everything i read january-march 2026

edith wharton! han kang! claire-louise bennett! etc!

I always think these recaps will take me less time than they actually end up taking. Days, it took me, to write somewhat meaningfully about the books I’ve spent time with the last few months. No long intro because this is already a comically lengthy post, although in my defense I did have one of my best stretches of reading in recent memory this quarter.

Longtime readers will know that my Canva skills are at once limited and hard-fought.

Below, in the order read, mostly using my little Bookshop affiliate links although as per usual I strongly suggest you visit your library and/or local independent bookstore, every book I read from January to March.

Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri) (1999)

I found this at the used bookstore in the last week of December, and not soon enough actually—Lahiri is one of those authors I was embarrassed about not having read yet. The short story collection came with me on my New Year’s trip, which meant that it was the last book I started in 2025 and the first one I finished in 2026. Gorgeous. You’ll be shocked, I’m sure, to hear that I inhaled the sparse, occasionally hopeful, sometimes tragic, and always intimate stories about immigrants’ lives. The ebbs and flows and pain found in belonging to new and old places. Shocked. The fact that I read this on planes and airports and homes that weren’t mine only added to the experience of consuming Lahiri’s words for the first time.¹

The Colony (Annika Norlin) (2023) (trans. Alice E. Olsson) (2025)

This recommendation came courtesy of Steph Halchin, who I need to get on the newsletter soon because her reads are always thought-provoking and extremely up my alley.

Norlin is a Swedish author previously only known to me as the frontwoman of Hello Saferide, an indie pop group I spent a lot of my late teenage years listening to.² In The Colony, Norlin has constructed a familiar world dealing with the trappings of modernity: burnout, an excess of technology, performing for social media, and the specific vulnerability that comes with seeking meaningful community. There’s a freaky little group that may or may not be a cult and there are near-Gatsby levels of jealously observing from afar and there is yoga overzealously practiced by white people.

A weird and unsettling and deeply Scandinavian novel. It was the perfect book to read in January, when it feels like everyone’s googling things like “how to be better at being alive.”

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Claire-Louise Bennett) (2025)

It was time, I suppose, to dip my toes into the CLB universe. I was moved to do so by Petya K. Grady, who’s written about Bennett extensively. The author seems to be a particular favorite among People Who Love Discussing Books—there’s something almost religious about the fervor of this appreciation. But I hate excluding myself from literary discourse, so of course here we are and of course I, too, have become a fan.

The novel tells the non-linear (what else) tale of a woman living as much in the past as she does in the present; as she grows accustomed to a new home, she is also continuously rehashing the highs and lows of a previous relationship with a much older man.

There’s a diaristic quality to Bennett’s style that will prove familiar to anyone who’s read enough millennial fiction.³ I might have more to say about it once I’ve read her other work, but in part because of sentences such as the following, I felt very at home in the story.

It’s not the least bit unusual, is it, to be mad about someone. No it isn’t. There’s a very long and illustrious tradition of it in fact. And that helped didn’t it, to think that the madness we felt was in fact part of a tradition.⁴

Quite self-indulgent, isn’t it.

Before I embarked upon this read, I admit I’d assumed the author had written a small mountain of books, but Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is only her third published work of fiction. There’s a sense of expectation among her readers and fans, as if they are getting in on the ground floor of an Annie Ernaux-type talent and preparing to claim I knew her when in a few years. And I understand it. I’m not quite ready to invest just yet (have very much added Pond and Checkout 19 to my list, do not you fret), but with Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, Bennett writes what feels like a quintessential millennial novel with elements of Ernaux, Sally Rooney, Clarice Lispector, and Patricia Lockwood’s styles, sprinkled with a bit of Woolf for good measure.

(On the last reference, there’s a persistent bit about the older man sending our protagonist flowers, and:

There came a point when I became fed up and critical of the arrangements the florist bought me, so I said to Xavier, quite tactfully, that I would prefer to go into the shop and choose the flowers myself.⁵

My marginalia on this page, written in faint pencil, says ok Mrs. D! Like it or not, Virginia’s room hasn’t been solely her own for a very long time.)

I do get the fascination. It makes for arresting prose. You’ll be hearing more from me on this.

