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

February and March 2026 Reading

For Reasons, I have lumped together my February and March reading and I’m posting it before March is over because there is no way I’m finishing another book today.  It’s my reading log and I make the rules.  One of which seems to be that I have to keep keeping one even though I no longer have to do it to keep my kid on track with his.  Anyway:  I read or listened to 14 books in the last two months.

Audio first.  I finished out the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander by listening to Taran Wanderer  and The High King.  The former was a much better book than I remembered.  I have a feeling it has to do with where I am in my life more than the book itself.  It’s always a challenge to figure out who we are, which is what that book is about.  The second one is about what happens when it’s time to be an adult, when we can’t rely on our heroes any longer.  It is, of course, also inspiring.

 

Then I listened to Jean Ferris’s Once Upon a Marigold.  It’s a funny and satisfying fairy tale with a runaway, a kind troll, an evil ferret, and more.  Love triumphs.

 

Walter Moers is probably more creative than is allowed.  The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear is hard to describe because it just has so MUCH in it—a carnivorous island, a headless giant, the headless giant’s head as landscape, a genius with multiple brains, a dimension covered in carpets, pterodactyls that perform last minute rescues, and I have hardly got started.  It’s a great ride.  My kids loved it when they were younger and yours might, too.  (I mean, I still love it, so…)

 

Finally, I listened to Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede.  This is perhaps the most feminist revision of fairy tale ever.  Don’t want to marry a prince just because you’re supposed to?  Run away to the dragons!  Hijinks ensue.  And the happy ending is not a marriage.  I am impatiently waiting for the next book to be available at the library.

 

Various reading schedules for different church groups or independent studies had me finishing up a ton of nonfiction around Christian topics.  The big achievement was finishing Diarmaid MacCullough’s Christianity:  The First 3,000 Years.  It is a tome.  Fortunately, MacCullough is often snarky and funny as he describes centuries of Christians behaving badly toward each other and the rest of the world.  On one hand, it’s pretty disheartening to see how much killing has gone on in the name of God, or at least putatively in God’s name.  On the other, I appreciated the continual cycle of renewal as human systems became corrupt and reformers worked to clear the slate and begin again.  I would not say this is light reading, but it was informative and entertaining.

 

Mark Allan Powell’s Introducing the New Testament is a textbook.  It’s informative, of course, but not always the most fun reading.  And, unfortunately, Powell has to spend a chunk of time explaining that the New Testament is a collection of texts that can be read in a variety of ways with a variety of tools.  Even so, I’m sure there are folks out there who think he is a heretic for outlining the textual history behind the collection of works in our current canon.  Spoiler alert:  the authors in the titles are not always the actual authors.

 

God’s Joyful Surprise by Sue Monk Kidd was intended as an interim reading for a program I’m not continuing with, but I read the book anyway.  It came out in 1987 and 1987 me would have been all over it.  It addresses the problems of performative Christianity, the role of women, and other issues.  It was fine, but not life changing and I doubt I’d read it again.

 

(This next one is not nonfiction, but it was for my church book group, so I’m sticking it here.)  James Runcie’s The Road to Grantchester is a prequel to the Grantchester mysteries that may be familiar to many of us through the TV series (hot vicars!  solving crimes!  Woot!).  It delves into Sidney Chambers’s war experience and how that trauma drew him to God.  There was lots to think about and lots to talk about as we discussed guilt, grace, and calling.  Content warning for war.

 

The book we’re about to start talking about in book group is Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things.  I finished early because I got started and then I was done.  I haven’t read that much of his work, but I liked this book a lot.  He tackles the prophets and discusses why they are relevant to our times.  They begin in anger and outrage and eventually end up at the grace of God.  So should we.  It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.  Prophets lead us back to God when things in the world get corrupted.  We need them.  We need to be them.  Let’s get to work.

 

I read one more nonfiction book, which was definitely not for church.  It’s called Unfuck your Habitat and it’s by Rachel Hoffman.  I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes home home.  I am the primary home-maker in my home.  I always want more ideas for how to do that better.  This book was not really targeting me as its audience.  I do, in fact, know how to clean and I do keep a reasonably tidy house.  However, the underlying philosophy that we all have habitats, we all have responsibility for them, and we all deserve to have unfucked habitats is a good one.  I’m all about small habits that make big differences and that’s the general principle here.  This would be a great off-to-college gift for someone who will be in charge of their habitat for the first time.  Oh yeah:  it has swear words in it.  I think that’s kind of a feature, but your mileage may vary.

 

Even the fiction I read this last two months came in big books.  I continue to work my way through Ursula K. Le Guin’s work.  The Unreal and the Real is a selection of her shorter fiction.  I had read some of the stories before, but the one I really wanted to read was “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”  It is a thought experiment for our time and personally, I feel called to do more than walk away and I’m trying to figure out how to do that.  Read it and let’s talk.

 

Her novel Always Coming Home is one of the most interestingly structured novels I’ve ever read.  It’s kind of an anthology of anthropological studies, oral histories, poetry, folktales, and more.  It’s fascinating, rich, and satisfying.  Highly recommend.

 

Finally, I read The Rose Field by Philip Pullman.  It’s the conclusion of The Book of Dust trilogy and continues to follow Lyra’s story.  It’s exciting, satisfying, and well-written.  Go check it out.

 

February and March total:  14

Spring to date:  18

2026 to date: 18

January 2026 Reading

I expected to read more in January than I did.  However, I did finish four books.

