Скачать или смотреть 2026 Reading List: 50 Books

This is my Reading List for 2026. Most of the books and many of the authors are new to me, but some books will be re-reads, albeit usually by a different translator from any previous reading.

Also, many books are collections of essays, and I don't plan on reading every essay in each book, but I do plan on reading most of them, and then commenting on two or three in my weekly reviews.

Finally, since this is unscripted and unedited, you'll notice I mumble and misspeak a few times. For example, the Bodleian is a "library" at Oxford, not a university, as I initially say. Also, the name is Denisovich, but I said "Desinovich." Etc.

Here is the list, with title names and authors (or translators). I failed to mention some in the video.


Don Quixote — Cervantes (trans. Grossman)
Characters of the Reformation — Hilaire Belloc
Familiar Studies of Men and Books — Robert Louis Stevenson
The Ego and His Own — Max Stirner
Introduction to Poetry: Commentaries on Thirty Poems — Mark Van Doren
The Moral Fool — Hans-Georg Moeller
The Treason of the Intellectuals — Julien Benda
Half of a Yellow Sun — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays — Augustine Birrell
Chaos Theory: Two Essays on Market Anarchy — Robert P. Murphy
The Occasions of Poetry — Thom Gunn
Selected Essays — G. K. Chesterton
Don Quixote’s Profession — Mark Van Doren
Darkness At Noon — Arthur Koestler
The God of the Machine — Isabel Paterson
The Five Books of Moses: Translation with Commentary — Robert Alter
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis — Lydia Davis
The Myth of Individualism — Peter L. Callero
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt
The French Revolution — Hilaire Belloc
Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie
Addison's Essays from the Spectator — Joseph Addison
The Odyssey — Homer (trans. R. Lattimore)
Selected Essays First Series — Sir Edmund Gosse
Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, 1849–1928 — Anne Thwaite (bio)
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature — Erich Auerbach
Stranger Shores — J. M. Coetzee
The Servile State — Hilaire Belloc
Beowulf — trans. Seamus Heaney
The Road — Vasily Grossman
The Epic of Gilgamesh — trans. Stephen Mitchell
Virginibus Puerisque — Robert Louis Stevenson
To Overthrow the World: Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism — Sean McMeekin
The Captive Mind — Czeslaw Milosz
The Reckless Mind — Mark Lilla
Our Lord Don Quixote (from Selected Works, Vol. 3) — Miguel de Unamuno
Intellectuals and Society — Thomas Sowell
Fatal Discord — Michael Massing
The Good Soldier Švejk — Jaroslav Hašek
Selected Writings — T. E. Hulme
Res Judicatæ — Augustine Birrell
The Twilight of the Intellectuals — Hilton Kramer
Ecce Homo — Nietzsche
A Commentary on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo — Thomas Steinbuch
The Bitcoin Standard — Saifedean Ammous
Benedetto Croce Reconsidered — M.E. Moss
The World Turned Upside Down — Melanie Phillips
Encounters: The First Ten Years of Encounter — eds .Spender, Kristol, & Lasky
The Farewell Party — Milan Kundera