Books I Enjoyed In 2026H1

Fiction Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Beautiful prose and imagination. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. Beautiful and surreal prose, but completely unpretentious. Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories by qntm. I had already read most of these but they are very, very good, and it was a pleasure to read them again. ⭐️ Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Usually when I hear “it’s a 900 page Russian epic about three generations of a family living through a tumultuous time” I roll my eyes and assume it’s some 19th century slog that people only read to say they have read it. Life and Fate is not a slog. It is 900 pages, and the dramatis personae is so long it’s divided into multiple sections. But it’s great. It’s kind of like Legend of the Galactic Heroes but it’s the Second World War and in particular the battle of Stalingrad. ⭐️ Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. The trials and tribulations of a generation ship on a 160 year long journey to Tau Ceti. Pair with A City on Mars.…