As always, life came back after Christmas, and with going back home and starting work again, I could not bring myself to find time to spend on this blog, even though I enjoy it a lot. Part of it was the fact my girlfriend gave me Breath of the Wild as a Christmas gift and I haven't stopped playing since... and part of it was going back into an almost automatic routine that barely leaves any space for hobbies.
I have been talking to my therapist about how I'm doing better, and I no longer resonate with the note I made about "things to talk about in therapy" (which I wrote in a hurry on a day I was feeling particularly frustrated and never revisited or updated) that says "I have a problem with doing things that aren't productive – I struggle to play games because I feel like I'm wasting my time. I don't do things I used to love anymore because I feel like I have to do things that are worth something all the time". Reading that gave me whiplash. But I digress.
Since the year started, I have been participating in a Storygraph challenge that consists on reading at least one page every day. Back when I was in high school, this wouldn't even have been challenging. I used to read for fun. I used to pick up a book, get in bed, and spend at least half an hour reading every night. But then university came, and between having more of a social life than I had ever had and the fact I now had to read literature works for my courses, I found very little time to dedicate to reading as a hobby (and not as "homework"). So whenever I picked a book, it would either be a studying session or a guilty pleasure. And since I spent my day reading (either actual books or academic papers), when I got to bed at night, the last thing I wanted to do was read more.
If my 8-year-old self could've heard this, he would've looked at me in horror. But it happened, and for some good 6 years of my life, if not more, I've been relegating reading to a very brief time before bed, and some days, to nothing at all.
So I decided to join the challenge, because Christmas, and in general any holidays, always mean I go back to my child self – not worried about schedules or clocks, focused only on what I want to do next, and a bookworm at heart. Of course, coming back to real life has made it harder to maintain the habit, because I'm just so used to not reading here. But I've managed to cut out some time for reading during breakfast (instead of watching vlogs on YouTube) and to journal again before bed at night. Last year I didn't complete my Hobonichi because it felt exhausting to write at night sometimes, but this year I'm determined to write every day. But I digress again.
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| My 2026 Hobonichi |
I wanted to share here my reading list for the year. In part because I haven't thought about what I really want to read yet, and in part because I'd like to come back at the end of the year and see how much I've actually read, and what was left on the shelf. This, as everything in life, is subject to change – but I wanted to put pen to paper (or finger to key) and plan my reading year to get excited about books again. Book shopping what I already have, so to speak.
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| My brand new Obsidian bookshelf, still very much a WIP |
I've been slowly building back my bookshelf in Obsidian (I'm
dying to make a post about Obsidian, so more on that later, hopefully). Back when I was a productivity junkie and used Notion when it was still a niche app, I created a big database with most of my books and used it as a book tracker and a place to bookmark books that had called my attention. Of course, I went through a minimalist spree and deleted it, along with most of my other databases and Notion pages. I built it again, tore it down again, you know the drill. I hope this time will be different!
So far I've only added a few books I got for Christmas and the book I'm currently reading, but I'm so excited to expand it and use it as a digital library! I love looking at it and scrolling through all the books I've added already and thinking about reading them... But this post is about
actually doing the reading.
So, what am I planning on reading this year? In no particular order...
I picked this up on January 2nd and have been consistently reading a little bit of it every day thanks to the Storygraph challenge :o) This is the prequel to
The Priory of the Orange Tree, a
wonderful fantasy book I'd recommend anyone reads. Samantha Shannon makes a point of including very "organic" queer characters in the book, meaning it doesn't feel like she has a "quota" to fill nor thinks LGBT representation can only be added if it serves the plot somehow. Her characters are just queer, period.
Both background characters
and main characters are queer. It's very refreshing to read something like that, where queerness isn't always necessarily central to the story, but present anyways. I think I particularly like it because I'm at a point in my life in which my queerness is exactly that – it's not always visible or central to everything I do, and sometimes I feel like some people are unaware of how much it defines me, but it's still there and it's not something I want others (or myself) to erase.
Aside from my thoughts on queer representation in the books, the worldbuilding in this series is enthralling. You can tell how much time the author has spent thinking about it and living in it. It's easy to try and force all chunks of your detailed worldcraft in random sentences throughout the book so that every minor god in the pantheon and all of the traditional dishes you imagined will be present and not lost to oblivion in one of your multiple worldbuilding docs, but I think Shannon does a great job of only including what feels natural and create complex characters that feel interestingly different from one another.
