by Joe Miller
I don’t make a lot of New Year’s Resolutions, but for the past couple of years, I have set a reading goal. For 2026 the goal was 75 works of fiction.
My day job involves a lot of nonfiction reading. Most of my clients work in public policy, and they write lots of reports. No one can read all of them, but I try to keep up with the most important ones. Those clients are also mostly based in D.C. where politics is inescapable, so I read (or at least skim) several newspapers.
In addition, I generally read half a dozen or so articles for each of these columns.
Fiction is how I relax. I read while I eat breakfast and lunch and then at night before bed. Some of that is literary fiction, but most of it is genre fiction. That used to mostly be science fiction, but I’ve been on a mystery/ thriller kick recently.
My ideal novel is one that’s good enough to keep me engaged over lunch, but not so engrossing that I can’t put it down when it’s time to go back to work.
I hit my reading goal for the year at the beginning of August.
Some of that is weather related. It turns out that you can read a lot of books when your car is buried under a foot of ice! And part of it is that several of the books I downloaded turned out to be novellas rather than full-length novels.
Here’s a round-up of some of the high (and a few not-so-high) points from my reading so far in 2026.
The spring featured new entries in three series I’ve enjoyed: Martha Wells’ “Platform Decay” (the “Murderbot” series), James S. A. Corey’s “The Faith of Beasts” (the “Captives’ War” series) and Matt Dinniman’s “The Parade of Horribles” (the breakout hit “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series).
I’m slowly working my way through the massive back catalog of Lee Child’s “Reacher” novels. The 31st book in that series is scheduled for release later this year.
I can’t really get into Michael Connelly’s “Bosch” novels, and his latest Lincoln Lawyer novel fell a little flat. The police procedural is Connelly’s bread and butter. He seems increasingly uncomfortable with a series that is predicated on cops having made mistakes and the last few novels have put that discomfort on full display.
That said, I enjoyed “The Late Show” (the first in Connelly’s “Ballard” series) enough to download the second from Libby.
By the time most of you read this, my son will have moved into his new apartment just off the Florida State University campus. He starts his graduate program in philosophy in a couple of weeks. Carl Hiaasen is helping me prepare for regular encounters with Florida Man.
Discovering Lee Goldberg has been a real high point this year. His 2023 novel “Calico” is currently the front-runner for my favorite read of 2026. The novel is a delightful mashup of mystery and western all wrapped in a clever time travel package.
Regular readers of this column know of my love for weird metafiction. The reluctant detective of Benjamin Stevenson’s “Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone” is the author of a semi-successful series of guidebooks to writing crime fiction. Readers are treated to regular fourth wall-breaking explanations of how well the current case conforms to the conventions of the mystery novel.
Stevenson earns a spot alongside Anthony Horowitz and Sulari Gentill as mystery writers with literary chops.
Just about any collection of 75 books will contain a few duds.
Robert Heinlein’s “Stran-ger in a Strange Land” is much worse than I remembered from having read it in high school. The women are all curvy and into free love. The men take occasional breaks from bedding said curvy women to make boring speeches about freedom and rights and capitalism.
It reads a little like Ayn Rand taking up romantasy – a combination suitable mainly for teenage boys who know way less than they think they do.
Where “Stranger in a Strange Land” is an incel’s idea of the free love movement, Veronica G. Henry’s “The People’s Library” is the answer to “What would progressive Twitter look like if it were a mystery novel?”
The heroes of the story are all at least one of non-white, queer, neurodivergent or women. Most check two or three boxes.
The mystery isn’t very hard to untangle. The villain is the big corporation, personified by the heterosexual white man who is the heroine’s boss.
The annoyingness of both Heinlein and Henry stems from the same underlying flaw. Both root their characters’ fundamental worth in a set of arbitrary, unchosen physical characteristics.
They simply disagree about which of those characteristics are the good ones.
My reading always slows down in the second half of the year. Caroline and I spend a lot more time outside during the summer and fall, and it’s usually hard to find time to read during the holidays.
This year, I’m spending a lot of my reading time memorizing lines for the drama workshop.
But I still have several books on my to-be-read shelf, including new things this fall from John Scalzi and Emily St. John Mandel.
Read anything you think I might enjoy? Drop me a line and tell me about it.
