It’s June, and that means that we are almost halfway through 2026. It also means that it’s time for me to share some of the books I’ve been reading this year. To this point, I have read about seventy five books. That puts me halfway to my goal of one hundred and fifty books for the year. As usual, I rotate my reading, moving from fiction to nonfiction to drama to graphic novels and comics. This rotation helps me read something each day, and it gives me a respite from difficult reads. For example, I read Timothy Snyder’s Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning back in April. Snyder’s book, while extremely readable, is dense with historical information and the subject matter, of course, is extremely heavy. To offset this, I followed up Black Earth with Geoff Johns’ The Flash: Rebirth and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. So, with that in mind, what have been some of my favorit books this so far this year?

Jan Carson’s The Fire Starters

Back in May, I lead a study travel trip to Belfast, covering identity and the Troubles. Students read Anna Burns’ Milkman and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses for the trip, two novels I highly recommend. While in Belfast, I went into countless book stores, and every time I entered a store, I would ask someone what book set in Belfast or the North of Ireland that they would recommend. More than one said that I should read Carson’s The Fire Starters, and near the end of the trip, at a little bookstore called The Secret Bookshelf I spied a signed copy and picked it up. We were flying out of Belfast in two days, and I started reading The Fire Starters right before we departed, finishing it a few days after I returned from the trip.

At first, The Fire Starters feels like a realistic novel where Belfast itself becomes a character, but the further you get into the novel, it becomes apparent that it is anything but realistic. It’s a mix, for me, of realism and magical realism, an exploration of the history of Belfast and the Troubles wrapped up in a fantastical story with characters linked to mythological creatures such as sirens. Writing about the novel, Claire Kilroy states, “The Fire Starters succeeds in dramatising the simmering volatility of a region which could explode again.” Kilroy’s statement, written back in 2019, seems extremely prescient right now as we see the events unfolding in Belfast right now where, following a an immigrant’s knife attack on an individual, far-right extremists have seized on an opportunity to riot against immigrants and immigration.

I could write more about The Fire Starters, and I did a few weeks ago. Instead of doing that, though, I would recommend reading some other books set either in the North of Ireland or Ireland that I read in preparation for this course and following the course. These include, of course, Burns’ and Kennedy’s novels as well as Burns’ short novella Mostly Hero, Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors, Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane and Other Plays, Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic, Frank O’Connor’s The Big Fellow: Michael Collins and the Irish Revolution, and John Conroy’s informative Belfast Diary” War as a Way of Life which appeared in 1987.

Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s Run on Nightwing

Over the past few years, DC and Marvel have each started releasing smaller, compact comics for $9.99 and $14.99 respectively. Whenever I go to my comic store or to a book store I usually pick up the latest DC Compact Comic, and that’s how I’ve been introduced to comics that I would probably never pick up, including Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow which I thoroughly enjoyed and Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark’s Gotham Central. Thanks to these affordable collections, I also picked up Taylor and Redondo’s Nightwing: Leaping into the Night. Story wise, the series really didn’t offer me much to chew on like Tom King, Gabriel Hernández Walta, and Michael Walsh’s The Visions or King and Eveley’s Supergirl; however, it did provide me with an enjoyable experience, and it highlighted what comics can do as a medium, which led me to read beyond the issues collected in Nightwing: Leaping into the Night to see what Taylor and Redondo had in store elsewhere.

Two issues stand out for Taylor and Redondo’s Nightwing: #87 and #105. These issues sparked my interest because each of them expands our understanding of the comics medium. Issue #87, over the course of the issue, contains one unified image, moving from the first page to the last page in a seamless manner as we follow Nightwing throughout Blüdhaven as he chases after some hired assassins who seek to kill him. It’s an issue that could be presented as a folded image, much like Joe Sacco’s The Great War: July 1, 1916. In issue #105, Taylor and Redando present the entire story from Nightwing’s perspective. Thus, we see the action from a first person point of view, in every panel on every page. It’s something I have seen, of course, in panels here and there, but nothing over the course of an entire issue. We see Nightwing’s reactions to events in the reflections of mirrors, in the bottom of glasses, and in the reflection of sunglasses. This creates an extremely unique perspective for the book that causes me to slow down and really think about what is happening at each individual moment.

There are some many more comics and graphic novels that I would recommend from this year, including Chris Condon and Jacob Phillip’s That Texas Blood: Volume 1, which I reread recently, Leezy Young’s Hello Sunshine, which is an emotional read that tackles depression and LGBTQ discrimination through a horror lens, and Filipe Melo’s Ballad for Sophie, a moving story about history and the cost of fame that really punches you in the gut at the end. There are more texts I could add here, but I will leave it there for now.

Usually, I cover four or five books in a post like this, but today I only covered two. These books show the wide variety of texts I read and why I read diverse texts, both in regard to genre, place, and theme. To end this post, I want to leave you with ten books that I have read this year that I highly recommend. These will be books that I did not write about above.

• Julie Otsuka When the Emperor Was Divine
• Hika Harada Dinner at the Night Library
• Justo L. Gonzalez The Story of Christianity: Volume 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation
• David Diop Beyond the Door of No Return
• Sean Murphy and Matt Hollingsworth Batman: White Knight
• Sofia Samatar The Practice, the Horizion, and the Chain
• Caryl Phillips The Nature of Blood
• Joe Posnanski Why We Love Baseball: A History in 50 Moments
• Stefan Zweig Confusion
• Carol Anderson The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

What books have you enjoyed reading so far this year? What books do you hope to read during the rest of the year? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.