrology. I will enjoy whatever I want to & think about incongruent things to entertain & terrify myself. The lack of critical thinking skills is exactly why people stopped believing in basic shit like vaccines & pasteurization that brought us into the modern era of science. We did that by dictating ideas as dangerous or stupid carte blanche without explaining why & how we came to that conclusion in a way that people can apply to random shit that gets thrown at them by idiot rich people & their pundit lackeys. That & probably because I didn’t read Plato until college but “Left Behind” was required reading in my 12th grade English class.

Which brings me to Jung. This long ass book was mostly a waste of time that alternatively made me think deeply & want to fist fight men in general. I found his gaze toward women & “primitives” to be fucking annoying. Get a load of this loser calling someone a savage out of one side of his mouth & then using the same dude’s philosophy to prove his point with the other. It’s a double edged sword that a lot of rich white nerds from this era cut their proverbial throat with. Cheap western gaze orientalism is probably my biggest beef with Crowley too (though there are several. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is unquestionably correct I still think he’s a knuckle dragging racist misogynist dipshit). 

I read “Metamorphoses” for some poetry I was working on but it was a thoroughly amusing if not mildly annoying Roman Mythological telling. I did read it after Jung which I think added to my annoyance.

I’d been reading through the massive Neville Goddard Collection for awhile, as I do periodically. I don’t know if any of that shit works as said, but it is a very useful philosophy to cut down on rumination & doom spiraling if you’re even slightly neurotic. It’s also a very good primer for teaching yourself how to read esoteric works. Most people in the western world have had some encounter with the bible and Goddard reads the bible like an occult tome. His readings are engaging & cover familiar territory for most. Following his logic can teach you how to deconstruct esoterica & pretty much anything else you read.

I couldn’t put down “Braiding Sweetgrass” & Kimmerer’s “The Serviceberry” is much in the same vein, but a shorter, more essay-formatted discussion vs. her sweeping dip in & out of storytelling in the much longer “Braiding Sweetgrass.” And while I was annoyed at one point at my own disagreements with some of her assessments of people & the systems we currently use – I will never cede that it’s Capitalism all the way down & it will never change until Capitalism with its fucked up incentives are dismantled & culture shifts away from its toxic individualist entitlement. Ultimately I agreed more often than not & found it to be engaging, even if not to the level of “Sweetgrass.”