We are still waiting for the rain to arrive in Mumbai, the kind that turns an afternoon dark by four and makes the whole flat smell of wet earth and chai. As I eagerly wait for the rains to come, I have decided that this is the best possible weather for taking stock. So here I am, halfway through 2026, doing the thing every reader secretly loves and slightly dreads in equal measure, counting.
Eighteen books since January.
I will be honest with you: I did not expect that number. This has been a caregiving year more than anything else, a year measured out in small routines, doctor’s appointments, and the particular tiredness that does not announce itself until you sit down. Reading, this year, has happened in the margins: a few pages while Little Miss naps, a chapter on my beloved Kindle app at a traffic light that refused to change, a paragraph at 11:30 p.m. when I should have been asleep. That eighteen books fit into those margins feels like a quiet little victory. Books have a way of doing that. They expand to fill whatever space you can spare them.
So let me walk you through where the year has taken me.
The year I fell into Japanese comfort fiction
If you had handed me my own reading list in advance, I would not have guessed this pattern, but it is unmistakable now that I see it laid out. A good chunk of my year has been spent in quiet Japanese cafes, libraries, and stationery shops.
There was What You Are Looking for Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, where a librarian hands people the one book they did not know they needed. There was Kenji Ueda’s Letters from the Ginza Shihodo Stationery Shop, all ink and paper and small human repairs. I went back to the Kamogawa diner with Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Menu of Happiness – you may remember I fell for that series last year – and I let Toshikazu Kawaguchi break my heart gently all over again with Before We Forget Kindness, the latest of his time-travelling-cafe stories.
I have been thinking about why I reached for these the way one reaches for a familiar blanket. I think a hard year asks for fiction that is kind. These books are low on jeopardy and high on tenderness; nobody is racing to save the world, they are just trying to be a little less lonely. That was exactly the kind of books I needed.
And then, sitting slightly apart from that cosy shelf, there was Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore – the odd one out, strange and slow and full of holes you fall into. Not comfort reading at all. But there is a reason I keep returning to him. I have loved all the previous books I have read by Murakami but this one was not one of them. I felt it was too long, too convoluted and frankly I didn’t like it much.
A detour into the dark
Of course, I cannot live on tenderness alone. My mystery-and-gothic streak was very much alive this year.
I re-read The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie’s debut and the world’s first meeting with a fussy little Belgian named Hercule Poirot. There is something wonderful about going back to where a legend begins. I paired the classics nicely with M.R. James’s Ghostly Tales: Spine-Chilling Stories of the Victorian Age, which are exactly the sort of slow-dread stories you should not read alone during a power cut (I did, naturally).
The contemporary side of the shelf gave me Rachel Ayoub’s Our Secrets to Keep, Celaine Charles’s When June Haunts May, and the atmospheric Crooked Tales: The Rising by Chris Harrison, a book I spent a happy 450 words on earlier this year, for those who caught that review. I will start the next part of Crooked Tales soon and I’m sure that too will be as good as first.
The home shelf
I always want my reading year to have plenty of Indian voices in it, and 2026 has delivered. AAVISHKA by Cindy Ann D’Silva, All Roads Lead Here by Suchita Agarwal, and Vidya Sanath’s warm-hearted collection Happily Ever and Never Afters all found their way in. Malnad Mysteries: True Stories From South India by Harihar Pai gave me a different kind of chill. The regional, rooted, did-this-really-happen variety that I find far more unsettling than anything invented. And for pure escapism there was Jordan S. Keller’s A Sea of Ships and Souls, which scratched the fantasy itch I always carry around somewhere.
When the banker reads
You did not think I would get through a whole reading post without my other hat, did you?
Two books this year were not fiction at all, and they tugged at the part of my brain that spent thirteen years in banking. Buildit: Building Blinkit in an Evolving India by Albinder Singh Dhindsa is, on the surface, a startup story. But I cannot read a business book like a normal person anymore. I read it the way I used to read a credit file; looking for the risk hiding under the optimism, the cash burn behind the growth chart, the moment the whole thing could have tipped. And then, lightly, there was Mohar Basu’s Salman Khan: The Sultan of Bollywood because sometimes you just want the masala.
What I am reading now, and where the second half is headed
Right now my bedside book is Dibs in Search of Self : Personality Development in Play Therapy by Virginia M. Axline, the classic account of a withdrawn little boy slowly unfolding through play therapy. It is not a coincidence that I picked this one up in the middle of a caregiving year. It is doing something to me that I have not fully worked out yet, and I suspect it deserves a post of its own once I have finished.
As for the rest of 2026: I would love to bring more weight back onto the shelf, a chunky literary novel, perhaps something from my M.A. reading that I can actually enjoy rather than annotate. I want at least one more classic, one more debut Indian author, and, if the monsoon comes to meet us, a few more cosy cafes to disappear into.
Any books that I should not miss reading this year?
Leave a Reply