Best of 2026

a hard year, and flushing out a writer's block

What a damn year it’s been. Troops deployed to American streets, war drums and extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean, a prolonged national discussion about a pedophile, the longest ever government shutdown, sharp reversals on climate change mitigations, and a guttering economy. It’s been hard to look past the intentional suffering (and the above is just a US focus). My year in reading, whether novels, poetry or history, has brought some sense and succor to it all: to move beyond the prolonged aghast and begin to reckon with, as well as learn from and see through the current state of despair.

I’ve found in this year reinvigorated belief in the importance of literature, and that’s come from such belief being seriously tested: by both the constraints of writing under highly pressured circumstances as well as serious professional consternation.

What a damn year.

Belletristic plumbing

I’ve been logging and writing about every book I’ve read since 2005. This year has been an anomaly: I read fewer books this year — by a lot — than I have since I started tracking. The principal reason is that, in late August, I decided to take on the hardest professional project of my career: write an entire book in just under five months. (The book, How to Close a Camp, will be published by Haymarket by Labor Day, 2026.)

These two decades that I’ve been logging all my books pretty much exactly match the timeframe since I’ve been seriously writing. For twenty years now I have been committed to the craft.

Never in all of that time have I faced the impediment of writer’s block. There have been more and less productive periods, more and less creative ones, and I’ve hit periods of both flow and slog, but never, never have the words simply not come.

And then, a few weeks ago, I got clogged.

When the blockage hit I had written eight chapters and had two left to go. I needed to stop, turn away and rinse out my brain, but didn’t have the time, so I just kept opening my computer and trying to grunt through it. I basically took to lumping on material for the final two chapters, heaving up slabs of sentences, trying to palm them into shape. It wasn’t working. For almost three whole weeks I was plowing the sea.

See, back in early September I burst out of the gates, wrote through periods of early lactic burn, and, a couple months later, I was starting to see the finish. And then: the doldrums. I don’t even know how I got out of it exactly. Exercise helped: mostly climbing and hard runs. Family and friends helped. So did wine. I went weeks with very little sleep and, as painful as that was, it triggered a bit of a reset. I started hand-paddling out of those doldrums, and somehow — just keeping my ass in the chair, pushing through — I now have a full draft. In the final weeks I move to sharpening, tightening, plastering over crumbling transitions and trimming the fat. On January 19 I will take a deep breath and send it all to my editor.

Now, as I review the books I read January through August, it feels like looking back at a previous incarnation.

Here are three titles that stood out from that before period:

• Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, by David S. Reynolds

  As Whitman wrote, and perhaps remains true, “Of all nations the United States … most need poets.”

• A Single, Numberless Death -Nora Strejilevich

  Strejilevich recounts her brother’s forced disappearance in Argentina, and her and her family’s long crusade for justice. She writes about the importance of moving beyond lamentation: as her grandmother used to say, “Tears do not open locks.”

• Wittgenstein’s Mistress -David Markson

  A novel I had been wanting to read for a long time, tracing the last person in the world as she navigates an abandoned land and grapples with the meaning of, well, meaning. If anywhere (and that’s a big if) she finds meaning in art. “One of the things people generally admired about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it. Or a pair of boots.”

And then in August all of my reading — with a minor incursion into Nabokov to try to shake me out of my linguistic languor — focused on immigration detention. Currently, my bedtime reading shifts between the architecture of Auschwitz (Andrea Pitzer’s One Long Night) and early American abolitionists (Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause) — both excellent, important, even inspiring books, but not exactly lullaby material.

Some immigration detention-focused highlights include:

Revisiting Silky Shah’s Unbuild Walls, Brianna Nofil’s The Migrant’s Jail, CLR James’ Mariners, Renegades, Castaways, and Michelle Castañeda’s Disappearing Rooms: The Hidden Theaters of Immigration Law.

Report Card

My plan, as of late 2024, was to read more in Spanish and more poems. I did a little of both — not nearly as much as I was hoping for. I was also planning to read Lonesome Dove and San Fernando: Última Parada, by Marcela Turati. I read neither, but they’re both going back on my list for 2026.

Reading in 2026

Along with the McMurty and Turati, I cannot wait to turn back to more general reading, though, after a few months of pleasure, I’ll have to refocus on the history of forced disappearances, which is the topic of my next book.

Some gems I have planned: the latest Knausgaard, maybe try Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, Zola’s Germinal, and, to try to run with the cool kids, Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh. I’ve read most of Cristina Rivera Garza, could definitely use a dose of her artfully smart and startling prose, and want to get to The Taiga Syndrome. For both work and pleasure, I have lined up Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A Flower Traveled in My Blood.

I won’t read them all, though maybe I will. And I’ll end the year on that note of hope.