Also, her characters are not all teenagers who somehow wound up to be the chosen ones and had an unbearable weight thrust onto them when they could barely control their emotions yet. You have 50-something lesbians who engage in intimacy, you have old women in charge,
you have late-20-something year olds!!!! Which is unheard of in many other books, frankly. And really refreshing.
And last but definitely not least, it's quite something to read a fantasy book that doesn't seem to think it's acceptable to include dragons and magic, but an egalitarian society is out of the question. These might all sound like Tumblr-esque reasons to pick up these books, but I need to reiterate how perfectly woven all of it is within the story Shannon tells. The politics and religion systems in them are so carefully crafted, and even though it obviously gets inspiration from the real world (meaning the nations found in it seem to "mirror" real ones, or be heavily inspired by them), it never feels like she just changed the names, added magic, and called it a day (which is exactly the main problem I had when reading The poppy war).
2. The memory police
I'm so excited to read this. I'd had my eyes on it for a while, and my dad got it for me as a birthday gift. You don't know this about me yet, but I love a good dystopian novel – I went through a heavy dystopian phase when I was in high school, and so when I read the synopsis of this book, I was intrigued:
On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses — until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.
The people of Storygraph have concluded the pace for this book is slow, which I love, and something much appreciated after having my brain fried by high-speed social media content for years. I think I'll pick this up as soon as I finish A day of fallen night (a long time from now, I think, because that one is ~800 pages long and I'm only around 200 in or so).
3, 5 & 6. Orbital, The Dark Forest, and Parable of the Sower
We've reached the more space-y sci-fi section of the list! Before reading them, it is my understanding that all of these books can be placed somewhere on a scale ranging from a more Arrival-esque reflection about humanity to a Dune-like tale of religion and faith. What all of them have in common is that they give me a space feel. I'm not sure if this is even backed by anything in Parable of the Sower, but alas! We'll find out once I read it.
I actually picked up
Parable of the Sower last summer, which was coincidently the year some of the events are supposed to happen in the book. I didn't know this when I started reading it, and it kind of made me want to rush through it in order to finish it during summer (which is the time of the year reading is most beautiful, to me at least – staying up late with a soft light beside you, knowing there's rest tomorrow... literally what else can come close?). In the end, I couldn't get past the beginning of the book, for whatever reason. I think I found it hard not to cringe at the empath main character. I'm sure I'll start reading it again and finish it, because I've heard wonderful things about it and I think I'd really enjoy it, but that'll come later in the year.
Orbital I found at a library last summer too, and the cover for the Spanish version was so beautiful I couldn't not pick it up. From what I gather from the synopsis, it's about a group of astro/cosmonauts in the ISS, each performing a different mission, each going through the six months they're supposed to stay there with a very different mindset. This is what the Spanish publisher has to say about it (translated by yours truly, so excuse any mistakes...):
Orbital is a journey to the very limits of our certainty, a tale about the vertigo of facing the cosmic emptiness, and an existential transformation: intimate, but also universal, which speaks to us about what we are and what we, as a species, believe ourselves to be.
So of course, it being one of my greatest obsessions, I had to get it. I'm going to be kind to myself and delay reading it until the spring, at the very least, because doing it when there's so little daytime would probably send me spiraling.
Last, but not least,
The Dark Forest. I read
The Three Body Problem in 2024 and became obsessed with it, but when I first started reading
The Dark Forest I couldn't get into it (notice a pattern?). I dropped it so long ago I think I could easily re-read the 80 pages I got in the first time without remembering anything, and I'm really intrigued by the story itself, so i hope this time around I'll be able to finish it...
I've been thinking about replacing my who-knows-how-old e-reader for one with backlight – and, let's be honest, the ability to highlight and annotate my books in color. I rarely annotate books, and I should do it more often! My physical copy of Dune is filled with bookmark tabs and pencil annotations that feel so satisfying to read. I'm so used to storing quotes digitally that I hardly go through the trouble of laying out my supplies and annotating books, but when I force myself to do it, it's so much fun. So I think having the option to do that digitally would also be fun.
7. Burnout society
This was a gift and a hint from my dad, who has seen me struggle with burnout for literal years at this point. Byung-Chul Han is a Korean philosopher he likes, and this book is short enough I could've read it when I was so burnt-out I had no energy for anything. Admittedly, I'm doing better now. I'm learning to stop working when I need to, regardless of what others might expect of me. This past couple of days, for example, I've been bedridden with some virus I caught who knows where, and didn't do anything.