Audio first.  I continue to listen to the Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander.  In January, I heard The Castle of Llyr.  It was a better book than I remembered it being from my last reading.  I haven’t said this yet, but the actor doing the reading for the audiobook is really good and I think that contributes to my enjoyment.  My only complaint is one that feels like an anachronism; if the book were written nowadays, I think that Eilonwy would have been a self-rescuing princess.  Of course, I am going to carry on and finish the series.  I love spending time in Alexander’s world with his characters.

 

One reason I don’t go into bookstores very often is that when I do, I buy stuff.  In my defense, finding out that there is a new T. Kingfisher novel is a good reason to buy stuff.  Hemlock and Silver is a fascinating riff on the Snow White story.  I love the way Kingfisher writes women who don’t perhaps match societal expectations for how they look.  I also love that the fantasy world of this book is a desert world.  The archetypes play differently there.  The book is scary, but not too scary.  Two thumbs up.

 

Christmas brought me my next Terry Pratchett.  (I will be sad when I eventually run out of new-to-me books, but I will console myself by rereading from the beginning.)  Unseen Academicals is perhaps one of my favorites now.  It has more plot than the average Pratchett.  Plus it’s about the intersection of academics and sports.  I laughed a lot.  The only bad part is that I’m done and I have to wait for my birthday for the next one.

 

After the intensity of the holiday season, I wanted something familiar to read.  It just so happened that I had another edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll on my shelf, this one the 150^th Anniversary Edition with illustrations by Salvador Dalí.  [The illustrations did not illuminate much for me and Dalí was a fascist.  I don’t think he had much feel for the text, myself.]  I will always enjoy some time with Alice and her adventures.

 

January total:  4

Spring 2026 total to date:  4

Year to date 2026:  4

December 2025 Reading

Finished off another year of reading with five books in December.

I continued to listen to Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books.  I would be listening faster, but I have to wait for each one from the library and they are still popular enough that the wait is pretty long.  Anyway, this month I listened to The Black Cauldron.  It is awesome.  There are twists, high stakes, and hard-won triumphs.  I am continually struck by what an efficient storyteller Alexander is.  The book is not long, but it is packed.

 

For Christmas, my mom got me two picture books.  If You Give a Dog a Donut by Laura Numeroff is exactly what you would expect from an entry in this series.  It’s cute and funny and chaotic.  The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen is a great read-aloud (I know because I made my family listen!) with a rapping rhythm to the verse.  Sometimes our blub-blub-blub selves just need a kiss.  (This is not a huge issue, but maybe a little consent-modeling would make the book even better…)  Small children of your acquaintance (or other children masquerading as adults like me) will enjoy either one.

 

Also for Christmas, my son gave me A Grave Robbery by Deanna Raybourn.  This is the latest in her Veronica Speedwell series.  It’s a fluffy good time with plenty of skullduggery and mayhem.  What’s not to like about a feisty Victorian lepidopterist with a hot boyfriend who solves mysteries?

 

Finally, I finished out my Year of Water by reading a book that I maybe ought to have started with, except that I didn’t know it existed a year ago.  Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is a great book about water in the American West.  It’s an older book, but it lays out the issues that still face us in dealing with thirsty agriculture, growing populations, stressed environments, and that perennial human problem, greed.  It’s the kind of book that makes a person (well, me) mad and motivated to make changes.  It’s also an engaging read with great writing, memorable real-life characters, and good flow.

 

December total:  5

Fall 2025 total:  30

2025 total:  80.5

November 2025 Reading

Another month is over.  I read 6 books in November.

The total is a little low because the books I want to listen to via Libby at the library are on hold with waits.  I listened to one book, The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander this month.  It is a favorite of mine.  I’ve read it multiple times, read it out loud to my kids, and now I’ve listened to it as well.  I am currently waiting for the next book in the series to get to me from the library.

 

I mentioned last month that it is frustrating when not all the books in a series have audiobooks.  I read Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken because I couldn’t listen to it.  It’s a fun book and I’m glad I now own it, but I wish I could have listened.  It is a book full of plots and skullduggery and hijinks.  Highly recommend.

 

The new Louise Penny book, The Black Wolf, is good.  Penny’s work has shifted away from cozy murders set in Three Pines and toward high-stakes political thrillers.  She addresses the feelings of her readers in her afterward, saying that she understands that many of us just want to hang out in Three Pines, but that as a writer she needs to grow and stretch rather than write the same book over and over.  I do like the cozier murders better, but I will continue to buy and read as she writes.  This one gets bonus points from me because it is the Year of Water and water plays a central role in the plot (don’t think this counts as a spoiler).

 

Speaking of Year of Water, I read two nonfiction books in that category.  The first was a re-read, Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water.  I remembered it being better than it was, but I think this just means I’ve grown since I last read it.  The book is, in theory, a discussion of the intersection between faith and art.  Mostly it is about being a good artist, which is about being authentic to one’s creative self.  That requires a fair amount of faith, whether conventional or not.  In any case, it was a pleasant few hours of hanging out with a smart person, even if we didn’t always agree.

 

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book, Theory of Water, on the other hand, was a good stretch for my mind.  Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg thinking is different than my own.  I am enriched by the indigenous perspective on pretty much everything.  The European consumer culture is not serving most of us and we need to think better.  Turning to those who understood from the beginning that there was a better way seems plain smart, as long as white folks can manage to let our indigenous cousins take the lead.  White folks have some work to do to repair relationships and restore what we have usurped.  It was a privilege to learn from Simpson.

 

Finally, my book group is reading My Friends by Fredrik Backman.  I made it one week at book group pace and then gave up and read the rest of the book.  It is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.  Better, it’s funny at the same time.  There are characters to love, deep thoughts about art, fart jokes, abiding friendships, and spray paint adventures.  Read it.

 

November total:  6

Fall to date:  25

2025 year to date:  75.5