The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri) (2003)

And then I saw a copy of Lahiri’s debut novel at my go-to bookshop, so I bought it. I really do need to stop accumulating books. The Namesake combined two of my favorite elements: Russian literature and the generational trauma of families who’ve immigrated from the global south to America. What is not to love!

In this, Lahiri tells the story of Gogol Ganguli, eldest son of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, who’ve immigrated from Calcutta to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born in America to parents who despite the distance remain staunchly committed to maintaining their Indian roots and traditions, Gogol resents almost everything about his upbringing—the many family functions he’s forced to attend, the disinterest in the arts and culture he perceives in his parents, and yes, his very name, inspired by the Russian author that, unbeknownst to him, changed the trajectory of his father’s life.

Gogol’s choices in adolescence and young adulthood are an exercise in rebellion and dissatisfaction, prompted by a wish to belong in a more seamless manner than he’s had to bear. He wants to fold himself into America, eschewing the qualities that have made him stand out and absorbing those that’ll allow him to blend in. Until, of course, a sort of expected tragedy strikes and he is forced to reassess his attitude and, more importantly, his lifelong preconceptions about his parents.

Gogol knows now that his parents had lived their lives in America in spite of what was missing, with a stamina he fears he does not possess himself.⁶

As much as anything, the story is about Gogol’s journey away from the folly and bitterness of youth; it’s the slow process of letting go of his resentment, learning that it’s neither a total disavowal of nor an inauthentic attachment to his Indian roots that will give his life meaning. The trouble, of course, is that the journey is prompted not solely by time but by painful—if likely inevitable—mistakes.

I won’t pretend being an immigrant myself wasn’t conducive to my (pleasant!) experience with this novel, but I also think that anyone who’s had to grow up and Realize Things, to quote Kylie Jenner, would likely enjoy The Namesake just as much as I did.

Arquitectura Critica (Lorenzo Rocha) (2020)

What can I say about this, a brief survey of critical architecture that covers La Corbusier, Giancarlo de Carlo, Lacaton, Vassal, and Alejandro Aravena, other than: I bought it at a museum gift shop over a year before I finally finished it. I’ve been wanting to become more fluent in architecture as a subject, and while I wouldn’t say this alone got me there, it did expand my vocabulary and my references repertoire, which is juuuust enough to make me feel as if I occasionally know what I’m talking about when I look up at an intriguing building. It’s not nothing.

The Party (Tessa Hadley) (2024)

Discovering a friend has a compatible reading taste to yours is one of the best things that can happen to a person. Add to that a shared preference for physical over electronic copies of books and you’ve really kinda won the lottery. When uttered by someone whose taste in literature you trust, “I just finished this novel I think you might like” is a top ten sentence. The Party was recommended by one such friend is what I’m saying.

Anyway, this was a delightful novella reminiscent of Muriel Spark in both style and substance—in fact, I had to keep flipping back to the copyright page to make sure Hadley had actually written this in 2024 and not, as my mind repeatedly tried to convince me, the 1950s. The charming coming-of-age story set in post-war Bristol, coupled with brisk prose that doesn’t take itself too seriously and sisters that love but don’t very much like each other, was an ideal rainy day read.

The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton) (1920)

Some years back I read a collection of Wharton’s New York stories and until last month, that was all I’d read of the author. If I may be allowed to dabble in radical honesty very briefly, I’ll admit that my main impetus for finally reading The Age of Innocence was wanting to watch Scorsese’s 1993 film adaptation of the same, which I refused to do before reading the book. Bit silly, I know.

Well, of course I loved it. I had no doubt I would, being raised as I was on the joys and virtues of the nineteenth century novel.⁷ I mean, a love story doomed by a tragic adherence to the unflinching if unspoken rules of the upper class will do it for me every single time.

Wharton is also deeply, darkly funny. Her sense of irony jumps off the page, balancing the plot’s occasionally tragic turns. Like:

“Women ought to be free – as free as we are,” he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.⁸

And:

“It seems so to me,” said his wife, as if she were producing a new thought.⁹

Do you see what I mean? Suffering is so much easier when there’s humor involved.

In Innocence as well as in her short stories, Wharton appears to consistently poke fun at the notion of America as synonymous with freedom, noting with mocking abandon all the ways in which we are beholden to and constrained by the very customs we pretend to have escaped.

