What we've been reading: March 2026

Welcome to our monthly reading-round-up for February 2026.

This is the place where we gather highlights from what the Lighthouse team have been reading each month. You can check out round-ups from previous months and years amongst our book lists.

Zozan

• Empire of the Senseless – Kathy Acker. One of Acker's anarchic and experimental novels. With its fragmented narrative, harsh language, and political tone, it creates a disturbing but thought-provoking world about empire, violence, and identity. And, questions power structures by dissecting language itself. I kinda do not want this end.
• Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation – Jonathan Lear. One of the books I recently finished. Lear discusses the concept of ‘radical hope’ through the experience of the Crow Nation's cultural devastation: What does it mean to hope at a time when the world as we know it is collapsing? After finishing this book, I continued reading about the idea of ​​hope and politics from different scholars(more academic)
• Open Veins of Latin America – Eduardo Galeano. A classic text that recounts the history of colonialism and capitalism in Latin America. It powerfully reveals how the region's natural resources were systematically exploited by the West.
• Black Feminist Thought – Patricia Hill Collins. One of the fundamental texts for considering the intersection of race, class, and gender. It offers a very strong theoretical framework for feminist thought. I started this book after reading Françoise Vergè's Decolonial Feminism. My mind was still stuck there, and it made me feel that I cannot make any theoretical contribution without touching on feminism.
• The Museum of Unnatural Histories – Annie Wenstrup. I've also returned to poetry lately. Wenstrup's poems establish strange but fascinating connections between nature, the body, and history.
• Saints of Little Faith – Megan Pinto. Calm yet deeply heartfelt poems about faith, fragility, and the small miracles of everyday life.
• Return – Emily Lee Luan. Very subtle poems revolving around language, belonging, and the experience of migration. Luan's poems carry a quiet yet intense emotion; she beautifully captures the fragility of language as she reflects on memory, family, and identity.
• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy. A layered novel about memory, family, and social class. Roy's language can extract profound emotions from even the smallest details.

Nic

• My First Book - Honor Levy. A debut collection of satirical short stories defining a social-media saturated Gen Z, whose cultural reference points and relations are heavily mediated by culture wars and increasingly self-referential memes. This all makes for highly addictive, maximalist, fast-paced, tongue-and-cheek fun all the while offering deft commentary on the post-internet conditioning practically all of us, at this point, undergone! Would highly recommend!
• Human Capital: The Tragedy of the Education Commons - Guy Standing. Standing offers a powerful critique of 'the education industry', laying out the historical trajectory that led to the privatisation of higher education today - lots of interesting segments on political economy and the consequential ideologies it has produced in us! This serves to remind us that it was not always this way and, most significantly, that it need not continue be this way either. In its place, Standing proposes that we revive and reform the higher education system into - what he has famously re-claimed the coinage of - a part of 'the commons': a publicly shared resource through de-privatisation and re-democratisation!

Teddy

• Night Night Fawn - Jordy Rosenberg. I can already tell this will be one of my books of the year! Jordy writes an ‘autobiography’ of his mother, a Zionist and transphobe, as on her death bed she reflects on her ‘daughter’, her husband, her friendships, and her short stint in Israel. A satirisation of right wing perspectives for the age!
• Cataract by John Berger (illustrated by Selcuk Demirel). A gorgeous essay on Berger’s cataract surgeries, and the restoration of his version, Berger reflects on how essential light and colour are to human experience.
• A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre. A gorgeous character study of a mentally ill woman, told through the perspective of the mysteriously named ‘Narrator’.

Pao

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers (re-read) - I adore this book and its gentle philosophical musings about the meaning of life. My partner and I listened to this on audiobook during a long roadtrip and it was the perfect soundtrack to relax and think about the sweet things in our lives.
• Your Wish is My Command by Deena Mohamed - I'm on a graphic novel kick and this recommendation from Noor about an Egyptian world where wishes exist was fantastic. Publishers, give us more GRAPHIC NOVELS IN TRANSLATION PLEASE.
• Like Family by Erin White - Queer WASPs make chaos in their perfect Hudson Valley lives because they are bored. This was so satisfying.
• Life After Ambition: A 'Good Enough' Memoir by Amil Niazi - A gorgeous memoir about ambition and parenting. If you liked Desiree Akhavan's You're Embarrassing Yourself, you'll like this one.
• Unapologetic Love Story by Elle McNicoll - A spicy, spectacular romcom about an autistic podcaster who falls in love with a grumpy journalist. This was so good! Our friends Book Lovers are hosting an event for this as part of our First Day Festival. Join them!
• Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg - I have no words for how I felt about this mad book. If you like your main characters morally grey, you'll love this. Lior has so much to say about capitalism and the healthcare system in the US. This should be required reading for anybody who thinks we shouldn't have the NHS!

Christina

• I picked up a proof copy of Opening Night by Sara Baume and absolutely adored it. I have had Baume's books on my TBR pile for a while now and this read shuffled them all right to the top! I just loved her precision of voice, and related to her way of thinking about things. Opening Night is a memoir about Baume's friendship with the artist Mollie Douthit. Baume, a novelist and visual artist, meets Mollie through Mollie's paintings, and they realise they live close to each other and begin going for sea swims and long drives. It's a tender book about the lives of two artists whose work begins to intertwine as their friendship grows. It's published on 2nd July by Granta Books, with beautiful full-colour pictures of Mollie's paintings.
• So after I read Opening Night I couldn't stop thinking about Baume's writing, and so I finally picked up her first non-fiction book,handiwork . It is about making art objects, and grieving, and migratory birds, and it's incredibly beautiful.
• I read Radical Justice by Nani Jansen Reventlow because I had the honour of chairing an event to discuss the book earlier this year. In this book, Nani Jansen Reventlow takes the reader on a journey through what justice really means, and what justice would look like right now - traversing topics like climate justice, reparations and community litigation. It's a brilliant introduction to these subjects, and a generous guide to further action (each chapter ends with further reading, reflection, and action recommendations). You can watch our conversation back if you'd like to get a sense of the book!