The six best books I've read this year (so far!)

Mid-year reading reflection

Now that June is drawing to a close and we’re officially halfway through 2026, I thought I’d do a mid-year reading reflection. I’ve read 27 books so far. I don’t set numeric reading goals, but this year I did set out to read more non-contemporary books (I define contemporary as anything published in the last 20 years). I also set out to read more non-fiction and translated books.

Here are my stats. There’s some crossover between categories. My full list of reads is at the end of this post.

• 19 contemporary

• 8 non-contemporary

• 5 non-fiction

• 5 translated

I won’t review every book I’ve read, but I’m going to share my favorite 6 books from the past 6 months. Even though the majority of the books I read this year were contemporary, most of my favorite reads were not. I think I’m going to seek out more non-contemporary novels for the second half of this year!

The Wall by Marlen Haushafer (1963), translated from the German

The book of my heart. I missed it when I wasn’t reading it. I’ll never forget it.

The book begins with a woman joining her cousin on a hunting trip to the countryside. One day, she wakes up alone and discovers a transparent wall by the stream. Beyond the wall, every human and animal is dead. The lone survivor on the other side of the wall, the woman must begin the daily and endless task of staying alive. She is kept company only by a few animals: her cousin’s hunting dog, a lone lost cow, and an old cat.

I was completely enraptured by this book. I recently read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, which has a similar dystopian set-up, and was wary of growing bored. How silly of me! Despite the repetitive nature of our narrator’s days, there is nothing repetitive about this novel. On the surface level, it’s a diaristic account of tasks of survival. But at its core, it is a dissection of what it means to be human—what it means to be a woman trapped in a hopeless situation yet free, at last, from the constraints of society. It is masterfully constructed, totally alive.

“The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me. And I alone can show mercy. Sometimes I wish that burden of decision-making didn’t lie with me. But I am a human being, and I can only think and act like a human being.”

Nearly every page presents an observation that cuts to the bone. But my favorite part of this novel is the way it loves and understands the animal. What can a living but non-human thing teach us about survival, compassion, care, need, cruelty, and mercy? Haushofer conjures a world where they can be explored fully and purely. The narrator’s relationship with her animals is as complex and multi-dimensional as any relationship between humans. It brought me to tears many times. I’ll cry again just thinking about it!!!

For a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, The Wall presented one of the most pleasurable reading experiences I can remember.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

I eagerly await the day I reread this playful, generous, and mind-expanding book.

Like its titular character, Orlando, the book (inspired by Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West) defies classification, transcending genre and expectations. It takes the form of a (fictional) biography of a young nobleman at the start of the sixteenth century. Orlando’s life spans three centuries, across countries and cities, through the Elizabethan to the Victorian. By the end of it, Orlando is a thirty-six year old woman.

“Lovers she had in plenty, but life, which is, after all, of some importance in its way, had escaped her.”

Orlando is spirited and shrewd in its exploration of gender. As Orlando falls in love with both man and woman, eventually transforming from man to woman him/herself, all expectations and pre-conceived notions of sexuality give way to discovery and play. And beyond its examination of gender and sexuality, Orlando is also a devoted study of the love of literature. Through the three centuries of his life, Orlando pursues an intense and “doomed” love for letters, toiling away on the poem he started in adolescence, which is never quite good enough.

Woolf’s sentences are like chests of jewels. There’s so much to look at and hold, you want to admire all of it. Flighty, expansive free and indirect discourse meets a realist’s attention to detail and a romantic’s love for nature. The result is a simultaneously challenging yet deeply hypnotic reading experience you can’t get from anyone else.

Possession by A.S. Byatt (1990)

Do you ever read a book and marvel that it even exists? This is how it felt to read Possession. Not only is it a contemporary literary detective novel, it’s also a romance between two Victorian poets, whose poems and letters make up hundreds of pages of the book. The myriad of voices, perspectives, and literary styles come together in a chamber of never-ending delights for the reader.

We follow two literary scholars as they discover the paper trail and previously unknown romance between two poets, one of them a famous foundational male poet and the other a barely known social recluse, studied only by feminist academics.

The thrill of this book! The romance of reading a romance between two Victorian writers! The richness of the letters and the poetry and the prose! I, like the main characters, became absorbed in combing through old texts for meaning, parsing forgotten diary entries for clues, turning back to an old poem and reading it anew. I itched to discover something new about these two long-dead writers. Hair-twirling and feet-kicking ensued. But also dread, disbelief, disappointment. The highs and lows of true romance…

“And did you find—as I did—how curious, as well as very natural, it was that we should be so shy with each other, when in a papery way we knew each other so much better? I feel I have always known you…”

This novel asks, how far can our love for a book or a writer take us? How do you put together the mystery of two people who are no longer alive? What right does a reader—even the most devoted kind—have to the details of a writer’s life?

