I read The Double (1846), by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the kindest thing I can say is: This was not his best.

I am familiar with the literature of twins, doubles, and look-alikes. The Double, by José Saramago. Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. Sweet Valley Twins and Sweet Valley High, by Francine Pascale. They invite us to reflect on self, identity, and other.

Dostoevsky does not do a bang-up job of this. His book does not invite much reflection at all. I have not surveyed the critical literature to find out how others interpret the book, but my biggest criticism is that the characters are inconsistent. They behave for any reason or no reason.

Our hero (the book calls him that, often, but he's such a schmuck that it comes to feel ironic) is Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, who one day encounters a man who not only looks identical but has the same name. And is assigned to work in the same office as our hero.

This counterfeit Golyadkin starts out as a warm friend to the original Golyadkin, but after a day turns into his bitterest enemy. Why? We don't know. Golyadkin himself never asks why. 

Also peculiar is that almost no one but Golyadkin finds it remarkable that two men with identical appearances and jobs and names occupy the same circles. Perhaps this is meant to be absurd, like Gogol's influential short story "The Nose," published in 1836. But it takes a certain talent to write a successful tale of absurdism, and Dostoevsky had not yet developed that talent.

It pains me to criticize Fyodor Mikhailovich like this. In my estimation, the greatest novel yet written is The Brothers Karamazov, which became a foundational text for me when I read it at age 17. It reshaped how I understood God and it set me on the path of loving Russian literature, and Russian history, and Russian culture in general. It is safe to say that I majored in Russian history because of The Brothers Karamazov.

But that book would not be published for another thirty-odd years. With The Double, Dostoevsky was still learning to be a writer. May this comfort anyone trying to become a better writer. The finest novelist in the history of world literature had some duds, early on.

Now listen: I normally discourage people from finishing books they don't like. Life is short, and there are too many superb books to get through in a lifetime. But I make an exception for Dostoevsky because I know how great he becomes later. I was glad to make this my annual Russian novel, and glad as always to listen to one of of my favorite narrators, Stefan Rudnicki.

In 2007, I read all 40+ books of the Discworld series over the course of a few weeks. In 2026, I'm rereading them over the course of a few years. Life has changed, and my brain has too. The internet has rewired my neural pathways. I used to get engrossed in books, giving them my full attention, each day. That's probably never coming back.

Which is all the more reason to be choosy about the books I do read. The Discworld books remain some of the most enjoyable, and most affecting, I've ever read.

Wyrd Sisters plays around with MacBeth. A power-hungry woman convinces her husband to murder the king. The rightful heir to the throne, an infant, winds up in the care of three witches, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick, who whisk him off to a faraway land to be raised in obscurity.

To my disappointment, I discovered on this reread that I misread a pun. Lady Felmet does not accuse her husband of being "infirm on purpose." 

Like many readers, I prefer to read series in order, but Discworld has many, many entry points. If you haven't read any Discworld books but your interest is piqued, you can jump in with Wyrd Sisters without feeling lost. 

I read the latest Murderbot book, Platform Decay. As expected, it was delightful.

Murderbot is a Sec Unit, created by corporate overlords to protect property and occasionally people. These security units are robots, but they look like people and do have some organic matter.

They have no choice but to obey the commands they receive, even if those commands are ethically dubious. If the person behind the controls tells the sec unit to kill a room full of people, then that room full of people is going to die.

Early in the series, Murderbot figured out how to free itself of these controls. And for the best reading experience, I recommend reading these in order, starting with All Systems Red. But even if you start here, with the eighth book, you'll get the gist. Murderbot's personality is on full display here: its neuroticism, its clever ways to outwit the bad guys, its overwhelming desire to kick back and watch soap operas.

In Platform Decay, Murderbot is trying to extract his human charges from a safe house when the corporate baddies find the location. Their escape is complicated by the new knowledge that human children in a different location are being held hostage. 

For audiobook enjoyers, Kevin R. Free's narration captures Murderbot's special blend of insecurity and lethality. I strongly recommend listening to these books, if that's your thing. 

Friends, this is only my second book talk of the year. I am behind in books, in reading, in writing, in life. This is what happens when the masked secret police occupy your community.

Lev Grossman first hooked me with his Magicians trilogy, among the finest fantasy novels I’ve ever read, and once again astonishes me with The Bright Sword. It is such a rare thing to find a writer who is gifted with both word crafting and storytelling.  

This is an Arthurian adventure fantasy starring a group of misfit heroes. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but it is safe to say there is a wizards’ duel—as Arthurian tradition demands—and it is phenomenal. It is also safe to observe that the queer representation in this book is superb.

I realize I’m handing out superlatives like they’re candy, but The Bright Sword was such a delight—what a high fantasy quest story should be. For those who like to hear their stories, Nicholas Guy Smith’s narration is a joy. He is adept at accents from all over the British Isles and some other places, too.

I read “The Apologists,” by Tade Thompson. Thompson’s novel Rosewater contains one of the scariest, most visceral scenes I have ever read, so I was eager for his new short story.

In the early scenes, we meet a mother and daughter who get bludgeoned to death. Detective Eve Stevens investigates the murders, and for a while I thought I was getting a murder mystery, but then came the bit with the spider, a hiccup of weirdness in an otherwise straightforward police procedural.

