What I’ve Been Reading in 2026

I’ve been working more on reading books rather than doomscrolling social media in the evenings, and as a result I’ve already finished almost a dozen books, barely three months into the year. I’m not sure if anyone is going to read this or care, but here is what I’ve been reading so far in 2026:

1. Prelude to Glory 8: A More Perfect Union – Ron Carter – 535pgs: This is the eighth book in a historical fiction series about the Founding Era of the United States, as experienced first-hand through the adventures of a fictional extended family (the Dunsons). This book primarily focused around the time of the Constitutional Convention, including the lead-up, some of the debates, and the ratification process afterward. Mixed in, they also had a fictional story of the Dunson rescuing a crew of theirs that had been seized by the British in the Caribbean. The author included tons of chapter end notes and sources, and explained where the story took liberties with the historical source material, and why. This really brought the Constitutional Convention, and the challenges of drafting and ratifying the Constitution to life in a way that history and civics classes alone often struggle to do.
2. Prelude to Glory 9: By the Dawn’s Early Light – Ron Carter – 612pgs: This final book in the series skips forward around 30yrs to address the War of 1812. Many of the characters are now middle-aged, with the rising generation starting to have more of a role. It was a fascinating stitching together of the stories of the war and the politics behind it. While trying to cram the story of that war into only ~600pgs meant leaving out and in some cases simplifying some of the complex story, it definitely was a fun and interesting read, and it was sad getting to the end and realizing that with the author now deceased, that was truly the end of the series.
3. Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir – 478pgs: I really loved this book the first two times I read it through¹, so knowing the movie would be coming out in March, I decided to reread it this January. I really love the story – geeking out on the science and troubleshooting, the friendship between Rocky and Grace, watching Grace’s character arc, the riveting action, the humor. I’ve actually met people who didn’t like the book, but it’s one of my favorites. Definitely worth a third time through.
4. The Three Body Problem – Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) – 399pgs: This one had been sitting on my shelf for a while, the first book in a trilogy about an alien invasion of the earth (to oversimplify things). I’ll be honest, I struggled a bit with this series. It was written well enough to make me want to know what happens, but it’s picture of humanity is pretty bleak. This book is in many ways a mystery story – something has been leading a bunch of scientists to commit suicide, and they’re trying to figure out what or who is causing that. Which leads them to find out that humanity is now at risk of destruction due to the revenge of a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
5. The Dark Forest – Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen) – 518pgs: How do you defend humanity against an enemy that is vastly more technologically advanced, and that can prevent you from making physics breakthroughs, and who can spy on anything you say or do anywhere in the solar system? That’s one of the key premises of this second book. Also, the source of one of the scarier explanations for Fermi’s Hypothesis. I’ll be honest, I almost put this down near the end, because it seemed pretty hopeless. But I stuck through to the ending, and it made me decide I wanted to read the final book.
6. Death’s End – Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) – 604pgs: The thrilling and depressing finale to the series, chronicling how the detente at the end of the previous book breaks down, and what that leads to. I won’t spoil the story, but its outlook on humanity and sentient species in general was a bleak and not particularly hope filled one. It was well written, but makes me really hope the author’s hypotheses about how interstellar species-to-species interactions are wildly wrong². Worth reading, even if it’s depressing. Kind of like some classics from Russian writers like Dostoevsky.
7. The Martian: Classroom Edition – Andy Weir – 380pgs: After that previous series, I badly needed something more hopeful and life-affirming. Having re-read Project Hail Mary already this year, I decided to reread The Martian. I’ve read this one at least three times previously, but had given away my hard copy to someone, so I bought a copy of the “Classroom Edition”. Basically this was the edition with PG-ified language that Weir made³. It doesn’t really change anything from the plot, but I’d strongly recommend it if you’re the kind that doesn’t like excessive swearing. It’s a great book, a story of survival, and rescue, and sciencing the crap out of things. And of course, once I was done, I had to rewatch the movie, which was yet another enjoyable entry in the Matt Damon Rescueverse⁴.
8. Delta-V – Daniel Suarez – 426pgs: I can’t remember if one of my asteroid mining friends gave me this as a gift, or if they just recommended it and I bought it. Either way, it had been sitting on my shelf for a while. As a story, I really enjoyed it. The characters and plot were interesting, and definitely sucked you in, with real stakes. If you either don’t have a deep background in space, or have drunk deeply from the “asteroid mining and free-flying space settlements” koolaid dispenser, you probably will love this book. If you aren’t from the asteroid mining/free-flying space settlements tribe, or have a strong background in manufacturing or aerospace engineering, you’ll likely still enjoy the book in-spite of being triggered by it occasionally⁵. It was interesting, having worked on some robotics for NASA’s abandoned Asteroid Redirect Mission⁶, hearing technical concepts I had been pushing a decade ago being put into a story. If you know the industry, you could guess who Suarez used as consultants.
9. Mormon’s Codex – John L. Sorensen – 714pgs: This one was my first non-fiction of the year. It was the magnum opus and last major publication of a latter-day saint anthropologist who had been studying Mesoamerican cultures and archeology for over half a century. The book makes the argument that the Book of Mormon makes most sense when viewed as a translation of an authentic Mesoamerican codex⁷. It was a fascinating read, with some parts fairly convincing, and other parts less so – and that’s coming from someone who believes in the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Key interesting insights I liked were: that it’s quite likely that a small colonizing party would not have transmitted much archeologically detectable material culture into a larger indigenous population⁸, an interesting explanation for the meaning of the “narrow pass” into the land northward from the Book of Mormon that fits really well geographically but is totally non-obvious for someone not from the area⁹, a strong correlation between major demographic and cultural changes in the Chiapas Central Depression area that line up very well timeline-wise with the narrative from 4 Nephi and Mormon. I could probably list a few more. But there were also a lot of places that felt forced, and where the author ignored some of his better points to try and overfit things. Long-story short, if you’re a latter-day saint with an interest in Mesoamerican archeology, it’s probably a worthwhile read, but I’m not sure how much anyone else would get out of it.
10. Critical Mass – Daniel Suarez – 444pgs: This one was a bit slower of a start than the other book, and was a similar mix of a reasonably well written story that was engaging and fun, with interesting characters, in a hard sci-fi setting. Once again, if you’re coming from one of the space tribes that strongly believes in some of the technology choices he selected, or if you don’t have a strong space background, you can probably enjoy the book and not get too triggered by it. While all of the technical pieces are ones that researchers have looked at, and all of them look technically feasible, it really felt like this was “what can happen if everyone’s research idea works nearly flawlessly the first time”, which ends up being a big suspension of disbelief requirement on my part.
11. Artemis – Andy Weir – 305pgs: After rereading Weir’s other two books, and watching or rewatching both of the movies, I figured I’d reread Artemis. I had only read it once before, so had forgotten enough of the plot to make it enjoyable again. That said, this one is just impossible to censor down to a PG-level on the fly, so I didn’t even try reading it to my family. It has some similarities with The Martian and Project Hail Mary, in that the protagonist had to solve challenging technical problems to save the day, but wrapped into a caper/heist-gone-wrong genre of story. I’m kind of looking forward to seeing the guys who directed the Project Hail Mary movie adapt this book into movie form. My guess is they’ll try to keep it PG-13, so they’ll have to tone down some of the crude humor and language to a point where I can watch it with my family. It’s definitely not one I can recommend as-is to my kids or other family members. But if you don’t have a problem with crude language and and a lot of adult humor, the story itself is fun and interesting. Not as good as his other two books, but other than the more mature content, I don’t regret rereading it.

