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UCSB Reads 2026

Longlist of Books Considered by the UCSB Reads 2026 Advisory Committee

  1. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith

  2. Before the Movement by Dylan C. Penningroth

  3. Belonging by Geoffrey Cohen

  4. Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michele Zauner

  5. Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

  6. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vailant

  7. Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration by Reuben Jonathan Miller

  8. How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo

  9. Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer

  10. Mexikid: A Graphic Memoir by Pedro Martin

  11. Mothers, Fathers, and Others by Siri Hustvedt

  12. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

  13. On Freedom by Timothy Snyder

  14. Orbital by Samantha Harvey

  15. Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back by Kate Aronoff

  16. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

  17. Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed

  18. The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

  19. The Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

  20. The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are by Alva Noë

  21. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

  22. The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation's Neglect of a Deadly Disease by Daisy Hernández

  23. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Andrea Zevin

  24. Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimer's Families and the Search for a Cure by Jennie Erin Smith

  25. Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How it Shapes US by Charan Ranganath