My 2026 Reading List: Update

So after getting through the first four chapters of “The Master and Margarita” (about 50 pages in), I decided to drop it from my reading list. While the premise of the book was interesting (The Devil visits Soviet Moscow), I find the dialogue, environment descriptions, and character actions quite hard to follow. I will shelf this book and replace it with William Peter Blatty’s “The Exorcist”. It’s a similar length, so it will fit in nicely to my 3,000 page reading goal. Here is the updated list:

  1. The Stranger - Albert Camus

  2. The Tartar Steppe - Dino Buzzati

  3. The Magician - Somerset Maugham

  4. Piranesi - Susanna Clarke

  5. The Plague - Albert Camus

  6. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

  7. The Castle - Franz Kafka

  8. Moonchild - Aleister Crowley

  9. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty

  10. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy