Constant Reader discussion

Here it is - the list of nominations for July - December 2026. (Note: if the list is too long to fit in one post, it will be broken into two parts.)

You may vote for up to six selections from the list. Anyone who is interested in participating in the Reading List discussions is eligible to vote.

As most of you know, in the past you submitted votes via direct message on Goodreads. With the elimination of that avenue, Matt and I discussed potential ways to improve the voting process. One of our goals is a reduction in tie votes that need to be broken. Matt’s research found a free web tool that allows rank-order voting in systems like ours, where multiple votes are submitted. We think that will reduce (and hopefully eliminate) the ties. We’ll test it with this round of voting for Reading List and Classics Corner and gather feedback afterward.

The poll is available now at https://www.rcv123.org/ballot/6P9ChRr... . You should find a list of all the nominations (in random order). You just drag your top 6 to the selection area (in order of preference). Because this tool doesn’t accommodate the descriptions we’ve relied on in the past, I’ve included them below. Voting will remain open until Sunday, May 10, at midnight unless someone lets me know they need more time.

If you see any mistakes in the list, please let me know as soon as possible.

Kaveh Akbar – MARTYR!

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others. 331 p.


John Boyne – ALL THE BROKEN PLACES

This is a sequel to THE BOY IN STRIPED PAJAMAS. It is about Gretel Fernsby who at age 15 went into hiding along with her mother to escape being connected with her father who was the commandant of one of the Nazi extermination camps. The book starts in London in 2020, where Gretel now lives at age 91. It alternates between the present in London and Gretel’s past, following her from 1946 to 1953 to 1970. It is a powerful book enhanced by Boyne’s wonderful writing. 383 p.

George Saunders – A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN

Combines the full text of several classic Russian short stories with the author's reflections on how they work at the level of sentence, scene, and structure. Each chapter presents a story—by writers like Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol—followed by (or interspersed with) commentary that tracks the reading experience in real time. Rather than offering formal criticism, Saunders focuses on how our attention moves, how expectations are set and disrupted, and how small stylistic choices accumulate into emotional impact.

The balance between primary material and commentary sets a good pace, and the emphasis on craft pushes the reader to explore why certain passages land as they do. It’s a book that encourages readers to slow down and consider authorial choices, while also enjoying the original stories at their own level. 403 p.

Carmen Maria Machado – IN THE DREAM HOUSE

A unique memoir that examines an abusive same-sex relationship with a focus that is both precise and formally inventive. The book is structured as a series of short, self-contained chapters, each adopting a different narrative lens—drawing on genres like folklore, true crime, classic horror, and literary criticism—to approach the same set of experiences from multiple angles. This approach allows Machado to explore not just what happened, but how memory is shaped, recorded, and sometimes distorted.

At its core, the book is concerned with the gaps in cultural narratives around abuse, particularly in relationships that fall outside mainstream frameworks. Machado is attentive to the ways language can both illuminate and obscure lived experience. The fragmented structure reflects that tension, while the prose is carefully crafted throughout, creating a balance between experimentation and readability. 251 p.

Fredrik Backman – MY FRIENDS

A group of teenagers escaped their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion.

Twenty-five years later Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, is determined to find out the story of these figures and goes on a cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. This is an unforgettably funny, deeply moving testaments to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art. 488 p.

Molly Fisk – WALKING WHEEL

Newlyweds Phoebe and Miles journey from Oregon to California. In quiet poems building a world of intimacy in alternating voices. From sawing timber, turning the heel of a sock, and measuring a pie's baking with verses of a song, through sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, the couple's first year of marriage working side by side is given in unexpected detail. Tender, funny, erotic, and surprising, Fisk brings a measure of balm and solace to our often fraught, overwhelming times. 160 p.

Jennifer Coburn – THE GIRLS OF THE GLIMMER FACTORY

This is the story of two girls who were friends when they were children in Munich. Hannah is a Jewish girl who ends up in the “model” concentration camp, Theresienstadt. Hilde is a good German Nazi girl who works for the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment. Her greatest ambition is to become a film director like Leni Riefenstahl. Hilde ends up in Theresienstadt as an assistant to the director who is making a film at the camp. The purpose of the film is to show how good life is for the Jewish people. The two former friends run into each other at the camp, but what we learn about their lives before this meeting is what is important. The author did extensive research about Theresienstadt and it shows! 435 p.


Lauren Groff – ARCADIA

Ridley Stone was celebrated as the very first baby born in a newly formed commune in upstate New York sometime in the sixties. Weighing in at a little over 3 pounds, everyone in the Arcadian community knew him as Bit. Lauren Groff's wonderful novel follows Bit through his life, first as a child growing up in the commune, then as an adult living in New York city after the collapse of Arcadia, and finally coming full circle to care for his ailing mother in the rural area of his childhood. The book explores themes of family and community relationships, love, nurturing, nature and the essence of personal freedom. 291 p.


Tayari Jones – KIN

“My first word was ‘mother,’ spoken out loud and with texture. MOTHER.” Thus begins this beautiful novel about two motherless girls, Vernice and Annie, who grow up together in the Jim Crow South. Although they are fated to live two very different lives, they maintain an unbreakable bond. The idea of what it truly means to be kin is the very heartbeat of the novel. “I don't believe that blood makes a family; kin is the circle you create, hands held tight." 368 p.


Anne Enright – ACTRESS

Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter Norah retraces her mother’s celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother’s and her own.

