Expand Your Reading Horizon
Part 1 of 2
Recently, a friend asked me for a book recommendation for her book club to tackle. Like many clubs, hers seemed to come back to the same sort of book over and over again, and she was hoping I could steer her in a different direction. I find one of the best ways to widen my reading repertoire is to participate in reading challenges, where each book I read falls under some limiting definition. To my mind, the best of those challenges is that of the Massachusetts Center for the Book. You’ll see pictured above the categories for twelve months of reading for 2026. It’s early enough in the year for you to join the challenge. Over this course of this Musing and that which follows, I’ll let you know the book I tentatively plan to tackle each month, as well as a recommendation from my prior reading. With any luck, I’ll hit on a title or two that my book club friend, not to mention all of you, might enjoy. Meanwhile, if you’re up for the Mass Center Challenge, click here for more information.
January - A book about or set in winter
For January, I’m immersed in Septology, a seven-part novel by Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse. Set around Christmastime, each section of the novel covers a single day. Fosse’s narrative style is deeply meditative, with a stream of consciousness feel as we explore the present and past of the first person narrator, the painter Asle, who seems to have a doppelganger with whom he engages. Plus, there’s so much snow!
I dare say you’d be challenged to finish Septology this month if you haven't started already, so I’ll recommend some alternate titles. Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale received a rapturous review by the New York Times in 1983. It’s one of my favorite books that for some reason or another (I just can’t recall), I didn’t finish. It’s set in a mythic New York over the course of many years and involves fateful love and stopping time, a combination for which I’m a sucker. If you love mystery, and have either been to Iceland or would love to, pick up Voices, by Arnaldur Indridason. Almost the entire book is set in a Reykjavik hotel. so you won’t experience much of Iceland, but it’s set at Christmastime, and will introduce you to a series that I’m sure expends its setting to more of the island. The Mass Center Challenge website also provides recommendations, including one of my personal favorites, Ali Smith’s Winter. Smith is a British writer of wide range. Winter is one of a series of four loosely integrated novels, one for each season. Her characters confront some of the challenges of living in present-day Britain, as well as universal challenges of family and friendship.
February - A book outside your usual genres or spin the genre wheel
It’s hard for me to make a specific February recommendation for you, since I don’t know your usual genres, right? I’ve already spun the genre wheel, which includes five options: Young Adult, Memoir, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Historical Fiction. For me, the wheel pointed to fantasy. I’m tempted to ask my middle school students for a recommendation, since so many of them only read fantasy. What’s I’ll likely read though is an advance readers copy of a novel which I found in a Little Free Library (a pretty good source of advanced readers copies, by the way) called Canon, by Paige Lewis. It’s subtitle, “A Nonbinary Epic” makes it perhaps suitable for the August Challenge (a book that could be considered taboo; somehow and alas almost every good LGBTQ book is on someone’s taboo list).
Here again, the Mass Center Reading Challenge website provides helpful recommendations. Among them, I’ve read and recommend the following titles:
Fantasy: Babel, by R.F. Kuang
Memoir: Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner; Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
Science Fiction: Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
March - A book featuring an unlikely friendship
If you have somehow not already read Percival Everett’s multiple prize winner James, here’s your chance. Do I need to tell you that this is a re-imagining of the unlikely friendship between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, where Jim is in reality the highly literate James? Everett starts by hewing close to Mark Twain’s plot, but then takes his tale to some much darker places. Your book club will confront some thought-provoking moral dilemmas
As for me, once I see the 2026 Challenges, I start looking for possible titles in my Little Free Library peregrinations. For March, I’m ready to try Orphan Train, by Christina Baker Kline, where the unlikely friends are a 90+ year old Irish immigrant and a young orphan riding the train of the title to an uncertain fate.
April - A short story or essay collection
When it comes to short stories, I’m not as widely read as I might wish, I tend to steer to longer works (novels) or shorter one (poems) for those views of life and the world that are more to my taste. One short story genre I do like, though, is science fiction, where I enjoy exploring a particular, often peculiar, story idea at moderate rather than excessive length. George Saunders doesn’t fit under any genre label, and only some of his stories would I consider to be science fiction, but let’s put it this way: each of his stories seems to find a way to send a shiver up your spine. If you haven’t read his one novel (another is due this year: Hooray!) Lincoln in the Bardo, with Lincoln grieving his son in some sort of purgatory, with a text on the page that reads like a theater piece, then please find any excuse to read it. I’ll be reading another Saunders collection this April, Liberation Day. I trust Saunders so completely that I can recommend Liberation Day even before reading it. If you’ve already read all of Saunders and need another recommendation, I’ll mention again a title I referred to already above, Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. These tales are truly science fiction, by the author of the short story upon which the Amy Adams film Arrival (another recommendation!) was based.
May - A book set in Massachusetts
If you’re both a reader and a library patron, you likely already know about the free monthly magazine Book Page. While I’ll usually turn to the New York Times Book Review first for recommendations, I have come upon some titles in Book Page that have found their way to my “books to read” list. One is the book I’ve lined up for the May Challenge, Notes on Infinity, by Austin Taylor. Book Page interviewed Taylor, who was brought up in Maine, went to Harvard, and struggled there to feel like she fit in. Her novel, set at least partially at Harvard, draws upon her real-life experience.
This is as good a place as any to say that you can satisfy many of the Mass Book Challenges by reading non-fiction. I could revisit Thoreau’s Walden. I could finally read Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. I could extend the time I’ve spend currently reading Heather Clark’s Sylvia Plath biography, Red Comet, seeing that Plath spent much of her life in Winthrop, Wellesley, Northampton, Cambridge, and Boston. What should you read in May? How about finally tackling one of my three favorite novels of all time, with a primary setting right across the street from an apartment my brother and I shared in Brighton? Yes, I’m talking about Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s truly great American (and Massachusetts) novel.
June - A book with a sympathetic villain
Here’s the only month where I’ve nothing lined up as yet. It’s also a category where I may stretch my definition of what is a sympathetic villain. For you, for example, I’ll recommend Richard Powers’ latest novel, Playground. If you’ve read The Overstory, by Powers, think of Playground as The Overstory, but centering around undersea life rather than trees. Like most great novelists, Powers’ characters are three-dimensional human beings, people who occasionally do the wrong thing for what they think are the right reasons, keeping our sympathy while we question their actions.
If you have a recommendation fitting this category (novels with a sympathetic villain), please let me know in the comment section.
I’ll discuss the July-December Challenges next time.