June 2026 Monthly Wrap Up -- BOOK THOUGHTS

BOOK THOUGHTS

June 2026 Monthly Wrap Up

What book surprised you in June? For me, the answer is The Calamity Club, which completely pulled me in from the get go. See my earlier review post.

Here's the list of the book I read in June. See any favorites?

• Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie. I love AC but often forget to read her books. I'd like to read at least one a month but need to concentrate to make that work. This was an overly complicated but still fun Hercule Poirot case set in France.  

• Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling. Schoolboy stories are not my usual cup of tea. These are as good as they get, and I appreciate them as a classic, but didn't really engage with them.

• The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett. I got a review copy of this one from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. I was determined to get it read and reviewed, but was daunted by the page count -- it's a doorstop! So I switched to the audiobook from my library and was so happy i did. The two readers did an amazing job and really made the characters come alive. 

• The Bible of British Taste: Stories of Home, People and Place by Ruth Guilding. This coffee table book was fascinating. I expected glossy layouts of fancy houses. But it is more about how real people live in architecturally significant houses in whatever state those houses may be in. It is about preserving, not necessarily restoring or renovating. I was unfamiliar with Guilding's former blog of the same name, so this world was all new to me. 

• Simisola by Ruth Rendell is the 16th book in her Inspector Wexford series and explores issues of immigration, racism, and exploitation. It was a good one. 

• Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography by Muriel Spark. Spark is one of my favorite authors. Her autobiography covers her childhood in Edinburgh, disastrous first marriage to a mentally unstable man she followed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), work for the British Secret Service during WWII, and early success as an author. It's fascinating to read her story in her own words. 

• The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books by Robertson Davies. This was a delight from beginning to end. Davies is another favorite fiction writer of mine. This is a collection of speeches he gave later in life, mostly about reading and writing. I loved every page. 

• Diamond Solitaire by Peter Lovesey is the second mystery in his Peter Diamond series. I have most of the book in cool Soho Crime editions and am excited dive in. Diamond is the kind of schleppy, overweight, own-worse-enemy sort of crime solver I love, sort of an English version of Ian McEwan's John Rebus. 

• Slightly Foxed No. 87 (Summer 2025). This literary quarterly is so interesting it is worth the risk of overloading my TBR shelves. 

NOT PICTURED

• The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. This was my first Shafak book and might be my last. I read it for book club and we all agreed that the premise was good but the execution left us cold because she lectures a lot. A lot. 

• Road Rage by Ruth Rendell. This 20th Wexford mystery involves environmental activists protesting the construction of a new byway near "Kingsmarkham," Wexford's fictional town in Sussex.

• The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman. I love the Thursday Murder Club books and this new one, the fifth, lived up to me expectations. 

• Mona’s Eyes by Thomas Schlesser. This was another book club pick and I did not finish it. I don't include it on my book count for the year, but I include it here because I wrote about it here. 

The Kipling, Spark, and Davies books were from my TBR 26 in '26 stack, leaving me with nine to go.