All my great intentions for reading in 2026 have manifested in the way of man whose eyes are too big for his stomach. In my case, my reading appetite has bitten off a few large portions and I find myself already well into March and not having completed much of anything. It is not for lack of reading, but rather some lack of focus and what focus there is landing on some very large books. I am currently reading four very different novels, each of them massive tomes of fiction, and not one of them particularly close to being completed.
Among them are the following and I might leave you to guess the titles:
A far-future science fantasy novel spiritually-adjacent story themed around the philosophical coming of age its protagonist.
A very popular apocalyptic horror novel by a very well known author dealing with a government created disease outbreak.
A fourth part of a techno science fiction epic tangled up in poetry and science and artificial intelligence and religion.
A work of historical fiction threaded through ancient Japan about a pirate and a clash of culture and romantic adventure all around.
None of them are less than a thousand pages long.
Back on January first—it is the thirteenth of March as I write this—I hunkered in the post new years glow and finished off my first book of the year (my recap written later that day follows below) and figured I was off to a good start to fill my blog with interesting book reviews.
How did that hold up? Um. I’m pressing out a pair of reviews in this post to make up the gap. Figure that out.
Either way, enjoy, I read:
Flybot, Dennis E. Taylor with Ray Porter
Long before I was logging books here, I had long since finished listening to all the Bob-iverse novels by Taylor and narrated by Porter, so when I saw this audible exclusive pop up in my recommended titles I knew two things: (a) the algorithm knew me and (b) I was almost certainly going to listen to it. Taking a break from all the heavy, thick novels I’ve been reading—and needing an excuse to make use of my new airpods (jeeze, this starting to sound like a damn sponsored post—it’s not) I sunk into this little murder mystery science fiction story. Taylor has jumped deep into the genre of nerdy-guys-write-clever-fiction in the style of The Martian or Dungeon Crawler Carl—guy lit, where nerdy men dig into the jargon of science or geekdom while making pop culture references so thick that you sometimes get lost googling the reference just to make sure you are up to speed on all the cleverness. I fall for it every time, of course, and love these books the same way my wife tucks into Austen or Agatha or Bridgerton. Flybot tells the story of the world about thirty years anon where hardware and software are highly regulated to prevent a rogue AI from destroying the world—which is darn near just about what happens, tangling up a pair of wisecracking scientists in a terrorist plot involving their work, the computer cops and somehow linked to some missing AI hardware. Like all of Taylor’s books it is something of a beach read—or in my case, a trudging through the snow while walking the dog read—and you are only meant to get some light entertainment out of the fun story, not some deep philosophical insight or momentous understanding of the weight of the world (a definite feature of all the other heavy stuff I’ve been reading lately). Porter is on my shortlist of favourite narrators, to the point where I pretty much narrow my search to see what else he has read and listen to that. (I noted this before, but if you haven’t listened to Project Hail Mary, close this blog and go download it now. Maybe Flybot, too, but first PHM.) It is a match of geeky proportions. And I love it all and will buy every damn audiobook these two create.
Artificial Condition – The Murderbot Diaries (Book 2), Martha Wells
Well, crap. I was doing oh so well logging all my fresh reads in 2025 and then, let’s see. I think it was a cross between laziness and traveling and then generally all the way back thru December, which was mostly just a different kind of laziness. Anyhow. Didn’t log a bunch of reads after, I think, about September. So. Whatever. Onward and upward, right? I was determined to start this new year off a little more focused (aren’t we always, tho?) and both (a) read a lot more and (b) keep better track of what I am reading. To that end, I kicked off a lazy, snowy January first by completing a whole damn novel. (Well, ok, a novella. It was a mere one hundred and twenty one pages long.) Artificial Condition is the sequel (and second in what turns out to be a substantially long list of titles) to the Murderbot Diaries, a clever and quirky science fiction series from the last ten years or so. After reading book one back in October we went on vacation and then I came back and watched the Apple TV adaptation of that first book which somehow caught quite a lot of the magic and vibe of the book and I found myself actually quite enjoying it. The eponymous Murderbot is the protagonist of the stories, a rogue human-form Security Unit who has a shady backstory and has been sneakily avoiding getting caught with his hacked control module (which unhacked would otherwise compel him to obey humans) but who spends the bulk of his time just trying not to be forced to have awkward conversations with humans preferring instead to watch (what is implied to be) mediocre soap opera space dramas that he downloads off “the feed.” Humans, from his perspective, are always making dumb decisions that are about to get them killed. Fortunately Murderbot is there to step in and slow down some of their progress: is he deep down a nice guy or just a bot who hates the distraction of it all? I bought the whole set as a Humble Bundle of ebooks mid-last year, so I guess I’ll have lots more evidence to figure that out.