It was fascinating reading this novel while everyone was watching and commenting on the JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette series—I couldn’t help seeing the similarities between Bessette and Wharton’s tragic heroines; how so often, the cost of belonging and being accepted by a tightly-knit and self-regulated social class is the loss of oneself. Try as one might to juggle the two, there exists an inherent impossibility in obeying competing masters.

Walking on the Ceiling (Ayşegül Savaş) (2019)

Long-time readers will recall I read (and loved) Savaş’s The Anthropologists this past autumn. I lent that novel to a friend, and the same friend gifted me Walking on the Ceiling for my birthday last month. The enjoyment of literature is a virtuous circle, etcetc.

The novel toggles constantly between past present and future, because of course it does, what else would a novel published by a millennial in 2019 do, and tells the story of Nunu, a young Turkish woman who moves to Paris in search of meaning, purpose, a sense of belonging.¹⁰ Savaş follows Nunu almost as if from a careful distance, like she’s aware of her protagonist’s reticence and self-isolation and doesn’t want to spook her by poking too intimately into the details of her life.

When in the last third of the novel we do finally approach and begin to unravel the sources of Nunu’s loneliness and dissatisfaction, it is with the cautious understanding that whether intentionally or from a subconscious desire to protect herself, Nunu may not have been entirely honest with herself about the role she’s played in her own unhappiness. There’s a recognition that we are, at best, unreliable narrators of our own lives, and that examining our memories may either cement our deceptive understanding of ourselves or painfully disclose our true—and flawed—nature.

You see, the thing about Savaş’s writing is that I feel personally attacked whenever I read it. Take, for instance:

One time he referred to Paris as a “sad and forgiving city” and I did not ask him why he thought this. I felt that this sort of curiosity for facts would betray the rules of our correspondence.¹¹

The element of self-sabotage is a heavy presence over the pages of this novel. And I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say, but in its treatment of memory and childhood, in its Parisian setting, in its serious chronicle of an all-consuming relationship with someone of whose affection you remain uncertain … it is terribly Proustian.¹² This is not a bad thing, but it is A Thing.

To be clear, I very much enjoyed it, even if it was a kick in the teeth. If you’ve also read The Anthropologists (2024), I think you’ll find that in the five years between Walking on the Ceiling and The Anthropologists, Savaş managed to locate a glimmer of optimism and/or hope. I’m excited to read more of her work.

We Do Not Part (Han Kang) (2021) (trans. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) (2025)

It was only about a year ago that I read Greek Lessons, my first novel from Han Kang, and since then I’ve been steadily making my way through her works. An edifying—if emotionally devastating—project.¹³

Reading Kang always makes me feel like I know next to nothing about Korean history, which in fairness, is mostly true. It’s embarrassing. A week-long study in revealing my ignorance to myself. I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia whenever I finish one of her novels. This, for instance, is the Wiki entry for Jeju Island, where most of We Do Not Part takes place and where, between 1948 and 1949, the state (with the West’s help, ahead of the official start of the Korean War) massacred between 14,000 and 30,000 people suspected of being communist sympathizers in what the South Korean government in 2003 concluded was a genocide of its people.¹⁴

In We Do Not Part, Kang uses history in the same way some authors utilize homes as their own characters and plot devices (apropos of nothing, I’m currently reading Brideshead Revisited). The lines between generational and national trauma are blurred, helping to explain why Inseon, our protagonist Kyungha’s eccentric friend, lives a secluded life in Jeju Island and why she has chosen the documentary subjects she’s completed thus far and why she counts a small bird, Ama, as her only companion. Why following a terrible injury, she asks Kyungha to urgently make the long trek from Seoul down to Jeju and save Ama.

As Kyungha rushes to Jeju in the middle of a snowstorm, the history of the island and of Inseon’s family seeps into the pages like blood from an open wound. It’s not sentimental, the narrative; there’s something direct about it, as if there’s nothing to do but tell the story as it happened. It doesn’t cheaply tug at the reader’s heartstrings. Somehow, this makes it worse.

