After stepping into 2026 with a strong start to my reading journey in January, I thought I had already outpaced myself by finishing fourteen books in a single month. That was so ambitious. Surprisingly, I drowned myself in a stack of great books in February and boosted with reading energy I did not see coming.

Reading 20 Books in February

I read 20 books this month. Twenty. Even typing that number still feels unreal.

When I am immersed in reading, I rarely track the numbers of books that I read. I also don’t bother by the number of pages I read in a day. The counting only happens at the end of the month or year.

The first half of February carried the same literary fiction mood that shaped my January. I stayed in that comfort zone, moving from one beautifully written story to another.

At the same time, nonfiction remained part of my rhythm. I never set it aside. And somewhere between those genres, something unexpected happened. The novels I picked up began echoing the ideas I had gathered from nonfiction. They spoke to each other.

When Fiction and Nonfiction Meet

This month. I read The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, where one of the narrators is a fig tree. As I followed its voice, I kept thinking about ideas I had encountered in The Wisdom of Tears, The Hidden Life of Trees, and Entangled Life. The memory of trees. The intelligence of ecosystems. The intricate ties between humans and the natural world.

Those concepts resurfaced with emotional depth. The novel felt like a continuation of my nonfiction reading, expressed through story, character, and feeling.

Then I picked up Remarkably Bright Creatures and met a giant Pacific octopus with its own point of view. Immediately, I thought of Secrets of the Octopus. The intelligence, the sensitivity, the awareness beyond the human perspective returned to me. Nonfiction had given me the framework. Fiction gave it personality and texture. Together, the experience felt fuller and more dimensional.

Reading this month felt like filling in a coloring book. The outlines were already sketched by the knowledge I had accumulated over time. Then, fiction brought the colors. The image that once felt structured became vivid and alive.

Beyond that, I sensed a deeper connection forming across species, across disciplines, across genres. I remembered a line I once heard: nonfiction is for information, fiction is for imagination. February showed me how deeply intertwined those two truly are.

Turning Toward the Present: Politics, Technology, and Our Attention

In the second half of the month, my reading direction shifted. I felt pulled toward nonfiction again, especially books that speak to the world we are living in now, even if they were written years ago.

I read How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak, and it felt painfully relevant. I also picked up Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger. Recently published in English, it required more patience from me because of the theoretical and techinical terms used in the books. It challenged me in ways that demanded attention rather than speed.

Then came Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis, which explores the transformation of capitalism and the way our attention has become a commodity.

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My February’s reading journey felt balanced.

I moved between fiction and nonfiction. One deepened my understanding of the world. The other expanded my sense of possibility within it.

Reading 20 books is a number I am proud of. But the real highlight of February was the way those books began speaking to each other. That connection is what made this month stronger than I ever expected.