October 2026 Reading

Halloween has passed, so here we are in November.  Yes, I’m doing my reading log late.  It’s because I spent 11 hours yesterday in a car.  (And, for the record, even though I do this because my younger son needed some kind of reason besides it being an assignment to do reading logs, I am not actually in school any longer and I don’t care if this being late goes on my Permanent Record.  So there.)

Anyway:  I read ten books in October.  Five of them were audiobooks.  I continue to listen my way through Agatha Christie.  This time, I heard The Hollow, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and The Secret of Chimneys.  All three were good examples of her work, although I expect Roger Ackroyd is one of her most famous.  Hugh Fraser continues to be my favorite reader.  The other two audiobooks were Terry Pratchett:  Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids!  Of the two, I preferred the former to the latter, but both are funny and insightful and 100% worth listening to.

 

Despite my overburdened to-read shelf, some books jump the queue.  The existence of a new Louise Penny novel causes this to happen.  Miss Wolcott’s Ghost was fabulous and I definitely stayed up past my bedtime to finish it on the day it arrived.  While I enjoy all Penny’s books, I do prefer the mysteries to the more political thrillers, so this one was tailor-made for me.  I will take any opportunity to hang out with the citizens of Three Pines, no matter what they’re doing, but if they happen to be solving crime, so much the better.

Another exception:  walking into the bookstore and discovering that there's a new T. Kingfisher.  Daggerbound is awesome and hilarious and wonderful.  What's not to like about a gay romance between a former monk/scholar and a guy trapped in an enchanted sword?  Go read it.

 

One of my church book groups is currently discussing, chapter by chapter, Theology:  The Basics and Theology:  The Basic Readings by and edited by, respectively, Alaistair McGrath.  As a group, we’re not done yet, but I finished the books because I needed to tick things off my list.  The books do exactly what they say they will.  I feel like I have had an introduction to various theological concepts and like I have had a chance to read some primary sources.  McGrath is a lucid writer and explains things well.  I am just not that into theology.  (My personal belief does best when it is allowed to lurk by itself rather than getting examined and dissected.)  (Plus, one of the few tenets of my belief that I can successfully articulate is that God is bigger than my understanding.  This makes theology at best an intellectual exercise and at worst a waste of time.)  I’m just not a fan.  No shade on the books themselves and if you’re into theology, I’m sure it’s a reasonable place to start.

 

Finally, I am getting a jump on my 2027 theme reading.  2027 is the Year of Noticing and Exploring.  I know the theme does not really roll off the tongue, but nonetheless I’m doing it.  In terms of reading, I’ll be learning about how we notice things in the first place and I’ll be reading about various explorers.  In the latter category, I read Anthony Bale’s translation of The Book of Marvels and Travels by John Mandeville.  Sort of.  In the sense that Mandeville probably didn’t exist and has more candidates who could have been him than Shakespeare has (but Shakespeare was real and did in fact write his own works).  The Book is partly a straightforward travelogue and partly… not.  There are miracles and weird creatures and odd happenings all over the place, plus Prester John.  The book was hugely influential in its day, cited by both Chaucer and Shakespeare (yes, I know they lived in different centuries, but that just speaks to the staying power of Mandeville).  The tone is chatty and almost gossipy, down to the “well, I can’t say for sure, but I heard…”  Niche, perhaps, but a fun read.

 

October total:  10

Fall 2026 to date:  19

2026 Year to Date:  101

September 2026 Reading

September is over, already?  (Somebody wake up Billy Joe Armstrong…)  I read nine books over the month.

Six of those books were Agatha Christie audiobooks.  To be specific, I listened to Nemesis, By the Pricking of my Thumbs, And Then There Were None, Towards Zero, Ordeal by Innocence, and The ABC Murders.  Of those, a surprising proportion had sleuths other than Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, although the latter does turn up in the mind of the investigator in one of them.  I have to say that I really like the non-standard investigators, possibly because Christie was not compelled to do the usual schtick with her detectives.  For most of them, because they are re-reads, I remembered who the perp was, but I love seeing how she constructs her plots.  Another shout out to Hugh Fraser, my favorite reader of her work.  And, of course, one for Libby and the public library.

