What’s On My Mind (and My Reading List) — February 2026

Welcome to 2026. I’ll speak for some of us and say that I feel as though I lived through an entire year within the last month. This new year has felt chaotic and frantic in a way that I’ve never experienced in my life. And yet, I still make time to read.

My reading for the next two months will focus on the topics that have preoccupied my mind the most lately — fiction writing and world history.

Researching the Mystery & Thriller Genres

There are few stories I love more than good mysteries. Mystery fiction has been a recent medium for my parents and I to bond in the years since I moved out. And after three years, I am feeling the itch to write fiction once more — this time in this genre that means so much to me.

So, as research, I’m focusing on the recent releases and modern classics of the mystery genre.

• Everyone in This Bank is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson

• The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

• The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

• Anatomy of an Alibi by Ashley Elston

• It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica

World History & Geopolitical Affairs

I’ve been thinking a lot about the United States of America’s territories. The history of the founding states is drilled into the minds of American children year after year. Yet, I feel that the history of these other regions subjected to American rule — Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc. — is less talked about in American schools. So I am taking it upon myself to finally read a work that has long been on my shelf, Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.

I am also going back to another favorite series of mine, The Experiment’s Shortest History series. I’ve acquired quite a collection of these books over the years, and I think it’s about time that I get through the few that have been sitting on my shelf.

• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

• The Shortest History of Greece by James Heneage

• The Shortest History of Europe by John Hirst

• The Shortest History of England by James Hawes

• The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine by Michael Scott-Baumann

• The Shortest History of War by Gwynne Dyer

With the pace of things on the newsletter slowing down a bit, I hope to spend a bit more time digesting these books and giving more critical analyses of them. I’m really proud of my recent piece on Harper Lee’s The Land of Sweet Forever. This is the kind of book criticism I would like to do more of moving forward. And essays like that take time. So I’m giving myself that time. 

Happy reading!

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