Recent reading
Jan. 1st, 2026 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxI appear to have read 87 books in 2025, my first year recording <100 books since 2018, although this just might be due to shoddy record-keeping; I didn't write down any of my 2000s YA re-reads, so that's at least 9 more? Top niche this year was memoirs— 12-15, depending on whether you count non-fiction with an aspect of tying the narrative to personal experience (Caroline Fraser's Murderland, Alexa Hagerty's Still Life With Bones) and/or autofiction (Patricia Lockwood's Will There Ever Be Another You)— followed by 2000s YA/MG nostalgia and People Having Bad Times on Boats.
My first book of 2026 was A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, which I finished in an afternoon: a solarpunk novella in which a human and a robot meet for the first time since, centuries before, robots gained sentience and disappeared into the wilds to live as they pleased and humans moved to a post-industrialized, post-scarcity society. Oddly enough, it kind of reminded me of Gail Carson Levine's Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg, a childhood favorite— it was the world-building through charming descriptions of physical objects, but also something in the stories' shape and cadence, and in the main character's struggle to find their place in a world where people seem to have pretty specific callings...? (Here, the human, Sibling Dex, is a monk who travels from town to town serving tea and as a shoulder to cry on.) None of which is necessarily unique to either book, or used in the same way - for one thing, Chambers pushes back against the idea of people (or robots) having a specific purpose that they need to fulfill - but for whatever reason, the comparison popped into my head and I couldn't shake it. This book also checked the box of first character who's canonically my age that I encountered after turning that age in the record time of one week: early on, there's a line about how Dex - struggling in their vocational change from garden monk to tea monk - "now, at the age of twenty-nine, would like very much to return to the safe shelter of their childhood for an indefinite amount of time until they'd figured out just what the hell they were doing." What a mood.
My first book of 2026 was A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, which I finished in an afternoon: a solarpunk novella in which a human and a robot meet for the first time since, centuries before, robots gained sentience and disappeared into the wilds to live as they pleased and humans moved to a post-industrialized, post-scarcity society. Oddly enough, it kind of reminded me of Gail Carson Levine's Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg, a childhood favorite— it was the world-building through charming descriptions of physical objects, but also something in the stories' shape and cadence, and in the main character's struggle to find their place in a world where people seem to have pretty specific callings...? (Here, the human, Sibling Dex, is a monk who travels from town to town serving tea and as a shoulder to cry on.) None of which is necessarily unique to either book, or used in the same way - for one thing, Chambers pushes back against the idea of people (or robots) having a specific purpose that they need to fulfill - but for whatever reason, the comparison popped into my head and I couldn't shake it. This book also checked the box of first character who's canonically my age that I encountered after turning that age in the record time of one week: early on, there's a line about how Dex - struggling in their vocational change from garden monk to tea monk - "now, at the age of twenty-nine, would like very much to return to the safe shelter of their childhood for an indefinite amount of time until they'd figured out just what the hell they were doing." What a mood.
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