 

I also listened to Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery.  I love Terry Pratchett.  His satire bites even as he continues to look with sympathy on the world at large.  This particular one involves characters stealing horses from the horsemen of the apocalypse, so what’s not to like?

 

Fall means that my various book-involving activities resume.  As a result, I read White Awake by Daniel Hill.  If all goes well, I’ll be reading it again next year with a group.  The subtitle of the book is “An honest look at what it means to be white.”  We white folks don’t understand that we have a culture because we’re good little fishes swimming in it.  We need to learn to recognize it, with all its peculiarities.  This particular book guides us through what it means to be white in the context of Christian faith and talks about how we might come to grips with the wrongs our culture has perpetrated so as to bring us into better relationship with God and each other.  It’s a useful book.

 

My book group is reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.  It begins with a suicide attempt, so that might have folks tune out right away.  That said, it’s ultimately a life-affirming book that asks some deep questions about the choices we make.  And it’s beautifully written.

 

September total:  9

Fall total to date:  9

2026 to date:  91

August 2026 Reading

This month’s photo looks different.  That’s because I finished only one book in traditional format.  I also listened to seven audiobooks because I have been busy with my various craft projects.  (That’s a total of eight books, for those doing the math.)

Is it really eight books?  The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is, as it says on the cover “five novels in one outrageous volume.”  It could be argued that I read twelve books.  But arguing is silly.  Anyway:  I thought I had read all the Douglas Adams novels, but I was wrong.  I had definitely never read Mostly Harmless before and I remembered little of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.  What I liked in this reading/rereading was much the same.  The works are creative, funny, and quotable.  (Plus, that thing about Thursdays is just so absolutely true.)  It all seems like madcap chaos.  But then there was the end.  I had gotten so used to Arthur and Ford somehow surviving that I was unprepared for the ending.  It gave me a bit of an existential crisis, kind of like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  I can just blame August for that (it is the Thursday of months).  Worth the read.

 

The rest of my reading consisted of listening to Agatha Christie novels via the Libby app and my public library.  This time, I listened to The Sittaford Mystery, Taken at the Flood, Dead Man’s Folly, A Caribbean Mystery, Five Little Pigs, Black Coffee, and The Man in the Brown Suit.  Hugh Fraser is by far my favorite narrator.  The more of these books I listen to, the more I am struck by the way they have aged.  The plots, while ingenious, are slightly insane in their complexity.  Disguise is not a feature of modern life.   The xenophobia gets old, even when it is set off ironically by the presence of Hercule Poirot, the very un-English detective.  All of the imperial colonial stuff irritates me.  That said, they are reasonable brain candy for while I work with my hands.

 

August total:  8

Summer 2026 total:  40

2026 YTD:  82

July 2026 Reading

It is theoretically possible that I could finish another book today, but given that the ones I have in progress are long and I’ve just started them, I am going to assume I won’t.  That means that my July reading total is 14 books.

 

Nine of those books were audiobooks.  It turns out that when I’m not excited about what’s on TV, I listen to a lot more stories.  I finished out Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest series by listening to Talking to Dragons.  It is as charming as the rest of the books, although I found myself wishing Cimorene had a larger part.  It all wraps up nicely in the end, so that’s good.

 

I listened to three Terry Pratchett books:  The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, and Equal Rites.  As always, I laughed and I thought and I enjoyed.  I am not the only one:  I have had to wait to listen to each book from the library.

 

While I was waiting, I have been listening to whatever Agatha Christie books are available.  That means I am jumping around in her works, reading some late books and some early ones.  It’s interesting.  This month, I listened to Cat Among the Pigeons, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, Cards on the Table, Sleeping Murder, and Elephants Can Remember.  The plots are… complicated.  I mean, fiction is fiction, and I’m willing to suspend my disbelief a good bit, but there’s nothing plausible about evil twins, drug gangs, and the like.  That said, I have fun listening.

 

I read one kid book, cleaned out from my son’s shelf.  I had read it before, but long enough ago that I remembered nothing about it.  It was The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards.  It’s charming, if a little dated in its conception of sex roles.

 

Similarly, the one nonfiction book I read came from the same source.  The Ravenmaster by Christopher Skaife is a memoir by a Yeoman Warder at the Tower of London whose job it is to care for the tower ravens.  It’s chatty and fun and informative.  I’m sure we bought it on a visit.  As a book, it’s perfectly good.  As a souvenir, it is well above a tea towel, commemorative spoon, or fridge magnet.

