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That’s a wrap on the first quarter of 2026! The weather is warmer, everyone is coming out of hibernation, and life is getting busy again, which means less time to read. It was another light reading month, but a great one nonetheless. Let’s get into it.

The Ministry of Time – Kaliane Bradley

• A British government program begins bringing people from different historical periods into the present, assigning civil servants to help them adjust to modern life.
• The story centers on one such pairing: A woman is tasked with supporting a man from the 1800s while navigating the emotional and ethical complications of the experiment.
• As relationships deepen and tensions rise, the novel explores power, identity, and the consequences of altering time in ways that can’t be neatly controlled.

I wanted to love this one more than I did. The premise is interesting and it felt like it had a lot of potential.

But it didn’t quite meet my expectations. The first half was interesting, funny, and gripping; I flew through it, then started to lose interest around the halfway point. That’s not to say the writing isn’t good, it just didn’t keep me motivated to keep reading. In full honesty, I can’t even remember if I finished it or moved on to something else before the end.

That said, I still think it’s an interesting story, and readers who enjoy science fiction or more metaphorical writing might get more out of it than I did.

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness

In my upcoming 2026 releases post, I said this book was one of my most anticipated titles of the year, and it lived up to my high expectations.

Michael Pollan is not a physicist, psychologist, or lifetime consciousness researcher. He’s what I’d call an “exploratory writer”—someone who writes compelling nonfiction about the intersections of humanity, nature, and mind.

You might think this reduces his credibility for a book like this. Why read about consciousness from someone who hasn’t spent their entire career studying it?

But Pollan is upfront about this in the book, and that honesty is what makes it so great. It’s a refreshingly humble approach to a subject even the most respected scientists struggle to fully explain.

As he makes clear in the book, this is because defining consciousness is elusive and difficult, especially from a traditional scientific angle. The “hard problem of consciousness,” he discusses, is that we’re trying to understand it from the inside—that is, it’s our very consciousness that allows us to think about consciousness in the first place.

“Consciousness is the water we swim in, and in our everyday lives, we have almost as little distance on it as fish do of the sea. We can’t ever climb out of the water and stand on its shore.”

But I think the reality of this challenge—and his willingness to tackle it anyway—is what makes this book so incredible. Nonfiction often positions itself as the final word on a subject. Instead, Pollan’s writing feels like an ongoing investigation: a mapping of how scientists, philosophers, and psychologists have approached consciousness so far, where the gaps still are (and there are plenty), and how emerging technologies like AI are forcing us to reconsider our definition of conciousness—and ultimately, its place in our way of being.

“Not knowing can be a source of frustration, but it can also be an opportunity, a spur to deeper exploration, including of one’s own mind. My hope is that this book smudges the windowpane of your own consciousness and serves as a tool to help you fully appreciate the everyday miracle that a world appears when you open your eyes—a world and so much else, including you, a self. A sturdy scientific explanation of how this happens would be welcome. But I’ve found that it’s possible to hold this most elusive phenomenon in our hands while at the same time letting go of the idea that we will ever understand it completely.”

This was a slower read for me, but intentionally so. I wanted to pause and sit with the ideas rather than move quickly through it. I’d highly recommend it to anyone curious about consciousness and interested in going a bit deeper.

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Final Thoughts

Last month, I ended my roundup with a few things that had my attention outside of reading. I find a lot of inspiration in books, of course, but also in other forms of news and entertainment.

• NASA’s Artemis II mission took place April 1–April 10, and it completely took over my life. If you haven’t had a chance, check out some of the amazing photos and videos they took from Orion, like this shot of the total solar eclipse. Incredible!
• Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream released on April 16th, and watching Twitch streamers play this game (specifically, Chris Melberger) has become my new favourite alt reality TV show. The creativity and absurdity is the kind of silliness we all need right now.

See you soon,