The best books to start 2026 with, including 'Crux' and 'Cosmic Music'

SAM DINGMAN: I’m willing to bet there’s a few folks out there listening who resolved to read more books in 2026. But if you’re anything like me, sometimes your best literary intentions are thwarted by decision paralysis.

You walk into the bookstore or the library, you stare at the endless shelves of options, and you don’t know what to pick — it feels like so much is riding on the choice!

Thankfully, The Show’s resident book critic — Mark Athitakis — is here to narrow down your options. He’s put together a list of new titles he’s confident you’ll find rewarding, all coming out between January and March of this year.

First up is "Crux," a novel by Gabriel Tallent. It’s set in the desert region near Joshua Tree, and focuses on two high schoolers who are obsessed with rock climbing. They both come from complicated families, and the story follows their attempts to reckon with their histories as they also reckon with the harshness of the rocks.

Athitakis says one of the things that makes the story feel immersive is the way it uses hyper-specific language from the world of rock climbing.

MARK ATHITAKIS: And doing it very fluidly as well. There's no glossary in the back of the book that explains, here is what this word means. But it becomes very clear over time that to ascend a rock means to complete your climb.

That the crux, and I hope that you don't have anybody listening who will say that I got this wrong, but I believe a crux is kind of a pivot point in a climb about where you are making a decision point about to go in this direction or that direction.

A lot of writers, I think when they succeed, they don't worry so much about hand-holding the reader. They believe that if they are authentic about what they are saying, the reader will catch up with them.

I remember speaking once with the author, Luis Alberto Urrea, and talking about the complexity of talking about the Latinos families that he was describing and how sometimes he would receive criticism from mostly gringo readers and say, it's like, you know, we're here. Do a little work.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I think most people like feeling like they're part of a club. And if you treat them like they're already a member of the club, like, come on, you get it. You understand what's happening.

ATHITAKIS: Right? Well, there's a certain trust of the reader and a certain respect for the reader that comes along with that.

DINGMAN: Well, let's move on to your next recommendation. This is a book by Andy Beta called “Cosmic Music."

ATHITAKIS: “Cosmic Music” is a biography of Alice Coltrane, who, you may know, was the wife and widow of the great saxophonist John Coltrane. And she was an artist in her own right. She put out many albums. She was a piano prodigy growing up in Detroit, but she was a remarkable synthesist of a lot of different genres.

She learned to play harp. She was a pianist. She worked in jazz toward the, in the '70s, and for the rest of her life she was very focused on Indian spiritual music. She became the official guru in herself. She ran her own ashram in California. So she was a devotee and an expert in a variety of different music styles. And I think there's never been a full dress, general interest biography of her work. And this is a very lively, thoughtful, well-researched story of her life.

DINGMAN: That is really exciting, especially since Coltrane is so, I mean, this not to take anything away from John Coltrane, but he is so associated with such a specific type of music, it sounds like Alice was expert in a number of different musical disciplines.

ATHITAKIS: And also that, as the book talks about, John encouraged her in that. John Coltrane was the biggest fan of Alice Coltrane musically, that that you could possibly find. So, yeah.

And the interesting thing that Andy Beta talks about this in the book is that there are very few full interviews with her profile. So you're really building up her story from the ground up, because her story just really didn't get told.

She was actively dismissed as somebody who was respected because she was the caretaker of John Coltrane's legacy, but often condescended to thinking that, well, we're just going to release her albums because, you know, we're doing her a favor.

DINGMAN: Nice to see her finally getting her due. Well, let's go to the next book on your list. I'm going to say the title, and I'm going to ask you to say the author's name because I'm worried I will get it very wrong. OK. The book is called “Call Me Ishmaelle." 

ATHITAKIS: Yes. And the author is, I'm, I'm going to do my best with this as well, Xiaolu Guo.

And she is a Chinese-British author, award-winning author. And as the title suggests, this is Ishmaelle. It is a take on “Moby Dick” from a feminist female perspective.

DINGMAN: Very cool.

ATHITAKIS: It imagines that instead of Ishmael, the narrator in “Moby Dick," it has a young woman who has decided that she is going to leave her home in England and she is going to head to the United States, and she's going to get on a whaling ship.

And I spoke with the author about this, and she had told me about that there are lots of stories about women doing this. Trying to cut out on their own, having to disguise themselves as men. And the thing that is remarkable about this particular novel is that it doesn't necessarily map exactly to the source, though it does have a Captain Ahab-type character, but it is much more engaged in obviously themes of sexism and racism.

And, there's a element of Chinese spirituality where the Ching, the book of changes, plays a major role in the story. So if you are eager to have your understanding of a very complicated, interesting novel, I think of it as the American Bible, you know, always rich for reinterpretation. It is a new way of thinking about the book.

DINGMAN: So you're saying you spoke with Guo about the work.

ATHITAKIS: Yes.

DINGMAN: In that conversation, did you get any sense of how she perceived “Moby Dick”? I mean, you're characterizing it, I think quite accurately, as kind of the Bible of Western literature. Was it a book that she held in great reverence, or?

ATHITAKIS: It was a book that she had great admiration for, and also was a great admirer of just those sorts of 18th, 19th century seafaring tales. She's talked about how one of her inspirations for the book was not necessarily just “Moby Dick”, but also Charles Darwin's “Voyage of the Beagle”, that those sorts of seafaring tales so fascinating, but was struck by the fact reading “Moby Dick” the first time she read it, she read it in a Chinese translation.

She said that the spiritual elements of the book just did not get over, did not translate ... but reading it in English, she was enchanted by it, but also saw that it is a relentlessly, persistently, exclusively male book.

So from the beginning she was thinking, how can I, what would happen if there was a woman on board?

DINGMAN: This also implies that she has read “Moby Dick” at least twice. 

ATHITAKIS: Yes.

DINGMAN: Which is much more than most people can say. So she is qualified, too. 

ATHITAKIS: Yes, I'm only a one-timer.