Reading notes, book reviews and the reading life. What I am reading, what stayed with me and why.
Barnes and Noble’s 16 finalists for its 2026 Book of the Year divide into six novels, seven nonfiction titles and three books for young readers, with the winner named on 12 November 2026. The mix records what the chain can hand-sell as much as what critics liked.
A novella led the Goodreads most-read list this week with 103,000 readers, ahead of four novels that ranged from about 19,000 to 34,000. The ranking measures how fast books are finished, which is why the highest-rated title sits fifth and a 2018 backlist thriller sits third.
Book Riot picked four new horror novels for the last weeks of October, including Off the Reservation, Stephen Graham Jones’s sequel to The Only Good Indians. Here is what each one is, which to start with, and why horror publishing saves its established names for this month.
Barnes & Noble chose its best books of 2026 in 17 categories, from fiction to libros en espanol, and the shape of the list says more about what sells than what lasts. Two books called The Keeper appear on the same list in two categories. There is no poetry section.
Peacock has greenlit a live action Dungeon Crawler Carl series, filming in 2027, which is the first time a genre that grew up in public has to introduce itself to everyone else. Serialised chapters, a subscription model that pays by the page, and an audio market doing more work than anyone credits.
Choosing what to read next is upstream of every other reading decision and almost nobody has a method for it. Why the default approach fails, the question that works better, and the list problem that turns good intentions into guilt.
I abandon most books I start, and it made me read more rather than less. The case for the fifty-page rule, the three exceptions worth making, and the one argument against it I have never been able to answer.
I wanted the complete Harry Potter box set since I was ten. I finally bought it at 26, and this is what that actually felt like, growing up without a book culture around me.