Here's what we're reading in 2026 — one book a month, each one discussed on the podcast. Read along with us!
January
Twain's landmark American novel follows Huck Finn and Jim, a man escaping slavery, as they raft down the Mississippi River. One of the first major novels written in vernacular English, it is by turns an adventure story and a sharp satire of antebellum Southern society.
February
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, James reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the enslaved Jim — a harrowing, darkly funny retelling that stands as a major novel in its own right.
March
The author of Underland journeys to Ecuador, India, and Canada to ask a transformative question: are rivers living beings? A revelatory work of nature writing that reshapes how we imagine rivers — and life itself.
April
Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, Robinson's modern classic tells the story of sisters Ruth and Lucille, raised in the remote lakeside town of Fingerbone by a succession of relatives — most memorably their eccentric, drifting aunt Sylvie.
May
Rare book dealer Rebecca Romney goes in search of the women writers who inspired Jane Austen — a page-turning literary adventure and a meditation on reading, collecting, and what books can teach us if we let them.
June
Homer's epic poem follows Odysseus on his ten-year voyage home from the Trojan War — past monsters, sorceresses, and vengeful gods — to reclaim his kingdom of Ithaca and reunite with his wife, Penelope.
July
In 1883, Emma M. Lion returns to London's eccentric St. Crispian's neighborhood to claim her childhood home, Lapis Lazuli House. Told in wry journal entries, this beloved series opener is a comedy of manners full of scheming relatives and memorable neighbors.
August Currently reading
From the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Remains of the Day: Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy grow up at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school in the English countryside — a place of mysterious rules whose secret gives this beautifully atmospheric novel its extraordinary twist.
September
The #1 New York Times bestseller from the MSNBC host: a wide-angle reckoning with how the battle for our attention has reordered our politics, our society, and our inner lives.
October
Radcliffe's 1794 novel is the quintessential Gothic romance: orphaned Emily St. Aubert is imprisoned in the crumbling castle of Udolpho by the scheming Signor Montoni, amid seemingly supernatural terrors and sublime Italian landscapes.
November
We're still choosing this month's book — check back soon!
December
In 1934, painter Christiane Ritter left her comfortable life in Austria to spend a year with her husband in a small hut on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen. Her rediscovered classic memoir is a mesmerizing account of finding freedom and peace in the polar night.