Books We're Reading This Spring
A short, idiosyncratic list from the desks of our editors.
By The Editors · May 6, 2026 · 3 min read
A few things we have actually been reading, as opposed to the ones we mean to. No rankings, no stars, no affiliate links. Just notes.
Madeleine has been re-reading Annie Ernaux — A Man's Place, specifically — and reports that it is, on a second pass, even better than the first. 'It is a hundred pages,' she writes, 'and it does what most six-hundred-page novels are still trying to figure out how to do.'
David is most of the way through Anthony Doerr's new collection of essays, and finds himself reading it slowly, one piece a night, the way one might read poems. He notes that he has started keeping a small list of sentences in the back of a notebook.
Eliza is in the middle of a book about the history of denim, which she is enjoying considerably more than she expected to.
Priya is reading, of all things, a 1962 cookbook by Elizabeth David, and reports that the recipes are mostly beside the point — it is the prose between the recipes, she says, that is doing the actual work.