 

I read three books that count as fiction.  The first is disguised as nonfiction:  Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village by Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper.  It is a send-up of all the tropes beloved by people like me who are addicted to Midsommer Murders and Grantchester and the like.  Quick, funny read and it was a welcome birthday gift this year that I finally got around to reading.

 

Nicholson Baker is the kind of writer who makes other writers cry, I think.  He’s that good.  The Anthologist is about a writer who is supposed to be writing an introduction to a poetry anthology.  There’s a lot about poetry in the book, but a lot more about how the writer’s life is falling apart and any number of brilliant digressions.  It’s not the most plot-driven book ever, but it’s a great ride.

 

Finally, I read Theo of Golden by Allen Levi.  It’s my mom’s copy of the book and I need to mail it back to her.  She loved it.  Like really loved it.  I… did not.  It is Levi’s first novel and it reads like it, in my opinion.  The prose does not flow for me.  For the first half of the book, I was willing to deal with that because I wanted to know what happened.  As the book progressed toward its end, I just got madder and madder at it.  Many people seem to adore this book.  It’s a best-seller.  And it is definitely not my cup of tea.  If you love it, you do you and I will leave you alone to do it, but, for once, I am not having a hard time returning a borrowed book.

 

July total:  14

Summer to date:  32

2026 to date:  74 

June 2026 Reading

Another month of reading is done.  I often read less during the summer than other times of year, for reasons that have been unclear.  However, I am between binges on the TV, so I’ve been listening to a lot more audiobooks while I do my crafts.  This is padding my totals.  In June, I read 18 books.

Of those, nine were audiobooks.  I have specific rules for audiobooks for Reasons.  I need to have read the book the regular way before.  It needs to be a book I don’t find stressful in any way.  And it needs to be available from the library.  Because of that last requirement, I often have to wait a good chunk of time for the books I want to listen to to be available.  This explains why I listened to so many of the Agatha Christie b-list books:  they were available right away.  I listened to Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder at the Vicarage, The Murder on the Links, and The Body in the Library.  All were perfectly reasonably done.  Several of the books were narrated by actors who played Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and Captain Hastings.  The fun in these books is that the plots are so torturously convoluted.  No one in their right mind would commit murder in the complicated ways that these perps do it.  There are disguises, faked deaths, double crosses, spies, and even petty practical jokes.  I will carry on listening until such time as I run out of choices.

 

I finished up the Wee Free Men series by Terry Pratchett with I Shall Wear Midnight.  I can’t say enough how much I adore Pratchett.  I laugh and I think and I feel reassured that at least some people in the world are doing the hard work to make it better.

 

I listened to the next two books in Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest series, Searching for Dragons and Calling on Dragons.  Of the two, I preferred the former to the latter, although I do love the cooperative nature of all the stories, the insistence on powerful women, and the funny bits.

 

I am having so much fun reading fiction, but there is still nonfiction to be read.  One of my book groups at church read The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins.  Obviously, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, so to speak, but I found it fascinating because it traces the history of Christianity in the East and its interactions with Islam and other eastern religions.  It was a great corrective to the western bias we carry around with us.

 

Some folks may remember that I had a Year of Don Quijote a few years back.  My theme years tend to bleed into other years because who stops enthusiasms by calendar date?  Ilan Stevens has written an interesting book in Quixote:  The Novel and the World.  He traces the influence of the book from its inception.  It’s definitely a book for Quijote nerds, but I enjoyed it.

 

As I mentioned last month, my kid moved out and that meant that a bunch of books migrated over to my shelves.  I read three of the kid books this month.  Great Lies to Tell Small Kids by Andy Riley is pretty fun.  I don’t actually recommend telling kids lies.  (My kids’ dad gave them this book, not me.)  As an adult, I enjoyed it.  I would not give it to a kid.

 

One of my sons was obsessed (is obsessed) with rabbits.  There was some trickle-down to my younger son and so It Came from Beneath the Bed! by James Howe came to me.  Howe is the author of the Bunnicula  books and this is a spin-off series “written” by the family puppy.  Hilarious.  Highly recommend.

