Top reads: March and April 2026

Non-fiction:

• Everything Is Tuberculosis (Green): If this doesn’t make you angry, nothing will. A classic example of something we can solve with a bit of money, if only we could be bothered.
• On Writing (King): Combination memoir and writing tips. Good, at times funny, and with quite the recommended reading section(s).
• The Art of Memoir (Karr): Reviews of and advice about writing memoirs. More focused than King’s book, which was less genre-specific.
• Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (Lynskey): Interesting review of how we talk about the end of the world in books, movies, and arts.
• The Extinction of Experience (Rosen): What do we gain and what do we lose when we no longer talk about the Human Condition, but rather the User Experience.
• The Brain at Rest (Jebelli): All the work your brain does when you do nothing, and the value that adds to your life.
• Reality Hunger (Shields): A manifesto (his word, not mine) about mixing genres, reality and unreality, and narrative structures to reflect how chaotic life is. Interesting, whether or not you agree with him.

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Fiction:

• The Book of Form and Emptiness (Ozeki): What goes where in your life, and how do you make room for it? Where do you go in your life? This isn’t a happy book, but it also isn’t sad. And it’s gentle in a somewhat violent way: intrusive thoughts and objects and people, and events you’d be better off without, but so many of the characters are willing to accept each other’s worst, hardest parts that the events are never wholly bad.
• Endling (Reva): Very good, in a very weird way. The book takes a turn halfway through, when real life interferes with the process of writing it. It will speak to you especially if you have family far away, and you find yourself worrying about a handful of people to the exclusion of millions.
• Pretenders to the Throne of God (Tchaikovsky): Latest part of The Tyrant Philosophers, which at this point is my favourite fantasy series. As the series goes on, there’s an acceleration of disillusionment and outright breaking away from the philosophy that underlines the colonial force. This is achieved, largely, by adding more and more “insider” characters struggling to reconcile rules and reality and feeling – or realising they are – rejected and betrayed.
• I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There (Lanigan): This is a common feeling if you’re uncomfortable in your own home, but the visceral nature of that discomfort is dialled up to ten in this book.
• Eat the Ones You Love (Griffin): I’m lukewarm about this one. In a sense it’s a coming of age story for adults, the ones that feel stuck in a life more or less chosen for them at least a decade ago. The Little Shop of Horrors element, however, didn’t work for me.
• Elder Race (Tchaikovsky): A novella about finding your role and place in society; the things only you can bring to the table and whether it’s right or wrong to do so.
• The Charming Man (McDonnell): The second Stranger Times novel. Lovely, in a not-so-lovely way.