Lists, lists, lists—how they proliferate. But it just so happens that I love lists, and have done so ever since I was a little boy, making my first lists, written in pencil on very inexpensive lined paper in the mid-1950s. I also love books, to such an extent that not even the mind-boggling expansion of book-related lists today—not infrequently prompting me to silent screams, howls of derision, public rants, and more—has dimmed my ardor.
Have we just finished with lists of one sort or another devoted to books published in 2025? Then it’s time to start lists of books that will be published in 2026: books by writers, translators, editors, and so forth who are on our always-read list, such as Michael Connelly’s Ironwood, due in May, the second novel in the series launched with Nightshade last spring, and the Boris Dralyuk-translated Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood, by Alexander Voloshin, coming in April; books on subjects we find compelling, such as The Oldest Rocks on Earth: A Search for the Origins of Our World, by Simon Lamb, just out, and Lyric Temporalities, edited by Kimberly Johnson and Ryan Netzley, due this month; and more, much more.
The new publishing year has barely started, and yet a couple of stacks of compelling arrivals are already rising on the rug next to my “work station,” the old recliner that our dear friend Gary Gnidovic passed on to me some years ago. Who could resist KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union, by Filip Kovačević, or Chinatown: San Francisco’s 1906 Earthquake and the Paradox of American Immigration Policy, by Dafeng Xu, or Aztec Music and Dance in California, by Kristina F. Nielsen, all published in the first week of 2026? Not this reader.
Due in just a few days is a new edition of Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave, edited by Timothy Clark, which will remind my daughter Katy and me of the splendid Hokusai exhibition we saw at College of DuPage last September.
Of course, we need to remind ourselves regularly (I do, at any rate) not to press our enthusiasms on anyone else. After all, there are many books that someone I like and respect has urged me to read that are simply not my cup of tea and that (without prejudice) I have in fact not read, just as many readers I know and love have never gotten into Spencer Quinn’s delightful Chet and Bernie novels. By the way, the latest book, Cat on a Hot Tin Woof, is due in April, as I mentioned in an earlier column; if you do want to get the flavor of the series to see if it’s to your liking, you could easily plunge into this one and then go back to earlier volumes if you are smitten.
I haven’t even mentioned a book I’ve been looking forward to for a long time (originally scheduled to be published earlier): Puzzles: A Seminar on the ‘Benefit of Christ,’ by Carlo Ginzburg and Adriano Prosperi (translated by Thomas Haskell Simpson). I read anything I can find by Carlo Ginzburg. The book’s description notes that it
invites readers into the unpredictable world of scholarly discovery, where interpretation is not a straight path but a labyrinth of dialogue revision. At the heart of this book is a seminar held forty years ago at the University of Bologna, where students wrestled with The Beneficio di Cristo, the incendiary sixteenth-century text that questioned Church authority and championed salvation through grace alone. This is not a neatly packaged historical study, however—it is an unfiltered look at the errors and insights that emerge in the collective process of reading and debating a text.
If I were still editing a magazine, I would commission three or four responses to the book, with a follow-up in a subsequent issue in which the participants could in turn address one another.
It’s good to know that there is more worthy of our attention, not to mention more that is simply “diverting” in the most generous sense, than we could ever exhaust. May it always be so.
