February 2026 Reading Wrap Up: novel thoughts, nonfiction, poetry, and writing thoughts
In February, I finished 5 books, which is a perfectly respectable number. It's half of what I read in January, but I also spent half of January not in school, at my parents' house, doing nothing. February was a much more representative month because I had classes, multiple events a week, and also a major hump in my big writing project to get over. I spent the beginning of the month not really reading novels because I had printed out my manuscript draft and spent the first two weeks reading it aloud and marking up and then inputting all these changes and doing rewrites and then reading it all again and then giving all my brain space to writing a query letter. So I did far more reading this month than is reflected on my spreadsheet. Sadly, I don't feel like I can count my own novel in its very real yet still so hypothetical stage. I also had to do class readings and review classmates work that don't count in the spreadsheet. That's life. But it doesn't help when it comes to blogging or my pile of proofs or my other pile of books I bought that I'm about to get buried under.
What I will say, is that in February, I'm proud of how widely I read despite only reading a little more than a book a week. And I read a lot of books that I loved and a lot of books that made me think deeply and intensely and that I already feel inflecting my art. I thought it would be interesting to talk about the impact that reading had on my creative process this month. Being in the cocoon of the M.Phil certainly helps bring that attitude to reading. But there's also a certain amount of serendipity that brought me here. So let's talk about books:
I read two novels this month, The Lodgers and Lost Lambs. Neither of these imbued a certain sense of love from the immediate outset but both have made lingering impacts. The Lodgers was published by Granta's Press, which, I love everything Granta does, magazine and otherwise. In true form for them, The Lodgers was a deeply unique book. The sentences were surrealist and a little mind bending—the kind of novel where I couldn't tell you exactly what almost any of it meant but the feelings crashed through with an immense clarity. There's a real beauty there even in the distinct discomfort that followed me through reading it. It's made me actively consider what alternative forms or phrasings might be interesting in my own work and also pressed me to consistently mine towards what will make the emotion most immediately accessible. (There's a full review on the blog, if these comments seem strangely abstract, where I do talk about plot.) Then I also read Lost Lambs, which experimented with the form of the novel in its own way. While Cash takes a similarly exacting and playful approach to language, there is a concern with commerciality here that does lead her astray. There is a reason why Lost Lambs is exponentially popular. It was designed (quite literally with that cover but also metaphorically) to balance many of these essential elements with a certain uniqueness that would create a conversation. While I oscillated in how much I enjoyed reading Lost Lambs, I do feel like it's the most rewarding review I've written in a very long time, and I was quite proud of it in a way that is rare now that I'm coming up on nine years (wow, that's scary) of writing these reviews. I deeply enjoyed thinking about Lost Lambs.
Then, simultaneous to my journey with Lost Lambs, I finally got the audiobook hold in for Life After Cars, which I was very excited about. I love a good pop-social-science-adjacent nonfiction book, and I despise cars and would love for Americans to be able to think more expansively about the joys and freedoms that would come from alleviating the country's car dependency. I was inclined to agree with this book. I'd read similar books and enjoyed them immensely. My life in Dublin, a life that is truly after cars in the sense that I will only get in one if I have 3 bags and am going to the airport, is infinitely better for being free of the automobile. And yet the book was so boring it made me want to cry, even though I often took to listening to it as I fell asleep and probably missed chunks. It felt like arguments were repeated over and over and points were stretched for pages when they should've been three sentences. It really could've been a great essay, but there just wasn't enough brought to the table. It didn't make me more inclined to get out of my audiobook slump. I've been choosing music more and more to fill space, and when it's not music, I've been deeply obsessed with the Stinging Fly podcast and listening to authors talk. I do want to shout out Joyride by Susan Orlean, which was a truly addictive audiobook I finished at the end of January and can wholeheartedly recommend. I went into it mildly interested after hearing her on LARB and found myself finding random excuses to listen for longer.
The last two books of the month are heavy hitters and kind of linked to one another. I listened to Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti and then High Jump as Icarus Story by Gustav Parker Hibbett. I was first introduced to Heti's book in a creative writing class my senior year of undergrad—creative writing for nonmajors. It was a survey course mostly there to get people the GE-A or whatever it was they needed. It was the class that solidified for me that I had no option other than to return to my twelve-year-old self and fully commit to being a writer after trying to do everything but in undergrad. In the survey course, the professor tried to expose us to more unconventional ways of writing creative nonfiction and one example was Sheila Heti alphabetizing every sentence in a decade of diaries and molding a story from that. I'd tried to read it a while ago, but I couldn't figure out how to approach the giant clumps of alphabetized sentences on the page or what to make of them. So I decided to try it again as an audiobook, and I was immediately hooked. Read aloud, the sentences rolled like poetry and the juxtaposition of taking years of feelings and decontextualizing them and clumping together became obviously apparent. Again, all I wanted to do was listen, and I ended up writing some poems inspired by it. It felt like the sentences were unlocking parts of my brain both personally and creatively. A lot of Heti's experiences resonated for me and the phase of life I'm in, and it began to feel vital. I picked up the gorgeously simple Fitzcarraldo Edition at Hodges yesterday and am now in the process of re-reading it with three different highlighters in hand. I think it will be a new bedtime ritual until I get to the end. It is easier to read now having had it read to me, but I do wish that each sentence got its own line on the page (I know this would make the book ridiculously long) so that the sentences stood alone and then could be formed into constellations more easily than the intimidating blocks of text. I can't wait to write a full review for you when I get to the end of the reread. I don't typically do full length reviews of the audiobooks I read because I feel like I don't absorb them completely enough to do a fair review, so I'm excited to see what I'll get out of a close-term reread. Marking up the book almost feels like a creative project in itself.