The writing is lush and descriptive, a beautiful thing to sink into. It’s also very funny! Byatt throws crisp stabs at Englishness, academia, and class. If you have ever been possessed by a book, or a writer, or a text, you will understand the heart of what this book is all about.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956)

Baldwin’s sentences are perfectly crafted emotional traps. They punch you in the stomach while looking you in the face.

David is a young white American in the 1950s. Plagued by a sense of misbelonging in America and frightened of his homosexuality, he moves to Paris, where he meets and falls in love with an Italian waiter named Giovanni. Their affair is short-lived (David is already engaged to a woman named Hella) and ends in tragedy.

Both David and Giovanni are running from something, but the difference between them is that David is ashamed and Giovanni is not. This makes for one of the most painfully doomed relationships I’ve ever read. I wondered, upon finishing, if shame makes honesty impossible. They’re certainly intertwined; shame is often an aversion to or denial of the truth. But, in recounting his past, David is honest yet still ashamed. What I’ve learned, then, is that while shame can accompany truth, it renders the truth unbearable.

“I wrote to Hella, telling her nothing, or I wrote to my father asking for money. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.”

The book is not so much a doomed love story between David and Giovanni as it is a reckoning of David’s distance from his own self, the shame that stands between the life he wants and the life he has, and the tragedy of looking for something you don’t want to find.

I wrote an essay on the book (from which I paraphrased for the above) in January. You can read it here if you want:

The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (2022)

This novel is like if the electrifying friendship of the Neapolitan Novels met the disquieting finishing school of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, laced with the angry psychological pulse of The Catcher in the Rye.

It starts with the death of Fabienne, the childhood best friend of our narrator, Agnes. Fabienne’s death pushes her to finally tell their story, which begins in a poor backwater farming village in France. Fabienne is enigmatic, shrewd, and wickedly imaginative, and Agnes is just happy to play along with Fabienne’s experiments. Fabienne hatches up a plan for the both of them to write a book, and what follows sends Agnes on a trajectory of sudden fame and fortune.

Agnes is a rare kind of first-person narrator: full of secret motivations and emotions, yes, but painfully, nearly pathologically passive. Because the book is partly about Agnes’s book, there’s a meta quality to the reading experience: we’re told early on to discount her narratorial voice as underdeveloped and devastatingly ordinary, but her story becomes increasingly impossible to turn away from.

Ultimately, this is a story about the vivid life of childhood, the impossibility of holding onto that world, and the disappointments and compromises of growing up. It’s about two girls who would do anything to stay in their own shared world forever.

“Can’t you see that we’ve already lived past the best times of our lives?”

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018)

I highly recommend this novel if you like books about writers and writing. You’ll also enjoy this if you liked Bluets by Maggie Nelson. The Friend features a similar controlled stream-of-consciousness prose style, bite-sized contemplations on art, philosophy, and morality, and sensitivity to feeling.

The novel follows a woman who unexpectedly loses her friend to suicide. She is entrusted with the care of his Great Dane, whom she becomes gradually devoted to. Soon this dog is her only tether to reality, and to her precious friend.

“Nothing has changed. It’s still very simple. I miss him. I miss him every day. I miss him very much.”

This novel probes the mysteries and sensitivities of the animal heart. And while it is a novel about a dog, grief, and loss, it is also a novel about novels. The narrator is a writer, so was her friend. Older and originally her professor, he still commands some authority over her writing, even in his death. Through writing, the narrator attempts to tell the story of his death, which had more to do with writing than it did anything else. It’s a beautiful and curious novel, with an ending that moved me greatly.

(Note: The Book of Goose and The Friend were featured in my March reading round-up, from which I paraphrased here!)

Have you read any of these books?

I’d love to know! I’d also love to know your favorite reads of the year. Substack is my new favorite place to get book recommendations…

---

Every book I’ve read this year

• The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Contemporary)

• Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (Contemporary)

• Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto (Translated from the Japanese, Non-contemporary)

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (Non-contemporary)

• All that Glitters by Orlando Whitfield (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Good Material by Dolly Alderton (Contemporary)

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Contemporary)

• Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte (Contemporary)

• The Turn of the Screw/The Aspern Papers by Henry James (Non-contemporary)

• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Hartman (Translated from the French, Non-contemporary)

• The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li (Contemporary)

• The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (Contemporary)

• Siblings by Brigitte Reimann (Translated from the German, Non-Contemporary)

• The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya (Contemporary)

• Audition by Katie Kitamura (Contemporary)

• Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Orlando by Virginia Woolf (Non-contemporary)

• James by Percival Everett (Contemporary)

• Good Girl by Aria Aber (Contemporary)

• Love in Exile by Shon Faye (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert (Non-fiction, Contemporary)

• Greek Lessons by Han Kang (Translated from the Korean, Contemporary)

• The Wall by Marlene Haushafer (Translated from the German, Non-contemporary)

• What A Time to be Alive by Jenny Mustard (Contemporary)

• Possession by A. S. Byatt (Non-contemporary)

• The True Happiness Company by Veena Dinavahi (Memoir, Contemporary)

• Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Contemporary)