WHAT have you finished reading recently? American Lion, Jon Meacham. A biography of Andrew Jackson; The Cat Who Saved Books, Sosuke Natsukawa.

WHAT are you reading now? To Infinity and Beyond, Neil deGrasse Tyson; Chorus of the Union, Edward McClelland; and Heirs of the Founders, H.W. Brands. Clearly I’m in a casual-dating phase at the moment, though things are getting a little more serious with Chorus of the Union. It helps that a lot of the content is basically just a reminder of the men and scenarios I’ve been reading about the last month and a half.

WHAT are you reading next? One of those above, or And There Was Light, a Jon Meacham biography of Abraham Lincoln. I think once I take a shot at Lincoln I need to backtrack and finish off the Founding generation presidents, as well as Polk.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “Books We Are Looking Forward to Being Released in 2026”. This is also the TT prompt for next week, and I’m terrible at the question ever year because I simply do not track upcoming releases. So, I’m mostly going to be trawling amazon’s upcoming releases entries and hoping I see some prospects.

(1) The Crossroads, CJ Box. A new Pickett novel, coming out in February.

(2) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, full cast audio edition. Coming out in late January. I’m currently 2/3rds through Chamber of Secrets and am enjoying it enormously, though it’s weird that Hugh Laurie voices Dumbledore. “I say, Peeves, seems we’re in the soup again. Better leg down into the dungeons and see what’s causing all the rumpus, eh?”

(3) Liturgies of the Wild: Myths that Make Us, Martin Shaw. From this book’s blurb, I think it’s an expansion of Chesterton, Tolkien, and Lewis’ conviction that myth is important for grappling with reality.

(4) Black Baseball in Alabama: Rough Diamonds of Dixie, Shane Earnest. Releasing late January. I’m looking forward to this one because a local player played for Harvard and very nearly got picked up by a professional Boston team decades before Jackie Robinson.

(5) End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, Gord McGill. McGill is the author of Autonomous Truckers, a trucking substack that I follow, and is preparing to release a book at the end of March.

(6) GIRLS: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything, Freya India. India is one of my very favorite substackers. She doesn’t post very often, but when she does it’s dynamite. (Ditto Paul Kingsnorth, who I found through his Abbey of Misrule.)

And now, one book I’ve found solely by trawling:

(7) This Book Made Me Think of You, Libby Page. A widow starts receiving a book and letter a month from her late husband.