Rasdhar's 2026 Reading (Part II)

This is a painting by SH Raza, titled 'Flora Fountain in Monsoon' set in Bombay, India. Right behind and to the left of the fountain in this image is a street where even today, booksellers line up on the pavement and you can buy secondhand volumes, likely-pirated reprints, and rare volumes from collectors. All of these books are unpacked every morning, packed up every night, and subject to periodic raids, demolitions, and removals by municipal authorities. I bought books there as a child.

This is the second half of my thread (first half here). It has been a busy time, and I haven't been very good about keeping up with reviews and notes here in the first half of the year, but I hope I'll do a little better in the latter half! My modest goals for this year are to read more short stories, more works in translation, and make a dent in the ever-growing To-Be-Read pile.

Books read in 2026 (Jan to June)

January
1. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Sword (Orbit, 2013)
2. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Mercy (Orbit, 2014)
3. Tom Holt - The Portable Door (Orbit 2004)
4. Valeria Luiselli - Sidewalks (translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House Press 2014)
5. Ed Park - An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories (Penguin 2025)
6. Graham Greene - The Third Man (Heinemann 1950)
7. Damilare Kuku - Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad (Masobe Books, 2021)
8. Maggie O'Farrell - This Must be the Place (Vintage, 2017)
9. Vivek Shanbhag - Sakina's Kiss (translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, McNally 2025)
10. Tom Mead - Death and the Conjuror (Mysterious Press 2022)
11. Percival Everett - The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair (Dzanc Books, 1987)
12. Karin Slaughter - Fractured (Random House, 2008)
13. Karin Slaughter - We Are All Guilty Here (William Morrow, 2025)

February
14. Vincenzo Latronico - Perfection (translated from Italian into English by Sophie Hughes, Fitzcarraldo 2025)
15. Balsam Karam - The Singularity (translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Fitzcarraldo Editions 2025)
15. Adam Plantinga - Hard Town (Grand Central Publishing, 2025)
16. Mariana Enriquez -A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories (translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Granta 2025)
17. Karin Slaughter - Undone (2009)
18. Percival Everett - Half an Inch of Water (Graywolf Press, 2015)
19. Chantel Acevedo - The Living Infinite (Europa, 2017)
20. Mosab Abu Toha - Forest of Noise (2024)
21. Mike Davis - Dead Cities And Other Tales (The New Press)
22. Jessica Abel - La Perdida (Fantagraphics, 2002)
23. Elisa Shua Dusapin - The Old Fire (Daunt 2026)

March
24. Weipin Tsai - The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard 2024)
25. Ross King - The Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism (Walker and Co, 2006)
26. Karin Slaughter - Fallen (Delacorte 2011)
27. Asako Yuzuki - Hooked: A Novel of Obsession (translated from the Japanes by Polly Barton, Fourth Estate, 2026)

April, May, June
28. Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Final Problem (translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, Little, Brown and Company 2026)
29. Greg Grandin - America, América: A New History of the New World (Viking 2025)
30. Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister, The Serial Killer (Doubleday, 2018)
31. Yasuhiko Nishizawa - The Man Who Died Seven Times (Translated from the Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, Howes 2026)
32. Adrian Tchaikovsky - Service Model (Tor Books 2024)
33. Solvej Balle - On the Calculation of Volume III (translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, New Directions 2025)
34. Stephen King - Mr Mercedes (Scribner 2014)
35. Zuo Fei, Xiao Yue Shan and Simon Shieh - Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons: New Chinese Writing (translated from the Chinese by various translators, Honford Star 2025)
36. Andrea Wulf - Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (Knopf 2022)
37. Anjet Daanje - The Remembered Soldier (translated from the Dutch by David McKay, New Vessel Press 2025)
38. Shida Bazyar - The Nights are Quiet in Tehran (translated from the German by Ruth Martin, Scribe 2025)
39. Patrick Radden Keefe - Rogues (Vintage, 2023)
40. Jane Pek - The Verifiers (Vintage 2022)
41. Andrey Kurkov - The Lost Soldiers (translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, Harper Via 2026)
42. John Berendt - Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (Random House 1994)
43. Nadia Davids - Cape Fever (Simon and Schuster, 2026)
44. Adrian Tchaikovsky - Dogs of War (Head of Zeus, 2017)
45. Tana French - The Keeper (Viking 2026)
46. Stephen King - It (Viking 1986)
47. Stephen King - Pet Sematary (Doubleday 1983)
48. Stephen King - Needful Things (Viking 1991)
49. Louise Welsh - Cutting Room (Canongate 2002)
50. Louise Welsh - The Second Cut (Canongate 2022)
51. Lars Kepler - The Hypnotist (FSG 2009)
52. Don Winslow - City on Fire (William Morrow 2022)
53. Don Winslow - City of Dreams (William Morrow 2023)
54. Don Winslow - City in Ruins (William Morrow 2024)
55. Francine Toon - Bluff (Doubleday 2025)
56. The Best American Essays 2025 - Edited by Jia Tolentino, Kim Dana Kupperman (Doubleday 2025)
57. Jane Harper - Last One Out (Macmillan 2025)
58. Belinda Bauer - The Impossible Thing (Transworld 2025)
59. Christianna Brand - Cat and Mouse (reissue, British Library 2025)
60. Frances Louise Davis Lockridge - Death on the Aisle (Penzler Publishers 2019)