Which, I said that Alphabetical Diaries felt like poetry. I read actual poetry this month as well. Parker came to visit our class as they're doing a PhD in literary practice, and their advisor runs the lecture series we're all taking. They were the first poet to visit. I am very much not a poet, would never claim to be, but Parker had us all enraptured by their honesty and down to earth vibe as well as the incredibly insightful things they had to say about writing. Also, for the first time, we had a guest actually read their work to us. I was struck by so many of the poems, I knew I needed to read them again. Not since I was a child had I found myself so invested in poetry. So Zoie and I stopped into Books Upstairs on our way home and each bought a copy. I have a few favorites, but maybe the top one is Parker's rewrite of Fleabag's famous speech to Hot Priest questioning how to live. It's titled "What I Would Have Wanted Fleabag to Say for Me, Had the Priest Not Brought It Back to Sex" and it's brilliant. Many of the poems are about high jump but easily analog to whatever it was you desperately cared about as a teenager and were terrified to lose. I seem to be easily influenced by the guests because so far in February, Collin Barrett came and inspired me to write three new short stories and drag my friends to read at an open mic, and I started scribbling a poem while Parker talked that I finished later and ultimately wrote three of them. Will they ever see the light of day? No. Are the poems good? No. But it's fun to have forms that do feel low stakes and private because they're not what you're meant to be good at. Writing for pure play.
That sums up the five books I read this month, but I wanted to do a quick shout-out to some of the short stories and essays I read as well. I bought and fell into a few new literary journal issues, and I've been trying to read my way through them and consider what makes a good, and publishable, short story to the magazines I admire most (namely, Granta and the Stinging Fly). I haven't noted down any of my class readings, but short stories and essays I read for fun, I've decided to keep in a separate sheet of the reading log. The first up was what I thought was a historical fiction short story but turned out to actually be a nonfiction piece about Andy Warhol called "Burning Mao" by Fernanda Eberstadt from Granta issue 171. I was absolutely enraptured about this account of a teenage girl working as a receptionist in the declining slide of Warhol's later years and this extremely tender portrait she captured of the larger than life man. I've always been a huge fan of Warhol's work since I stumbled into the soup cans when my age was in the single digits. When I lived across the street from the modern art museum in LA, I would visit Warhol's work regularly, almost religiously. I particularly liked a sketch he'd done of the inside of a dishwasher. The Granta essay was beautiful. The other essay on the list is also from Granta but the online edition. Harriet Armstrong writes about "lol," my favorite tone augmenter in the casual written language in "Lol I'm trying to tell you how it feels for me." I loved the way that she wrote about the inherent insecurity of "lol" and the quiet plea to be understood that it silently conveys. It's full of beautiful sentences like, "Maybe the best ‘lol’ texts do something like that: they speak to something which might be complex, or go unspoken for whatever reason, and they acknowledge that context without needing to explain it. They neither deflect nor fully disclose; they don’t need to, because both the sender and the recipient understand it all already.” I identified with the essay deeply, and any chronic lol users probably will too.
The only short story that made the February list comes from an experiment that the Stinging Fly editors posed for issue 45 in which they asked a group of writers to craft a story in a single night, and then they published the result. I think I was drawn to these stories in particular because they're shorter than most lit mag stories by virtue of the time limit. I love a compressed story. My favorite of the set was "Arrivals" by Rebecca Ivory. It's a complex little glimpse at friendships and relationships and the utter mess of them. I also liked Marie-Helene Bertino's story "Every Forest, Every Film" as a surreal portrait of a movie reviewer from the cluster. Also, shout out to "Temporary" by Odran Waldron that I read last year in the Stinging Fly for being a short story that's continued to come into my mind months after first reading it. To me, it's about the little ways we sell our soul.
I guess to wrap it up, I'll talk a little bit about my current reading plan. I'm obviously working my way through Alphabetical Diaries again. I'm going to the bookstore to pick up The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden when I finish writing this. I read part of this book for my creative nonfiction class, and I think its format is going to inspire part of my term essay, so I want to dive into that slowly. As far as fiction, I'm over halfway through A Good Person by Kirsten King and flying through it. After that, I think I'm going to launch into Big Kiss Bye-Bye, which I've been hotly anticipating, and maybe I'm a Fan since both of those texts feel informative to what I want to write next. I want to get through my proofs and my physical TBR and make a big dent this week with my time off school. I also now have three books out from the library, which will divert my attention a little. I'm pretending like I'm at a writing retreat rather than the truth, which is that I've been left alone in Dublin by all my friends who made plans for the week. But I'm kind of loving it, at least this Day 1 version I've crafted.
Well, this was more fun to write than I expected. I've been thinking deeply about books lately, and I'm reminded of why I started this blog in the first place—as a conductor for that enthusiasm. I think when you've done something this long (blogging), sometimes you have to take the long route to remind yourself of the why. I can't believe it'll be 9 years next week of Reading, Writing, and Me. That's absurd. I feel like March is going to be a big month, and I'm excited to see what's in store.
P.S. As a random side note, it's interesting that there have been themes in my reading months so far this year. I'd call January a month of classics between Austen and Hemingway featuring significantly. February feels like experiments with form maybe?
February Posts:
Sense and Sensibility reflection
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