Happy WITMonth 2026!

It never ceases to amaze me just how long WITMonth has been happening. With my limited online presence these days, it's even more surprising to see how people celebrate WITMonth. I was invited to join in on an Instagram WITMonth TBR reading challenge of sorts (a monthlong book "passport"; it's cute!), and as usual I'm tagged in many, many posts as the month begins. As in the past few years, I feel somewhat detached from it all. My own reading continues as it always does, of course, but there's a feeling of hollowness in the performance. I don't want to show off my beautifully curated TBR. I don't have a beautifully curated TBR, or any clear sort of TBR to be perfectly honest.

So what does WITMonth look like to me, in 2026? I touched on this a bit in my last post, but here are some more details:

• I'm slowly working my way in updating a new releases list for US-based publications from 2025 through August 2026, on the WIT Bookshop.org page. I still have a lot more publishers and books to add, but if you're curious, feel free to check it out.
• I haven't yet updated womenintranslation.org, because life is a lot. I hope to get to it soon, but no guarantees.
• I might upload a post or two on Instagram, but I have found myself tired of the overly visual format. I want to be able to share thoughts and write words, and that's increasingly difficult in a medium that favors a certain type of brevity and imagery. I'm not going to make every photo into a video, or add a musical background. Why would I do that?
• I plan to read books. I'm already reading books, in fact. I'm sort of always reading at least one or two or five books by women writers in translation.
• I might write a post or two here, too. I feel like I'm testing the waters in terms of my own ability to wade back into this pool. There's a lot of weight here that I have no intention of discussing right now, but it's not as easy as it might sound.

I'm currently reading three books by women in translation:

1. Tangled Roots by Maria Turtschaninoff, translated from Swedish into Hebrew by Dana Caspi (the English edition is translated by Annie Prime). I am enjoying it quite a bit, reading it slowly and appreciating its warmth and depth.
2. All the Women Inside Me by Jana Elhassan, translated from Arabic into English by Michelle Hartman. This has been my "train" read for the past few days, and I'm finding it a deeply sad, unsettling book. The very meditative, aimless style feels a little distracting to me, but I understand what the book is trying to do.
3. Fire From the Sky by Moa Backe Åstot, translated from Swedish by Eva Apelqvist. This is my "bedtime" book, since it's on my eReader and I can read it in an otherwise dark room without waking the baby. It's a nice reminder of what I always say, that there is not WIT genre. Women in translation writing all sorts of types of works exist across every genre, age designation, plot type, etc.

Will I finish all this month? Who knows. Will I read other books? Almost certainly. Will it be nicely presentable? Almost certainly not. But... WITMonth can live without me, at this stage. I'd rather just read some good books.