My Reading List for 2026

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A photo of a bookshelf with the books listed in the article organized by book height.

I have been pretty much checked during the 2025 holiday break. I had planned to do so many cool Notion things this break (I famously delete all my Notion systems yearly and start from scratch, which is often surprising to our students), but I sat down at my computer on the 26th and had zero desire to be on the computer. I went through a period of real burnout in the fall and my health was seriously impacted. My mind was clearly telling me it was time for a real break. So be it!

So I spent the last couple days of the break auditing my knowledge base. Of course this lead to me reorganizing my office bookshelf, which lead to me reorganizing my closet, which lead to me reorganizing the garage, which lead to me reorg…. Wait, where am I again? Whose knowledge base is this? Who am I again? Good goddess, these periods of rest are confusing!

What are you excited about for the new year? What do you think will be challenging? I pretty much always organize my life about what I need to learn and then what I want to learn. Having completed pretty much all of the requirements for firefighting I’ll ever need this year (I got my Fire Officer I certification and completed the Emergency Vehicle Operator course I needed), I once again find myself having no learning needs and only wants.

This year I came to terms with being on the autism spectrum, so I’ve been consuming a lot of reading on the topic. This week I read Autism Is Not A Disease: The Politics of Neurodiversity by Jodie Hare.

Here’s my reading/studying list for the year. I’ll probably read less than half.

What’s yours? Send me a message on BlueSky if there’s something you’d recommend for me!

  • The Master and His Emissary - Iain McGilchrist
  • Against Progress - Slavoj Žižek
  • Change - John P. Kotter
  • Making Sense of Change Management - Esther Cameron, Mike Green
  • Better Piano: Music Theory - Charles Cornell (course)
  • Doppelganger - Naomi Klein
  • People & Permaculture - Looby Macnamara (re-read)
  • Losing Ourselves - Jay L. Garfield
  • TechGnosis - Erik Davis
  • It’s Not Complicated - Rick Nason
  • How to Solve It - G. Polya
  • Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness - Nicholas Humphrey
  • Man’s Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

Happy new year!