Ask HN: What do you plan to read in 2026?

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I'm curious what books, papers, or long-form articles are on people's lists this year. Technical books? New fields? Old favorites?

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I have the memoirs of an acquaintance to read; after living as a homeless amphetamine junkie for 10 years, he managed to raise himself up, got sober, clean, and went back to school.

I followed him as he managed to - through hard work, humility and determination - recover from the lost years of upper senior high he never completed in his teen, to enrolling law studies at one of Sweden's top universities.

He graduated some years ago, and got employed at a lower court, he passed his lawyer bar exam and is now a certified lawyer.

Unfortunately, his book "Uteliggaren som blev advokat" ("The junkie who became a lawyer") is not available in English (yet - I hope it will)

That is incredibly wonderful to hear. Glad they were able to make it through hell.

I have a few books still "in flight" that I started in 2025 that I'll finish. One of those is Parallel Distributed Processing - Volume 2[1] by Rumelhart & McClelland.

Beyond that, one book I'm specifically putting on the "to read for 2026" list is Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach[2] by Russell & Norvig.

Papers? I don't necessarily plan those out way in advance, but one that I know I do plan to read is that new one on Tensor Logic[3] by Pedro Domingos.

[1]: https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/5670/Parallel-Distrib...

[2]: https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/

[3]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12269

I've been meaning to read the AIMA book too. There is a free video lecture course by Norvig himself on Udacity do check them out.

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