The weirdness gradually escalates, and by the time things really get cooking, the story is a whole lot more than just a whodunnit. The plot zigzags like a ball in a pinball machine, leaving you dizzy and wondering where you left your coat.

I enjoy Thompson’s prose, which is economical and at times elegant, and I liked his characters here, especially Eve, trying to do her job in exceptionally difficult circumstances. I was also quite fond of the tiger.

I read Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy, because the older I get, the shorter life seems and the less patience I have for the ordinary when I could have something sublime.

Let my start by saying I laughed at the necrophilia scenes. Perhaps I should finish by saying that too. That one sentence will tell you whether this book is right for you or not.

McCarthy is famous for the violence of his writing. Quite a few critics point to Blood Meridian as the most violent book. Not just the most violent McCarthy book, but the most violent book.

I disagree. Now it has been many years since I read Blood Meridian, but I do not recall that one featuring a serial killer rapist who attempts to make sweet love to a corpse but keeps getting thwarted in Loony-Tunes-esque ways—forbidden desecratory love, but make it slapstick.

Child of God does not resonate for me as much as No Country for Old Men (the finest crime novel I have ever read) or The Road (with the scariest horror scene I have ever read), but even a lesser McCarthy is a magnificent thing. He is a prose stylist nonpareil. At times his sentences are straightforward and terse, the noun did the verb to the object, marching the plot forward in staccato steps. Without warning his sentences turn wavy, different lengths, new cadences. He describes the mundane throwaway details like a monk illuminating the serifs in his scroll.  

I did not read a print version, but when I checked the Wikipedia page, I found the passage that made me stop in my tracks and rewind the audio as I walked the dog the other day:

“He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man's life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?”

One final but crucial note: If you enjoy audiobooks, do not miss the Tom Stechschulte narration. He is one of my top five favorite narrators. Child of God is set in eastern Tennessee and he gets the accents right.

When I started as a public librarian, I checked out a few annual “Best of” anthologies to get a sense for different genres: sports writing, science writing, crime fiction, short stories in general. I recently found The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 (Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams, eds.) on sale, so I gave the ensemble-cast audiobook a listen.

Disappointingly, the stories were of varying quality. I expect better in an anthology with the word Best in the title. Or let me be more accurate: the stories were all good, speaking on a plot level, but the prose was not always up to snuff.

The phrase “achingly beautiful” should not appear in your short story, because that phrase is hackneyed. If I’m editing, I’ll let that slide in book-length manuscripts for some authors, because prose craft is not everyone’s forte. I will not let that slide in a short story, because you’ve only got three thousand words, give or take, and each one needs to count.

I absolutely, positively would not let “achingly beautiful” appear twice in the same fucking story. Which it did in one of the stories in the anthology.

My favorite fantasy short story was “John Hollowback and the Witch,” because I am a sucker for good witchy stories. Amal El-Mohtar has been on my TBR for years. I’m going to seek out her longer fiction on the strength of this story. My favorite science fiction short story was “Calypso’s Guest,” by Andrew Sean Greer. I love a familiar story thoughtfully retold.

And there was a short story I expected to dislike. I won’t name the writer, but I had bounced off his novels because his prose disappointed me, but he did a great job with the short story.

K. J. Parker has been one of my top-tier, can’t-miss writers since 2009, back before anyone knew he was the pseudonym of Tom Holt. To no one’s surprise, I enjoyed his newest novella, Making History.

As usual with Parker, the genre is low fantasy. It’s a make believe world with make believe characters, but the setting could pass for preindustrial Earth. The local monarch has conscripted a group of scholars to create a convincing set of archaeological ruins. Our main character, a linguist, is in charge of forging the ancient texts that will be uncovered at the miraculous discovery of the site, scheduled for nine months hence. The king will murder him if he gets it wrong.

Parker’s writing is always dark, in the sense that his characters make poor choices and people die, sometimes lots of them, but it’s always funny too. His writing is sharp and clever. “She looked at me as though I’d been spelt wrong.” What a terrific line.

Ian Bedford did a fine job with the audio narration, for those who want to go the audiobook route.

Though The Gospel of Loki is only my second time reading Joanne M. Harris, I feel comfortable extrapolating: She never disappoints.

I love her care with the language and her inventive storytelling. Here we get Norse mythology from the perspective of Loki, everyone’s favorite lying trickster liar. It is true that he is a philandering sociopath with dubious paternal instincts and a penchant for sowing discord, but he’s funny and charming and he can shift back and forth between his fire aspect and his human form.

If you’re familiar with Norse myths, you will recognize these stories, but Harris delivers them in a fresh way, so you won’t be bored. I enjoyed the audiobook narration Allan Corduner, who reads Loki with the charm and suaveness he deserves.

A friend encouraged/bullied me into reading The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, written by Natasha Pulley and audiobook narrated by Thomas Judd. I didn't know going into it that it was steampunk, a genre I usually avoid on stylistic grounds. Specifically, contemporary writers often overdo the Victorian dialogue, going well beyond atmospheric and into pastiche.

But Natasha Pulley does not make this mistake, and I found myself pulled into the world of Thaniel, a young clerk who one day comes home to discover someone has broken in to gift him with a valuable pocket watch.

There's a whole lot going on here, including live musicals, Japanese and English international relations, lady scientists, synesthesia, precognition, a queer love story, and trains. Read this if you like multi-layered plots, plot twists, and quirky main characters.