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 and wonderfully, simply lyrical though so many of the individual poems are, 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 so often lift off into transcendence, and in the case of Bornholdt's book I think the whole does 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 for me the fun is 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; Ali Smith, Gliff, with all the tricksetty energy of an Ali Smith novel, word play and plot play and kindness as the value at the heart of the book; Jacinda Ardern, A Different Kind of Power, also about kindness, and interesting obviously to get an inside view  on political decision making, but also written with an artful simplicity that makes every detail matter often in ways that only become apparent later, and, especially in the earlier chapters, a beautiful portrayal of ordinary small town New Zealand life; Grant Robertson, Anything Could Happen, another memoir covering many of the same years and same politics but often more revelatory and frank, and very funny in places too, but best of all are the photos of Grant Robertson as a small boy, looking almost exactly the same as when he grew up; Introducing Mrs Collins, by Rachel Parris, another Pride and Prejudice spin-off and a pleasant enough read though without the sparkle or the depth of The Other Bennet Sister; Normal Rules Don't Apply, short stories by Kate Atkinson, peculiar, bleak, rather unpleasant little stories; Kitten, Olive Nuttall, a kind of coming-of-age romance, written in the most brilliantly captured vernacular, with the most beautifully placed question marks; The Calling: A year exploring what the secular world can learn from religion, by Niki Harre, a heroically earnest book, about taking a year to try to be a priest, without being religious, endearing in its account of ordinary daily rituals and disappointments, with a generosity of spirit which I was more than willing to extend to the book and to Niki Harre even when I was on the other side, very occasionally, of political disagreements; The Siren of Sussex, Mimi Matthews, a Victorian romance in which the heroine, looking for an eligible suitor, accidentally falls in love instead with her dressmaker when he makes her a dress with pockets; Peace and Quiet, Dinah Hawken, but I don't want peace and quiet in the poetry I am reading, and even so, I did like most the poems in this collection with the least ambition, the small domestic moments placed into an arrangement of words, but I think there is a lack of ambition, formally, in not following through on this as the project of the book; James Brown, New Words for Old, small, surreal, prose poems that the blurb promised would add up to a kind of memoir but it sure doesn't, but as individual poems many of them shine, especially when he reads them out loud as odd and oddly wonderful performance pieces; The Schubert Treatment, A story of music and healing, by Claire Oppert, but I wanted to write "stories" not "a story" because what I liked about it best were how small the chapters mostly were, each just taking one small interaction between patient and musician, or patient and a piece of music (I really didn't like the poetry); The Hero of this Book, Elizabeth McCracken, a novel? autofiction? memoir? about a daughter's relationship with her mother, or, rather, about a mother as a character, and about two days in the daughter's life after her mother's death, a book I just loved, without quite knowing why, but it is just odd enough to feel completely necessary that it should have been written in this way, in this form, which is I think what makes it a work of art; Andrea Long Chu, Authority: Essays on Being Right, a collection of brilliant, incisive takes on books and other texts, alongside more personal essays which I loved to read; Cure: A journey into the science of mind over body, by Jo Marchant, really as much about body over mind as mind over body, a necessarily interesting field of study; Jane Miller, Paper Banners, a poetry collection I almost like a lot, and find aspects of quite exciting, but am not completely convinced by, I feel the line breaks are working too hard; Fulvia, Kaarina Parker's brilliantly plotted novel about the wife of Clodius Pulcher, the "chaos goblin" (as she called him at the Auckland Writer's Festival) brother of the Clodia who was Catullus's Lesbia. You would think an historical novel, keeping faithfully to the facts, couldn't be plotted as such but yes it is, she invents all the reasons why everyone did what they did, manoeuvring events into place with astonishing skill, and giving Fulvia full agency in a way I find completely plausible and very exciting! Solwej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, now up to volume 4, in which we are still stuck in November 18 but somehow, even so, the plot is both thickening and speeding up, and while we have lost something of the dream-like resonance of the first volume, it is being replaced by a velocity and breadth that thrilled me, and I am already looking ahead trying to work out where the series could possibly go next; Charlie Holmberg, The Paper Magician, a bit creepy really; Jeff Tweedy, How to Write One Song, a generous and endearing book about songwriting which also works pretty well as a guide to writing poetry, or one poem (at a time); Lydia Davis, Into the Weeds, another book about writing, more about why she writes than how to write, and really more than anything just a display of her enjoyment of writing sentences, that is obviously why she writes and why her writing is so appealing to read; Vita Nostra, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, translated by Julia Meitov Hersey, adolescent girl goes to magic school and discovers she has a powerful talent.....yes, yes, but this is not like anything else you've read, this is so dark and sinister and weird and truly frightening, the descriptions of the second years from the first year perspective especially, both a brilliant metaphor for adolescence and a powerful piece of world-building; Jackson McCarthy, Portrait, poetry in the lyric tradition, sonnets, spells, poems of formal Modernist perfection, about love, desire, beauty, nostalgia, memory and the body, with an astonishingly surreal - as in, more real than real - sequence in the middle which begins with an encounter with a boy who has a truck full of swans; Elizabeth Knox, The Vintner's Luck, a slow re-reading of this knotty miracle of a book, even wilder and stranger and more wonderful than I'd remembered, but dry, too, almost astringent, in a way that pleases me more now than it used to; also by Elizabeth Knox, her new memoir, Night, Ma, a rich, complex story, that she tells so that reading it is like remembering your own memories in a way, or, remembering what you've read is like remembering your own memories, while reading it is perhaps more like an intimate, enthralling conversation with someone you could listen to forever; Fast and Furious, a regency Romance by R.M. Caldwell, much racier than I expected in that it does involve carriage races and also a very thrilling plot involving highjacking and espionage, a terrific read; Sam Sax, Madness, a gloriously complicated brilliantly composed collection of poems on madness, grief, history, and psychotherapy, that I could - and will - read over and over again; Salt Quilt, a poetry collection by Airini Beautrais who is like a different writer with every book and this one is especially surprising, lyrical but salty, acerbic poems, using formal constraints, many of them rhyming, sometimes lifting into the gnomic lyricism Bill Manhire does so well; My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, Deborah Levy, a glorious combination of essay and fiction - a novel about writing an essay on Gertrude Stein that does, therefore, include a lot about Gertrude Stein, a brilliant way of writing an essay that is more than an essay; Seven, Joanna Kavenna, another in a run of terrific books, this spectacularly readable, funny, book about an imaginary game (but there are rules!  We can play it!) and an academic quest, full of beautifully realised characters;