Ok, that’s what I’ve completed so far for the year. I’m in the process of reading two other books — Jesus the Christ, which I described in my goals post yesterday, and On the Edge by Nate Silver. Both non-fictions. My guess is I’ll be done with Nate’s book this month, though Jesus the Christ may take a few more months to complete.

1. I read it once to myself, and then immediately turned around and read it to my family – reading books out-loud to my family is a bit of a tradition. I’m just glad I didn’t have to censor the language on the fly like I did for the Martian. But everyone loved the story. ↩︎
2. I’ll put spoilers here in the footnotes — I just really find the whole Dark Forest Hypothesis, that sufficiently advanced alien species will just go around trivially wiping out entire star systems and deliberately killing all of the sentient beings in them, just as a logical, amoral, and bureaucratic survival tactic really, really dark. ↩︎
3. So that high-school science teachers could use the book to teach their kids scientific thinking without having parents burn them at the stake for assigning a book with the F-bomb two times in the first three sentences ↩︎
4. I haven’t seen Saving Private Ryan, but understand it’s another Matt Damon Rescue movie, this time set in WWII. ↩︎
5. I liked some of the ideas, but felt like the ISRU and in-space manufacturing aspects were way easier than they would be in reality. Learning how to use new processes, new materials sources, and new approaches to manufacturing almost never is something that a tiny team figures out by themselves in a few months. Getting to a promising proof of concept demo? Maybe. Having a four-person team be able to carbonyl print a whole complex space plane without having to do any structural testing to make sure the material was consistent and that the print worked right without flaws? ↩︎
6. I literally have the simulated asteroid boulder we built for the prototype sitting about five feet away, outside my office window at home (it was about 1in too big to fit through the door into my basement), and I have a trio of partially disassembled asteroid boulder grabber robot arm prototypes sitting on shelves in my basement. ↩︎
7. The Spanish called the books indigenous Aztecan and Mayan bark-skin or deer-skin books that they found codices. Most of them were burned by the conquistadors, but a few, like the Popul Vuh survive to this day. ↩︎
8. Like for instance, in a two family colonizing group like what is described in 1st and 2nd Nephi, is there any reason to believe that any of the people there were master potters? Ceramics is one of the few things that survives well over millennia, but if there wasn’t a pottery expert in the group, would you really see any evidence of Near Eastern pottery influences where they landed? ↩︎
9. When I think of the term “narrow pass”, as someone growing up in the US, my brain goes to a mountain pass, or a narrow isthmus or something like that. I hadn’t thought of a major river surrounded by swamps and wetlands on both sides that only had one good location for over one hundred miles where the ground was elevated, dry, and rocky enough to safely pass from the river into the lands to the north. ↩︎