 

For Reasons, I will not buy any books by Neil Gaiman ever again.  But he does not get any more money from me reading a hand-me-down book.  Fortunately, the Milk was funny and silly and goofily creative.  I just couldn’t read it without thinking about the real life situation with the nanny.  So I don’t recommend buying it.

 

Then I read some regular adult fiction.  Jasper Fforde is a writer I enjoy.  I was delighted to find a book of his that I had not yet read.  The Constant Rabbit is a little too true to be comfortable reading.  We live in racist times.  This satire doesn’t exactly land.  Although I think we do need to be reminded that we can’t be good people and go along with oppressive systems.  Of course there are funny bits in the book, but mostly the feeling I was left with was of being disturbed and motivated to fight the power.

 

Yann Martel’s book Son of Nobody is just as creative as you’d expect from him.  There are two narratives going on in the book:  a discovered epic about an everyday soldier in the Trojan War and the dissolution of life of the scholar who pieces it together.  More than half of the book exists in footnotes.  I liked it a lot.

 

I read all the Elizabeth George novels about Lynley.  A Slowly Dying Cause is an okay mystery, but advances the story of Lynley in an interesting way.  Again, the telling of the story is interesting, with diary entries from the victim interspersed with more traditional narration.  I enjoy her characters, especially Havers.

 

Finally, Deanna Raybourn is the best.  I think I told everybody I knew that they should go out and buy Killers of a Certain Age.  The sequel, Kills Well with Others, is just as hilarious and fun.

 

 

June total:  18

Summer total to date:  18

2026 to date:  60

May 2026 Reading

New month, new book report.  In May, I read thirteen books.  As usual, the audiobooks are not in the picture, but neither are the two books I read at my mom’s house while I was visiting.

I suppose I’ll start with fiction, and specifically, those two books.  I arrived at my mom’s house on a Thursday and she invited me to her book group meeting, which was Saturday.  As a result, I read Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt quickly.  It is a wonderful book.  There is love and redemption and interspecies understanding and humor.  We all need some octopus intervention in our lives.

 

The other book I read at my mom’s was Delivering Apple Pie by Bill Reichert.  Bill happens to be one of my mom’s neighbors.  I’ve never met him, but she thinks he’s fab.  His book is pretty fab, too!  It follows a group of characters from the end of World War 2 through the 1960s.  At first, I thought it was going to be one of those sanitized historical fiction books, but it didn’t duck the issues of racism and sexism.  His characters face real obstacles and sometimes triumph and sometimes not so much, but I cared about them all the way through.  Highly recommend.

 

I finished off the Grantchester mysteries by reading Sidney Chambers and the Problem of Evil, Sidney Chambers and the Forgiveness of Sins, and Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation.  I enjoyed them all.  I think, having read the lot now, that I would describe them as stories that happen to have mysteries rather than mystery stories.  The emphasis seems to be on the characters.  Bonus points for a role for Roger Waters and early Pink Floyd?

 

I’ve been thinking about the construction of mysteries lately, so I reread Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side.  It is, like most of Christie’s books, an intricate device.  The story itself is interesting and all the usual suspects show up.  I had forgotten how the book differed from the very entertaining film version with Angela Lansbury, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Kim Novak (check it out!), but the overall mechanisms are the same.  Might be my favorite Miss Marple.

 

I had managed to get to this point without reading any John Grisham.  My husband cleared out a bunch of books and said I’d probably like Ford County, so I stuck it on my shelf and just got around to it.  I had somehow missed that Grisham is a southern writer.  Now I know.  The short stories in this collection are funny and sad and good.  I may read more of his work now!

 

The last fiction I read was Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.  It is a good book, but perhaps not the most cheerful ever, since it posits that humans are pretty much guaranteed to destroy themselves.  It’s not entirely surprising that it is an extremely male book, in that it was written in 1959, but I’m pretty sure the first female character doesn’t show up until about two thirds of the way through.  The idea of the church as the repository of knowledge and the keeper of humanity is not a new one, but the way it is expressed in this book is interesting.  Apparently it’s a classic work of speculative fiction and I see why.

 

In audio, I continue to listen to Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching series.  I finished A Hat Full of Sky and Wintersmith.  I love the Nac Mac Feagles.  I love Pratchett’s conception of witchcraft as mostly noticing and doing the right things.  I laugh.  Go check these books out, now.

