Books of 2026
Here’s a list of what I’ve been reading this year. This is a pinned post — intermittently I update or reorganize it. At the end of the year, I’ll replace this list with a structured table as in my books of 2025 and 2024 posts.
- BZRKR, by Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt, and Ron Garney
- Eloquent Javascript, by Marijn Haverbeke
- Beating Hearts & Battle-Axes, edited by Jay Wolf
- The Burgess Bird Book for Children, by Thornton W. Burgess
- ★ The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler
- What It’s Liked to Be a Bird, by David Allen Sibley
- Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore, by Char Adams
- ★ Across the Universe, by Natan Last
- ★ Monsters, by Barry Windsor-Smith
- Lost Marvels No. 1: Tower of Shadows, published by Fantagraphics/Marvel
- All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1), by Martha Wells
- Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries #2), by Martha Wells
- New Edge Sword & Sorcery #6, edited by Oliver Brackenbury
- ★ Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir
- Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson
- Rogue Protocol (Murderbot Diaries #3), by Martha Wells
Posted on Friday, March 6th, 2026. Tags: books.
Website Status
Two years hence from my last SSL certificate goof, I’m back up after another weekend website mix-up. Thanks to Scott at Laughing Squid hosting for the helpful and patient support. This blog and jimdevona.art are now both on upgraded cloud hosting accounts which should be free of the intermittent outages that affected my previous setup.
Posted on Monday, March 9th, 2026.
Visualizing Publication Timeline
Here is another visualization of my books of 2025. These plots were created with Publications Timeline, an Observable notebook I’ve written as a tool for plotting the publication dates of a list of books or stories. The notebook has various interactive options, but the key use case is visualizing the distribution of items over time.
This example lists books in reading order (click to enlarge):
This is the same list, sorted by publication date:
Posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2026. Tags: books.
Visualizing Books of the Year
My books of 2025 list is complete. In lieu of reviews, here’s an interactive chart to visualize the breakdown. The basic display is a countable bar chart of books by four broad categories. You can split the chart into two or four small multiples by source and/or format. It’s mainly an exercise in creating dynamic charts. Check out the Observable notebook directly for the code and any future updates.
Posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2026. Tags: books.
Spelling Bee Poetry
As a fan of wordplay and crossword puzzles, I enjoy the New York Times’ seasonal Puzzle Mania section. In particular, the two-page Super Mega crossword grid is a mind-magnet that demands attention until complete.
This year, the section included winners from a writing contest based on the Times’ Spelling Bee game, with modified rules to allow for short words and proper nouns. The entries are worth a read regardless of your interest in the game – they are pithy, punchy, and in some cases genuinely poetic. Like many poem forms, I think the limited letter palette is a constructive creative constraint.
Posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2025.
Word Alert: Kraken
I just read China Miéville’s Kraken. The pages were packed with exact vocabulary, both real and aptly concocted. Some of the novel terms I looked up:
- horripilation: goose bumps! (The shared root with horror is the bristling of hair, as with dread.)
- atrament: an inky black substance – such as cephalopod ink.
- plastination: a specimen preservation technique whereby certain tissues are replaced with plastics.
- oneiric: dreamy.
- nous: reasoning, inner purpose, or capacity for perception; common sense.
- aleatory: depending on luck or chance.
- fylfot: a bent-arm cross symbol; a swastika.
- alterity: otherness; the state of being “altered.”
- maundered: wandered aimlessly (on foot or perhaps in speech).
- hecatomb: a mass sacrifice, especially of 100 cattle. (Gruesome related bonus word from an unrelated Wikipedia rabbit hole: tauroctony, the sacrifice of a bull as depicted as a religious icon. Humans are weird!)
- shabti: Egyptian statuette intended to act as a servant to royalty in the afterlife. (My favorite character in Kraken was Wati, the revolutionary union-organizing body-hopping shabti.)
Kraken is an obvious work of fan service to word nerds like me. The magic of ink and paper and words is literalized through the nonstop mayhem and imagination of the plot.
Posted on Friday, December 19th, 2025. Tags: words.
Words of the Week
A few spells I overheard in recent wanderings through the hinterlands of the written world:
- sepultured: buried. (Alternate spelling of sepulcher.)
- brio: vigor, vivacity, verve. (Thanks, MW, for an alliterative definition.)
- tath: manure, or a field enriched by it.
- condign: deserving or appropriate.
- rhyton: a horn-and-animal-shaped drinking vessel/funnel from antiquity.
- parlous: perilous.
- psaltery: a harp-like stringed instrument.
Stand by for another quiver full of freshly-fletched vocabularrows soon: I’m reading China Miéville’s Kraken right now, and it’s rich with specific diction.
Posted on Friday, December 12th, 2025. Tags: words.
November Word Alert
Eight new-to-me words I recently encountered:
- hebdomadal: “a rare and curious term” for weekly; a hebdomad is a group of seven [days].
- descanted: to descant is to sing or play a musical counterpoint.
- hortatory: of prescriptive or persuasive speech; language that exhorts.
- meed: an old term for one’s pay or due.
- fils: French for son; appended to a name to distinguish a son from a father, similar to junior (but perhaps in cases where no such suffix is given as part of the name).
- entente: a shared understanding or intent, especially in a geopolitical sense. (See also the more familiar détente.)
- apopthegm: alternate spelling of apothegm: an aphorism or wise saying.
- ambit: scope or extent; perhaps literally describing the route of a patrol but today more likely to denote the jurisdiction of an office.
Posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2025. Tags: words.