I’m trying to read more for fun, especially fiction. In 2024, I read 21 novels; in 2025, I made it through 20. So, I’m re-upping for 2026. Here’s what I’m reading/have read, some brief thoughts, and Bookshop.org (or Amazon) affiliate links. Also what’s in my queue.
COMING UP: I enjoyed Foreign Affairs so not sure how I missed this book, originally published in 1967 and centering on a sociologist and his research assistant and a UFO cult.
The Award centers on David Trent and his ambition to become a celebrated novelist. This gains life when he moves into an apartment upstairs from an actually celebrated writer, Silas Hale. Hale turns out to be as insufferable as he is famous, which leads Trent to make a downward-spiraling series of choices that drive the plot. As comedy becomes dark comedy, the cost of ambition is brought to the fore. As someone who has paid the price of ambition myself, the story hit close to home.
This is a salvation narrative set in the context of a James Bond-like spy thriller and Carl Hiaasen-like Florida crime thriller. Several tensions drive the plot. The basic tension between good (the protagonist John) and evil (La Familia Michoacana). The tension between “true” Christianity and “false” Christianity — it is a salvation narrative after all. And the tension inside the protagonist.
Ha Jin revisits the events at Tiananmen Square from the perspective of Pei Lulu, a Chinese undergrad at Harvard when she first learns about the massacre. Lulu makes the massacre the subject of her doctoral dissertation in history at Columbia and the story follows her trying to learn about an event that Chinese authority want to forget. Along the way we get some political, family, academic, and personal drama to animate the plot.
I had no idea who this author was until I read a review of this debut novel in The Atlantic. It tells the story, in sexually graphic terms, of a 17-year-old high school student’s obsession with her 40-year-old creative writing teacher. I can’t describe the experience of reading this novel any better than The Washington Post’s reviewer did: “Hilarious, gross, disturbing, poignant.”
COMING UP: Building on enjoyment of reading Nabokov’s Pnin, going to keep the party going.
READING NOW: The original campus novel, which has somehow slipped my grasp all these years.
COMING UP: The second campus novel, understood by many as a response to McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe.