Meredith's 2026 Reads (mabith) Part II

2026 Reads July-December

Pansies – Alexis Hall
My Nemesis Has Finally Gone Bankrupt – Jiang Zi Bei
Just Ignore Him – Alan Davies
Flashfire – Richard Stark
Strata – Laura Poppick

Sula – Toni Morrison

My first half of 2026 reading has been decent. I've gone back and forth on achieving some goals, like consistently working on a poetry collection. The last month my reading has taken a hit due to watching soccer and the start of my prime grief season (my mom's birthday was July 7th, and it's around then she started having any symptoms before dying in September).

I find I often struggle to shift my thinking in a timely fashion. So for instance, I'm finding it harder to pick out history reads that I really love or that are professional enough to not annoy me with things I know aren't actually true yet also aren't 700 pages long either (and are available from my library). I should just lean into fiction but I keep thinking about my genuine fiction burnout almost ten years ago (when I was reading fiction recommended by people with very different taste to mine).

So my goal for the second half of this year is to worry less about ratios of genre and hypothetical fiction burn out, which I don't realistically think is still an issue, and read more for joy. The world is so hard, it's silly to worry so much or assume my reading patterns won't continue to change.

Pansies by Alexis Hall RE-READ

I keep picking audio re-reads to listen to as I fall asleep, and then in the morning when I'm rewinding to get back to where it was when I fell asleep I just keep listening to it.

This is a Hall book that's particularly tough one in some ways. It deals with internalized homophobia, coming to terms with past bullying (for both parties), parents who really don't understand and have fixed ideas about what being gay means, longing for home but grappling with feeling alienated by the culture you grew up in, and a deep grief for a parent. The grief elements are so well written for me, and extremely similar to how I feel about my mom so it's always very affecting.

But it feels lonely without someone in the world who knows who I am. Not just everything I pretend to be.

It's one of my favorite Hall works, though the first time I read it I really struggled with the internalized homophobia and some of the interactions with the one set of parents, just found it so deeply upsetting as a queer person.

I’ve done that several times, falling asleep while listening to an audiobook. So I bookmark as soon as I lie down properly and then I bookmark every now and then in case I fall asleep..

My problem is that if I fall asleep, the book seems to go into my dreams and if it’s not a pleasant book, I have really horrible dreams. I don’t actually dream the book but elements of the book change whatever I’m dreaming about.

Yes, the dreams are always a risk, Kate! I tend to just pick fun books I've read many many times (don't want to be trying to stay awake to find out what happens either!). Definitely a smart idea to put a bookmark down. I'm usually on a 10-15 minute timer when I go to bed anyway, so it's not too hard to get back.

My Nemesis has Finally Gone Bankrupt by Jiangzi Bei

Bit of fun by an author I've liked before. Though it's been long enough I had to remind myself of the details.

Ji Ran's high school nemesis' family has gone bankrupt and Ji Ran decides to take revenge by offering to 'keep' him for a year as a lover. Qin Man's family isn't really bankrupt though, and Qin Man has had a crush on Ji Ran since school, so takes him up on the offer in order to get close to him. There's also a whole plot with Ji Ran's family (he is an illegitimate child), which didn't feel properly explored at the end, but what can you do.

>5 mabith: it is easier to go to sleep if the book is difficult or a bit boring. I just finished. The Correspondent and I stayed awake for a while because I was enjoying it so much.

When I set a timer, which of course I usually do, I tend to wake up when the book stops and unless I am in a deep sleep.

Just Ignore Him by Alan Davies

This is a memoir by British comedian and actor Alan Davies. I've watched him on a lot of shows for the last 20 years basically and he's such a favorite. The memoir focuses on his childhood, his father sexually abusing him, how this impacted his life, how his father partly controlled the relationships between Davies and his siblings, and recent events of Davies taking potentially illegal pornography of his father's to the police and reporting the childhood events.

...I have set out to tell you the things you don't know about me, in the hope that, one day perhaps, you will feel able to tell someone what they don't know about you.

It's a hard read, and hits close to home for me in some ways. It is so hard to feel like you have to choose between being able to talk about childhood abuse by a family member when that person has remained in your life (to whatever extent). People struggle when they know what happened but you also sometimes want to tell a funny story about the abuser. It's very hard to avoid feeling judged in one way or the other. It's almost impossible to understand the complexities of family abuse. We're only truly comfortable when the abuser has been cut out of the person's life completely, but that's simply not how life works for most of us.

The writing in this is incredibly brilliant and beautifully done. I was constantly impressed with it.

I could keep the secret because I lacked the power to force news of it out of my person. Words to describe it adequately or plausibly were beyond me. I didn't want to tell anyway, not because I was consciously frightened, or even concerned that I'd be disbelieved. More that this new secrecy had gone very deep inside me, taken root so far within my being that to eject it was to risk self-destruction by somehow turning myself inside out and never being able to go back to where I was before. It felt, still feels, like a risk.

>8 mabith: Nice review of a book dealing with hard to talk about topics. "We're only truly comfortable when the abuser has been cut out of the person's life completely, but that's simply not how life works for most of us."

>7 kjuliff: Ah, I just like familiarity for mine. It's a big moment for me to decide when a book can gain Bedtime status.

>9 labfs39: Thank you

Flashfire by Richard Stark pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake

The summary of this one on book sites is really off for what the book is actually about. I feel like there's been more and more of that lately.

Parker completes a job with a less familiar group, discovering at the end that this was a job to fund a bigger job and test if they wanted him in on it as well. The rub is they need all the profits from this job, and Parker thinks the jewel heist they have planned is too risky to want in. Not to mention being given the run around and an IOU for his cut.

So, he calmly lets them leave, and then engages in a series of small jobs to get a stake that will allow him to catch up with those heisters. That section of quick jobs was so enjoyable, but as ever it's a good read. Revenge always suits Parker, though Westlake does put him through the ringer on this one.

I say it with almost every book in this series, but Westlake really has a gift for making the most minor characters feel like real people with whole lives. A lot of authors are great on that with their main cast on a series, but it's a rare feeling for me on the very minor characters. Plus, of course, Parker is usually working with new people in each book (with a handful of recurring crooks).

Strata: Stories from Deep Time by Laura Poppick

This is the book that expands on some of the science aspects in the CO2 book. I waffled between being glad I read them so close together and getting slightly bored at times (I think that was more my personal mood though). They're not really on the same subject though, this just goes into how we know certain things.

Laura Poppick decodes strata to lead us on a journey through four global transformations that made our lives on Earth possible: the first accumulations of oxygen in the atmosphere; the deep freezes of "Snowball Earth"; the rise of mud on land and accompanying proliferation of plants; and the dinosaurs' reign on a hothouse planet

Poppick introduces us to the researchers who have devoted their careers to understanding the events of deep time. She travels to sites as various as a Minnesotan iron mine that runs half a mile deep and a corner of the Australian Outback where glacial deposits date from the coldest times on Earth. Ultimately, she demonstrates that the planet's oceans, continents, atmosphere, life, and ice have always conspired to bring stability to Earth, even if we are only just beginning to understand how these different facets interact.

She also doesn't obfuscate the areas of disagreement on earth's past and in fact almost focuses on it. Recommended if it's a subject you're interested in. I found it well done.