 

My younger son moved out at the end of May, which means that he did a big clear out before he left.  The rules of my house are that I get first right of refusal on all books.  (I also got a bunch of my own books back!)  I’ll be reading most of them over the next while, but I stopped what I was doing to read the one picture book I acquired in the process.  It’s called Warning:  Do Not Open This Book! and it’s by Adam Lehrhaupt.  It is a funny and silly variation on the classic The Monster at the End of This Book, which I have read approximately ten gazillion billion times and love dearly.  This version would be a great gift to any little monkeys of your acquaintance.

 

My older son gives me books for all holidays because he is a wonderful human.  For my birthday, one of the books he gave me was Jenny Lawson’s How to be Okay When Nothing Is Okay.  This was amazing, because I was actually considering buying it for myself and it showed up in the mail!  Lawson is hilarious and deep, which is pretty much my favorite combination.  This particular book is about how to be creative when life is difficult.  Spoiler alert:  life is almost always difficult.  Check it out and feel hugged and inspired.

 

The book I got for Mother’s Day was S. Bear Bergman’s Special Topics in Being a Human.  This book is super useful in these difficult times.  I don’t think I know anybody who doesn’t know a marginalized person (or who isn’t one themselves!).  The cultural climate at present is extra terrible for those who are not cis/white/hetero etc. and this book offers useful, gentle, practical advice about how to love and support all humans.  Plus it has cool illustrations.  Check it out.  Deploy it.

 

On to summer reading.

 

May total:  13

Spring total:  42

2026 to date:  42

April 2026 Reading

April is when my birthday is, so naturally I got a bunch of books.  I’ve spent a lot of time recently focused on nonfiction and it is making me happy to read more fiction lately.  I read 11 books this month.

Nonfiction first, to get it out of the way.  I read three books on how to write mysteries.  They’re all good and useful for anyone interested in knowing more about how the sausage is made.  They are:  Mystery by Paul Tomlinson, Writing the Cozy Mystery by Nancy J. Cohen, and How to Write a Cozy Mystery by Nina Harrington.  The only other nonfiction I read this month is Diana Butler Bass’s book A People’s History of Christianity.  I liked it.  Having survived the behemoth book Christianity, the First 3000 Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch (see my report for February and March), Bass’s work seems a lot less complex if no less interesting.  Her aim is different, however.  She organizes things in a much more thematic way and consciously draws in contemporary experience.  Her emphasis is on the way that everyday people have consistently re-formed Christianity in order to meet current needs.  In short, she gives emphasis to the grassroots over the establishment.  Fascinating work that has sparked good discussions.

 

On to the fun stuff.  I listened to one audiobook in April, mostly because the stuff I wanted to listen to had long wait times.  It was Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men, which is absolutely hilarious and everyone should go out and read it or listen to it now.  (I have done both and either way is awesome.)  I also read his book Pyramids because my awesome kid gave it to me for my birthday.  It’s probably not my very favorite of his works, but he is always worth reading.  In this one, I particularly like his sendup of classic philosophy.

 

I read two more Grantchester novels by James Runcie, Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, and Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night.  I have (obviously) been thinking about how mysteries are constructed and the fabric in these is sound.  They’re also fun to read.  There are some surprises for folks who have watched the show; not everything goes the same way in the books!  I expected each book to be a novel, but each one is actually a collection.  Some folks might find that a feature; others not so much.  I intend to carry on.

 

While in a bookstore (I try not to go in to those places; it gets expensive!), I discovered a bunch of T. Kingfisher books that I did not yet own.  I fixed this problem.  I read two of them this month.  Nine Goblins is hilarious and short and charmingly creepy.  Paladin’s Faith is the fourth in the Saint of Steel series and a wonderful spy romance.  I love her strong women.  Apparently, so do hunky paladin types.

 

Finally, I read Leonie Swann’s The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp and Agnes Sharp and the Trip of a Lifetime.  What is not to like about a group of seniors solving crime?  Agnes and her ragtag band create mayhem wherever they go.  The books are fun, well-constructed, and beautifully written.

 

April total:  11

Spring 2026 to date:  29

2026 to date:  29