2026 reading log, week 4 (+ one week 'til TACOMA release!)

Aram Mrjoian, Justin Taylor, Julian Robles, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, John Updike, Samantha Schweblin, Jessica Treadway, Camille Bordas...

My book, Tacoma, is out in a week and a half! I’ll be doing a book release event at my local bookstore, Literati, in Ann Arbor, and am incredibly excited!

I’ll be “in conversation” with Aram Mrjoian, a great guy and great writer. I’ve had his novel, Waterline, on my TBR pile since it came out, but it kept getting bumped for various reasons. Using the event as the urging to finally dig in… and it’s great!

For our New Years Eve party, my gf made a chocolate dipping sauce for churros for and I’ve been using the leftovers in my coffee as a kind of at-home mocha on the weekends. Paired with my daily morning short story, it makes for a pretty wonderful start to the day.

On Sunday, I had a kinda lazy day and extra treated myself — I added some pistachio liqueur to my chocolate-dipping-sauce-in-my-coffee coffee, for a kind of at-home dubai chocolate coffee, and read my daily story (“Pobrecito” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva) and then almost 100 pages of Waterline. The world has felt extra awful and depressing lately, but this was a beautiful little delight of a respite!

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Did I already say Tacoma is out soon?

MY BOOK TACOMA IS OUT SO SOON, ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10!

You can preorder it here:

autofocusbooks.com/store/p/tacoma

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OK. Here’s the stories I read in the last couple weeks…

the stories I read this week:

Fri. 1/23: “What About This” by Justin Taylor

I really didn’t like this one. Maybe my least favorite I’ve read so far in this year’s BASS. The voice felt a little off-kilter for my tastes, in a way that turned me off instead of pulling me in, and it just didn’t really ring true to me.

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Sat. 1/24: “Third Room” by Julian Robles

This one, on the other hand, also from this year’s BASS, I was into. It, too, brings to mind “off-kilter” as adjective, but in a way that really worked for me.

I feel like I over-use comparisons to Brian Evenson for anything uncanny, but this one reminded me a little of Evenson while also feeling like its own thing.

I have a friend who noted that he wanted more of a payoff, more resolution, something along those lines, which I get… but I feel like once I made that Evenson connection kind of early on, I was into it just for the vibes and open to wherever it wanted to take me and I didn’t have much by way of expectations other than that.

It made me curious to read something else by Robles!

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Sun. 1/25: “Pobrecito” by Melissa Lozada-Oliva

I liked this one less than last week’s title story from the collection, “Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus is Alive!” Though that’s really less indicative of anything about this story, and more how much I loved that story.

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Mon. 1/26: “Should Wizard Hit Mommy?” by John Updike

I’ve read almost no Updike. Maybe only “A&P”??

I slept in and then was running a little late this morning. Didn’t have time to slowly, lazily start my day with coffee and a story like I like to most mornings.

But I have a little break in between classes, and I have a couple bookcases in my office on campus full of books — some mine, some grabbed here and there over the years from the free bookcase in the English Department hallway. I have a couple old Updike collections from when the Hopwood Room was cleaning out its library a couple/few years ago, and so grabbed one (Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories) and flipped through, curious. This story grabbed my attention because it is kinda short and also that title grabbed my attention.

It’s one of those “story-within-a-story stories,” with a father telling his daughter a bedtime story. It felt “classic” (it’s from 1959!) but also contemporary. It reminded me a bit of a couple stories by my buddy Derrick Martin-Campbell, especially “Two Dreams.”

I really dug it!

It’s available on the New Yorker online; the title above links to it. I’d love to hear thoughts, if anyone clicks through and gives it a read!

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Tues. 1/27: “A Fabulous Animal” by Samantha Schweblin

Like Lozada-Oliva’s “Pobrecito,” this was the second story in a collection where I loved the first story, and so it maybe had an unfairly high bar. It’s good, but the first story, “Welcome to the Club,” which I read last week, is still lingering in my mind and this one I’ve already mostly forgotten.

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Wed. 1/28: “An Early Departure” Jessica Treadway

This one is somewhere in the middle of my mental rankings of BASS stories I’ve read so far. It didn’t really work for me… but there are a couple of pretty great moments and ideas, and I did find the end affecting.

It lost me pretty early though. It does this thing where it sets up the present action of the story — narrator gets invited by her niece to come visit her in NYC — but then it kinda retroscopes (is that the word I want? I think so, though it is giving me little red squiggles under it…?) out and back and gives us all this backstory. “Show don’t tell” is a bullshit rule, but there’s so much “telling” in this story, I never really fully engaged.

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Thurs. 1/29: “One Sun Only” by Camille Bordas

This book was released on Tuesday and I was super excited to pick it up. I’ve been looking forward to it!

And: another leadoff story in a new hardcover short story collection, another banger.

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Fri. 1/30: “Most Die Young” by Camille Bordas

This story is really solid, but I liked it less than “One Sun Only.” It kinda just felt like a “New Yorker story,” which I don’t totally know what that means but ultimately results in a story that I recognized as pretty great but it didn’t really emotionally affect me.

Even with this story hitting me less hard, this collection is in the strong early lead for story collection of the year.

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Here’s something I wrote this week:

I wrote a little essay about Tacoma, which I might try to pitch a place or two and get published to accompany the book’s release, or maybe I’ll just publish it here on the blog next update. Here’s its opening:

How Much Does Size and Effort Matter?

My next book, Tacoma, is out soon. Hell, by the time you’re reading this, it might already be out. I hope I enjoyed its release (I’ll be doing a reading at my local bookstore the day of!), and that it has been finding some readers, and I hope they’ve been enjoying it.

But right now, in this lead up to the book’s release, I’ve been on the receiving end of a good number of well wishings. “Congrats!” friends text, and reply to social media posts, and say in person when it comes up. “That’s so exciting!” they compliment.

And it is exciting! I’m proud of the book. I think it might be the best thing I’ve written. It is definitely the goofiest, it has an energy I think is excitingly different from anything I’ve written before, it is almost certainly the most fun. It feels like I “pulled off” something I probably couldn’t have as a writer in the 20+ years before this. I’m excited about all that. I’m incredibly proud of the book!

And yet.

My response to almost every congratulations is to downplay. “It’s really short,” I demure, like that makes it count less. “It’s a really small press,” I say, even though the press is one of my current favorites, big or small. “I wrote it really fast,” I sometimes add and sometimes don’t, but almost always at least think, like how long it took is indicative of quality.

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Thanks for reading.

Any fave reads of your own this past week or two?

—Aaron

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