I knew about the organization, how back in 1948, after the first government was established, whole swathes of people were categorized as left-wingers in need of education and made to join the [Bodo] League so that they might benefit from its purported goal to convert, protect and guide…. Entire families were enrolled as well, meaning its ‘members’ included women, children and the elderly, and when war broke out in the summer of 1950, everyone on the list was preventively detained, then summarily executed. The estimated number of people killed and buried in secret around the country is said to be between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand.¹⁵

There’s a darkness and a tactility I now recognize in Kang’s storytelling. It’s imbued in her characters, in the way they speak and act and think. Her novels are at once an acknowledgment that tragedy leaves a mark and a patient digging into their inciting events. Not so much healing as understanding.

I wasn’t surprised to feel drained by the time I turned the last page, although the situation wasn’t as dire as when I finished The Vegetarian, a novel that demanded three to five days of desperate introspection. Much like she does her characters, Kang has an ability to render her readers a vessel for collective pain. One wonders, reading her prose, if shared pain makes it more bearable or serves to simply multiply the suffering. Maybe, by virtue of diminished loneliness, multiplied suffering inherently becomes more tolerable. Hard to tell.

A Far Cry from Kensington (Muriel Spark) (1988)

I mentioned Spark above, and probably made it sound like I was some big expert. In fact, before this I’d only ever read The Girls of Slender Means (1963). I remember being charmed by it—enough, apparently, to recall Spark’s distinct style when first encountering a different author’s Sparkian prose several years later—but as my first exposure happened to coincide with the height of Covid, it’s likely that I was more concerned with surviving (spiritually, physically, emotionally, etc.) than in becoming a 27-year-old expert in the eccentric Scottish author.¹⁶

Anyway, it was indeed Hadley’s The Party that made me want to get back to Spark, so when I spied A Far Cry from Kensington at the bookshop, I snapped it up. And predictably, I was once again delighted. The story of Mrs. Hawkins, a young widow in post-war London who constantly finds herself in the unwelcome position of being asked for advice, whether at the rooming-house she lives or the publisher where she works. While not as meddlesome, there’s an air of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge in the somewhat tragicomic comings and goings of Mrs. Hawkins and her often-unfortunate environs.

It’s a strange little book, slightly self-righteous almost in the vein of Louisa May Alcott but in a way that’s drolly aware of itself and the lessons it’s trying to impart. See, for instance:

I enjoy a puritanical and moralistic nature; it is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do. At the same time, the wreaking of vengeance and imposing of justice on others and myself are not at all in my line.¹⁷

Whenever I read strange and enjoyable little books I find myself wanting to know more about the author responsible for such a feat. Suffice it to say it did not surprise me much to learn that Spark converted to Catholicism in adulthood. I’ve added Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark (2025) to my little list; if you’re interested, Henry Oliver wrote a wonderful review of the Spark biography last year.

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And of course, I keep chugging along with The Brothers Karamazov. You’ll be happy to know I’m a hundred or so pages past the midpoint, so things are looking up (for me, if not Mitya).

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1. That being said, I just remembered that a few years ago I came across an interview of hers in The Paris Review, and I think it was from this exchange that I realized I’d likely enjoy her work. And as we all know, I love being right.

2. Urgent assignment: Play “The Quiz” and pretend it’s 2007 and you’re browsing modcloth dot com for dresses featuring Peter Pan collars.

3. I’m working on a longer piece about this genre, if we’re allowed to call it that, but what I mean by millennial fiction is, more or less, semi-meandering novels quite concerned with the self and following no particularly clear plot or linear narrative, usually written by folks born between 1981 and 1996 (ish).

4. p. 136, Fitzcarraldo edition.

5. p. 122, Fitzcarraldo edition.

6. p. 281, Collins Modern Classics edition.

7. And yes, I realize Innocence was published in 1920, but it’s set in the 1870s and is spiritually a nineteenth century novel, so let me live.

8. p. 27, Wordsworth Classics edition.

9. p. 36, Wordsworth Classics edition.

10. I kindly refer you back to my prior footnote regarding millennial fiction.

11. p. 59, Riverhead edition.

12. I’ll remind you I did say sorry!

13. And another non-linear narrative btw. Makes sense, given the trauma of it all, although at this point I find it a novelty when a newly-published novel is told sequentially. Imagine that.

14. Other estimates place the death toll closer to 80,000.

15. p. 312-313, Penguin edition.

16. A shame, really, as I now recognize that a minor creative obsession is one of my favorite means of survival.

17. p. 51, Virago Modern Classic edition.