Books read in 2026 (July to December)

July

61. Patrick Radden Keefe - London Falling (Doubleday 2026)
62. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya- The Time: Night (translated from the Russian by Sally Laird, Pantheon Books 1994)

July

61. Patrick Radden Keefe - London Falling (Doubleday 2026)



In 2019, MI5 cameras caught footage of a young man jumping off the balcony of an expensive high rise across the Thames. In an essay for the New Yorker in 2024, Patrick Radden Keefe examined Zac Buttler's life, tracing his troubled history of deception and lies, his involvement with shady figures in London's financial underworld, and the flawed police investigation that has yet to uncover the causes behind his death, or even the circumstances of his final hours. London Falling expands on that essay, incorporating a vast amount of material that Keefe obtained through interviews with Zac's family and friends, and seeks to connect it to a larger account of how London's financial circles function as spaces accommodating oligarchs, millionaires and criminals, especially those with Russian connections. Keefe is particularly adept at managing the difficult task of balancing empathy with scepticism: he writes sensitively about a troubled young man, but also does not obfuscate any of the mistakes he made, or the lies he told. He is less successful at establishing the bigger networks at play, I think because that is an account too complex - financially, historically, and politically - to be incorporated into this single account of one crime. Still, it is a well written and fascinating (if a little disjointed) book. If there is a key theme it is this: that we never really know each other, not entirely.

62. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya - The Time: Night (translated from the Russian by Sally Laird, Pantheon Books 1994)

>6 rasdhar: What you describe - both in the novel and in the author's life - is heartbreaking.

>1 rasdhar: Happy new thread Rasdhar. I love the S H Raza painting. He is such an interesting artist, and his “Flora Fountain in Monsoon” so appropriate for a new thread.

>6 rasdhar: Great review of The Time: Night, Rasdhar. The comments made by its author were interesting and enlightening, but sobering.

>1 rasdhar: Happy new thread! I love the painting in your opening post!

>6 rasdhar: the challenge of juggling domestic care, and finding time to write, has always fallen on the woman writer

Reminiscent of A Room of One's Own.

>7 Dilara86: Yes, I think I didn't convey it properly but there's a bleak dark comedy that underlies the book, which doesn't take away from the tragedy in any way, because it comes through the inner thoughts of the narrator.

>8 kjuliff: Thanks Kate! I really SH Raza's earlier work but his later abstract stuff does not appeal at all to me. It's a lot of orange squares, very angry-looking.

>9 kidzdoc: Thank you! The Paris Review interview is worth reading by itself, too.

>10 raton-liseur: Thank you!

>11 labfs39: Yes, indeed. I was given a copy of that when I first started on my doctorate, and I thought about it all through until the end.

>12 rasdhar: Yes I’ve seen his latest work and don’t like it at all. I have an artist friend who is constantly trying to explain to me what is so good about that type of art that appears to me to be just a few shapes or even a blank canvas.

>11 labfs39: Also a bit reminiscent of Forbidden Notebook, which I read a couple of months ago—do you know it? In this book it's an Italian woman in the 1950s, early middle age, who's been a wife and mother and employee all her adult life. She starts writing in a journal at night when her household is sleeping and comes to self-knowledge she didn't have before. It's a really sensitive book that asks some hard questions for women.

>1 rasdhar: Great painting! I'm not familiar with the artist.

>14 lisapeet: No, but it sounds interesting. Noting.