BOOK THOUGHTS
September 2026 Monthly Wrap Up
I'm trying to stay on top of posting monthly wrap ups, but I'm still behind. Maybe that means I'm reading more!
Here's the list of books I read in September, in the order I read them:
- Rivals by Jilly Cooper, the second in her Rutshire Chronicles and just as good as Riders. Now I want to read the rest. I love a shaggy soap opera of a story.
- Not in the Flesh by Ruth Rendell, the 21st book in her Inspector Wexford mysteries, which I really enjoy. This one involves missing children, a local group of religious fanatics, and, of course, dead bodies that may or may not be connected.
- First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston, my book club pick and one we all enjoyed despite its moral ambiguity.
- A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey, a Golden Age mystery I read for Spinster September because Tey never married. The mystery was a bit overly complicated and the character's casual antisemitism was off-putting (if accurate for the time), but I still liked it quite a bit.
- North from Rome by Helen MacInnes, another solid Cold War thriller, but not my favorite.
- A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris. I didn't care for this one. I had a hard time sympathizing with Charlie, an underachieving man who followed harebrained schemes and refused to take responsibility for his life or the problems he caused.
- The Cocktail Party by T. S. Eliot. I don't often read plays, but this classic about marriage and adultery was a good one.
- The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene. I read this with a Going Greene group on Instagram. It's a classic Greene tragedy set in Argentina, with flawed characters, macabre humor, and a series of bad decisions and mistakes that lead to the dramatic finale.
- Bloodhounds by Peter Lovesey, the fourth book in his Peter Diamond series and a very good locked room mystery involving a dead body found on a canal barge.
- Overdrive: A Personal Documentary by William F. Buckley, Jr., one of my TBR 26 in '26 books. It's a memoir structured as "one week in the life of" Bill Buckley, but digressions inspired by the week's events means it covers a lot of ground over a longer time period than one week. Interesting for Buckley fans or anyone interested in 1980s culture.
- The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, about the fading of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy during the Irish War of Independence. It's a quiet, slow moving story that sticks with you.
- Conviction by Denise Mina, a twisty mystery featuring podcasts — predating Only Murders in the Building.
- The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. I finally read this and it was excellent. Not what I expected from the movie description, which was basically, an Allied soldier drying of his wounds at an abandoned military hospital in Italy tells his nurse about watching his girlfriend die in a cave in Africa after her plane crashed. Yes, that's the gist, but the book is so much more than that.
- We Are All Guilty by Kingsley Amis. Amis said he felt compelled to write about this character, a young man who commits a crime but never gets the punishment he feels he deserved.
- The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell. Wexford confronts a serial killer he failed to convict years ago in this entertaining but implausible 22nd book in the series.
- A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters by Penelope Rowlands is the fascinating biography of the long-term editor of Harper’s Bazaar. It is just as much about the birth of the magazine and fashion industries in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Dense, but excellent. Also one of my TBR 26 in '26 picks.
- The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey is one of the very best Golden Age mysteries I've read. Her protagonist, Inspector Grant, barely makes a cameo while a village lawyer solves a baffling kidnapping case.