(Un?)Fortunately, I'm in academia, which means I have more flexible work schedules than most, and I can get things done (mostly) whenever, as long as they get done.
Not doing stuff for two whole days would've been a sure way to induce a panic attack to 20-year-old me. Back then I was going through two majors (one of which I ended up dropping because, even though it was my literal passion, the environment was so toxic I could not bear to finish it), had classes from 9h to 21h, and all of my time was spent either working on university stuff or dreaming about it. I barely had any social life, and the little I did have was mostly spent with someone who did no good to me. After that I had a more relaxed senior year... and then I got back into the Grind™. If you know anything about academia, you know you have to be very lucky to escape the mindset that you should be working 24/7.
I'm hoping to read this once the second semester has already started, partly as a reminder not to fall back into bad habits and actually give myself time to rest, have hobbies, and spend time doing nothing.
8. The dream hotel
Even though they're nothing alike, this book gives me the same "easy"-to-read, engaging story vibes as The vanishing half. I might be totally wrong about this, but what I mean is that it seems like a book I'll get really into and finish quickly. It's about a woman who is detained because her dreams offer clear data on something: she's about to commit a crime against her husband. This part of the synopsis is what called my attention most of all:
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
This is also a more dystopian read, but in an apparently less bleak way than The memory police, although I think as soon as I start reading that'll change. I haven't read anything by (or about) Laila Lalami, so I'm going into this completely blind only because I found it while scrolling on Storygraph and it caught my attention. This is one of my low-priority reads, along with There are rivers in the sky, but since I've only added 8 books to my reading list so far, I hope to get to them all nevertheless.
9. There are rivers in the sky
This was a surprise find I got at a bookshop at the same time as Butter (one of my best reads of 2024). I did pick it up because of its cover. But the story seems to be equally as intricate and intriguing:
A storm is approaching Nineveh, the sky swollen with impending rain. One of the clouds approaching the world''s largest and wealthiest city, built on the banks of the river Tigris, is bigger and darker than the others-and more impatient. It floats suspended above a majestic building adorned with marble columns, pillared porticos and monumental statues. This is the North Palace, where the king resides in all his might and glory. The cloud casts a shadow over the imperial residence. For unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles. Dangling from the edge of the cloud is a single drop of rain - no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously - small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth open down below like a lonely lotus flower. Remember that raindrop, inconsequential though it may be compared to the magnitude of the universe. Inside, it holds a miniature world, a story of its own...
I think this will be a perfect summer read, since it's also on the longer side, and seems to be a book you need to sit with for a while to really appreciate.
10 & 11. La diosa blanca and La vida contada por un sapiens a un neandertal
These two books I got as birthday/Christmas gifts, and are more on the anthropological side of things.
In
The white goddess, Robert Graves explores the matriarchy in Ancient Europe, and searches for the origins of poetry through mythology, history, and the ancient cultures of the continent. Back when I was in my first year of university, I read several books by Graves, and I remember vividly the night I started
The golden fleece and found myself immersed in a sketch of a matriarchal society that predated anything I knew about Greece, or Europe, for that matter, a sketch that lasted only a few pages and that I revisit every once in a while in thoughts. I didn't know about
The white goddess until a couple of years ago, and I'm excited to get to, although I think it'll be a side book to another fiction one I'll read as my "main" course, because I tend to favor those over non-fiction books, especially if they are as long as this one.
La vida contada por un sapiens a un neandertal is a book by a Spanish writer and a Spanish anthropologist who try to imagine what it would be like to explain life as we know it to one of our distant siblings, the neanderthals. They have also written two more books in this series, about death and about consciousness.
I've always thought I would've also liked to study anthropology, though maybe this is only my inner Annie Braddock from The nanny diaries speaking. She's an anthropology student at university, and (from what I remember) tends to look at New York City as she would any society western anthropologists would deem more "exotic", curious about the way humans behave. The movie is from 2007 and features heavy sexism and a creepy older guy hitting on Annie, so be warned. As a kid, though, I focused way more on the anthropology lens of it, lol.
I wanted to read this first book before diving into the rest of the series, but after hearing and reading more from the authors, I'm sure I'll like it a lot. This feels like a more reflective read, although perhaps lighter than Orbital. Because I like to suffer, I'll probably save it for the end of summer, when I'm more aware about the passage of time and life itself.
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| If you haven't watched this movie, it's probably worse than I remember |
I'm hoping to read more books than these, but I don't want hubris to blind me, so I'm setting on these for the time being. 2027 me... let me know what happened!
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