My 2026 reading year began as 2025 left off, with War and Peace, which I often carry into the bush with me and read under a tree, the hens scratching around at my feet, taking it one chapter at a time, entering into these distilled moments which are all so charged, more and more so, as the book goes on, with transcendent feeling, the strangeness of being alive in a war rather than dead, or being about to die rather than continuing to live, the strangeness of being one person rather than another person, which I feel, more and more, as I read on, about the characters in the novel and about being me in my own life - but why this life?  and why am I I in it?  And inbetween War and Peace, the other books I am reading include R F Kuang's Katabasis, a darkly comic satire of academic life that is also a brilliantly complicated take on Dante's Inferno, which begins with the same bitter jealousy Kuang wrote about in Yellowface but transcends it very beautifully; and the next volume of Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume, a series I began by loving so much I didn't want it to continue because of the perfection of the first book as a single book, but again I am drawn in, to the spaciousness of the narrative, that gives me so much solace, such calm, somehow, and so I have read volumes 2 and 3, and having finished volume 3, want nothing so much as to read volume 4, which I think has not been published in translation yet; Han Kang's The Vegetarian, on the other hand, repelled me as much as Solvej Balle's novels drew me in, an odd mean-spirited, unpleasant book though other readers have found it spellbinding and beautiful, words I would use for Balle's novels but not for Han Kang's; Heather Christle, The Paper Crown, sweetly swerving poems that are full of things and thoughts and a kind of poetic comedy; Bill Manhire, Lyrical Ballads, which includes poems of his I have loved when they came out individually but the whole is somehow less than the sum of the parts and poems are lesser in the book than out of it; Jenny Bornholdt, What To Wear, with many poems even lighter and artless than Manhire's, and not really artless - the art, or trick, is often too obvious, but the final poem really does lift off into something more than just noodling the way Manhire's poems sometimes lift off into transcendence, and in the case of Bornholdt's book I think the whole becomes more than the sum; James Rebanks, The Place of Tides, about preparing nests for the eiderducks on a Norwegian duck station with a Norwegian duck warden, a terrifically detailed and absorbing glimpse into a life remote from my own; Ben Aaronovitch, Stone and Sky, from the Rivers of London series, always fun, but perhaps wearing off slightly; Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People, intended to expose the flaws and immorality of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg but also, less intentionally but more revealingly, exposing the sycophancy that enables them and turns them into monsters, by people like Sarah Wynn-Williams herself, scrambling to ensure Zuckerberg's feelings aren't hurt and his egotism is gratified at every point, without even any real loyalty given that she can go away and write this book which I increasingly hated; What A Time To Be Alive, Jenny Mustard, a coming-of-age novel I loved, university life in Stockholm, what it is to make a first friend and love a first boyfriend, in what I think must be a very brilliant translation, capturing oddities of phrasing that I figure must reflect oddities in the original, and which beautifully capture the halting, courageous, vulnerable, determined honesty of the narrator, the lovely Sickan, a heroine I will never forget; The Stepdaughter, byCaroline Blackwood, first published in 1976, a strange, bleak, disturbing book that ends very deliberately without resolution, another book I think I might be haunted by for some time.