Katherine began her career on Ireland’s bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London’s West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a star turn, with young
Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, her grip on reality grows fitful and, fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime.

Her mother’s protector, Norah understands the destructive love that binds an actress to her audience, but also the strength that an actress takes from her art. Once the victim of a haunting crime herself, Norah eventually becomes a writer, wife, and mother, finding her way to her own hard-won joy. Actress is a book about the freedom we find in our work and in the love we make and keep. (From the Goodreads description) 264 p.


Chris Cleave – LITTLE BEE

The book begins in an immigration detention centre where Little Bee, a 16-year-old Ibo girl from Nigeria, has spent the last two years honing skills that point back to horrific past events and forward to a hoped-for future. Making herself look unattractive to men is the first of several mysterious threads that Cleave slowly winds in. Learning the Queen's English (from the quality broadsheets only, she specifies) has a more obvious relevance. "Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come here to talk to you about the bright African colours." (From the Guardian)
“An effective story of human triumph” (The New York Times Book Review) 266 p.


Julia Phillips – DISAPPEARING EARTH

One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the north-eastern edge of Russia, two sisters are abducted. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.

Set on the remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth draws us into the world of an astonishing cast of characters, all connected by an unfathomable crime. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty – densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska – and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.

In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer's virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel provides a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.
Beautifully written, thought-provoking, intense and cleverly wrought, this is the most extraordinary first novel from a mesmerizing new talent. 312 p.

(Page 2 of Nominations)

Jenny Offill – DEPT. OF SPECULATION

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.

Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page. 179 p.


Ben Lerner – TRANSCRIPTION

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record. 144 p.

Caro Claire Burke – YESTERYEAR

To conservative vloggers — and many of her millions of followers on social media — Natalie Heller Mills is living the “true American dream”: Pregnant with her sixth child, she purports to spend all day frolicking on her organic farm in Idaho with her perfect kids, her cowboy husband and the flock of chickens she calls her “ladies.” Then one morning she wakes up and finds herself in the mid-19th century, where her cosplay life becomes a gritty, grueling reality. It’s “an ingenious, exquisite, be-careful-what-you-wish-for,” our reviewer wrote.
From NYT “Best Books the Year (So Far)” 400 p.

Daniyal Mueenuddin – THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES

In his first novel, Mueenuddin weaves a tale of class conflict and ambition in Pakistan, focusing on members of a wealthy clan and those who serve them. Some are strivers who find that corruption, violence, tragedy and even love get in the way of their dreams; others occupy powerful perches already and are disinclined to share them. It’s epic in scale, but “the magic in ‘This Is Where the Serpent Lives’ is the up-close work,” our reviewer wrote.
From NYT “Best Books the Year (So Far)” 368 p.

Fintan O’Toole –WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF MODERN IRELAND (nonfiction)

A quarter-century after Frank McCourt’s extraordinary bestseller, Angela’s Ashes, Fintan O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, continues the narrative of modern Ireland into our own time. O’Toole was born in the year the
revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity.

Weaving his own experiences into this account of Irish social, cultural, and economic change, O’Toole shows how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a Catholic “backwater” to an almost totally open society. A sympathetic-yet-exacting observer,
O’Toole shrewdly weighs more than sixty years of globalization, delving into the violence of the Troubles and depicting, in biting detail, the astonishing collapse of the once-supreme Irish Catholic Church. The result is a stunning work of memoir and national history that reveals how the two modes are inextricable for all of us. 570 p.

This is a great list! I used the new poll, which was easy to do. I have read 4 of the books - all of which I liked, but I generally vote for books I have not read, so I voted for books that were new to me.

GoodReads links, for anyone that wants them:

MARTYR!
ALL THE BROKEN PLACES
A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN
IN THE DREAM HOUSE
MY FRIENDS
WALKING WHEEL
THE GIRLS OF THE GLIMMER FACTORY
ARCADIA
KIN
ACTRESS
LITTLE BEE
DISAPPEARING EARTH
DEPT. OF SPECULATION
TRANSCRIPTION
YESTERYEAR
THIS IS WHERE THE SERPENT LIVES
WE DON’T KNOW OURSELVES: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF MODERN IRELAND

spoko wrote: "GoodReads links, for anyone that wants them:

MARTYR!
ALL THE BROKEN PLACES
A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN
IN THE DREAM HOUSE
[book:MY..."

Thanks, Matt!

Ann D wrote: "This is a great list! I used the new poll, which was easy to do. I have read 4 of the books - all of which I liked, but I generally vote for books I have not read, so I voted for books that were ne..."

Thanks for the feedback on the new polling process, Ann! I'm glad to hear it was easy to use.

spoko wrote: "GoodReads links, for anyone that wants them:

Thanks Matt. That's very helpful to me.

Thanks Lynn and Matt. The voting was very easy and the book links were great!

Done!

Yes, I like this way of voting!

That is an easy way to vote. Thanks for setting it up.

It's going to be a lot easier for Matt and me to tally the votes too! I'm glad he found this tool. About time we entered the digital age.... ;-)

I really like the new way of nominating and voting too. Thanks Matt and Lynn.

Done. Thanks Matt and Lynn.

I'm glad to see the votes are coming in quickly already. There's still time for those of you who are still thinking! Voting doesn't close until Sunday night.

I was glad to see that one could click instead of drag, as I can't drag with my laptop.