I'm still waiting for my copy of Dave Hutchinson's The Essence to arrive, so am reading some of the shorter works still lurking in The Piles as the mood takes me.  I'm finding I can't read much history or non-fiction at the moment, as present reality is becoming simply too bizarre to handle, so escaping to non-genre fiction seems to be the way to go.  Still a lot of police procedural crime in the mix.

I'm still adding stuff into my intended 2026 TBR list, including a couple of general classics and a couple more re-reads, but it will always be a living document ie a continual work in progress.
 

Surtac wrote:

Still waiting for The Essence, and struggling with the Hinz book, so have started my planned re-read of Le Carre's Karla trilogy with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
 

well there’s a guarantee of a good read!

BGrandrath wrote:

I thought this review of Well Of Shiuan by a fellow BookTuber would be of interest to the group.
https://youtu.be/ZnyELRTkay4?si=hui3HUk0JAL1oRGW

Interesting perspective, and not one I'd really given any thought to previously.  
 

Surtac wrote:

I finished Le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and it was just as good as I thought it woulb be, a most excellent example of its type.

But there was a scene late in the book that threw me immediately back to a memory of a similar situation in the Chanur books. The scene where the mahen hunter captain is being interrogated by the kif and describes his twisted thinking as he tries to keep hidden the secrets he keeps buried in layers of species-specific metaphor and idiosyncratic individual memory.  It was such a striking similarity between the two works that I had to check the publication dates to see which was the oroginal occurrence.

I guess I'd better add a Chanur re-read to the 2026 reading plan.  I wasn't expecting that from reading a Le Carre classic.

 

And it may be time for me to reread TTSS!