Top Books First Read in 2026

[Peng]

1. The Complete Maus (Art Spiegelman)
2. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
3. Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories (Herman Melville)
4. Black Beauty (Anna Sewell)
5. Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion (Alan Sepinwall)
6. Lies Hidden in My Backyard (Kim Jin-young)
7. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (David Grann)

[baby doll]

Non-fiction:

• The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Renato Poggioli, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald, 1962)
• The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (D.N. Rodowick, 2nd ed. 1988/94)
• The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Joseph D. Anderson, 1996)
• Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Bence Nanay, 2016)
• Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Murray Smith, 2017)
• Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Carl Plantinga, 2018)

[baby doll]

Novels:

• Bleak House (Charles Dickens, 1852-53)

Non-fiction:

• The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (D.N. Rodowick, 2nd ed. 1988/94)
• The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Joseph D. Anderson, 1996)
• Brecht on Performance: Messkingkauf and Modelbooks (Bertolt Brecht, eds. Tom Kuhn, Steven Giles, and Marc Silberman, trans. Charlotte Ryland et al., 2014)
• The Antihero in American Television (Margrethe Bruun Vaage, 2015)
• Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Bence Nanay, 2016)
• Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Murray Smith, 2017)
• Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Carl Plantinga, 2018)

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• The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Renato Poggioli, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald, 1962)
• Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir (Dan Flory, 2008)
• Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (Daniel Yacavone, 2014)

]