September 2026 Monthly Wrap Up -- BOOK THOUGHTS

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. 

July 2026 Monthly Wrap Up -- BOOK THOUGHTS

BOOK THOUGHTS

July 2026 Monthly Wrap Up

July was a good reading month for me. How about you? 

Here's a list of the books I read in July, in the order I read them, not as shown in the photo. Those not in the photo were audiobooks I read with my ears. 

• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. Not a favorite but I’m happy to get it off my shelf, thanks to the TBR 26 in '26 Challenge. 

• Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, an economics book. It was a little repetitive of other books I've read by him, but his ideas bear repeating so I didn't mind. 

• Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream by John Derbyshire. I didn't know what to expect from this one and finally got to it because it was on my TBR 26 in '26 list. I'm so glad I finally read it because it is a delightful novel about Chinese immigrants and marriage.

• Troubles by J.G. Farrell, one of the books in his Empire Trilogy. The three books share common themes related to the end of the British Empire, but do not have to be read in order. I read The Siege of Krishnapur (Indian Uprising of 1857) a while back and The Singapore Grip also in July. This one is about a group of English people living in a dilapidated seaside hotel in Ireland at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921).  It is funny, sad, short, and excellent. Troubles was published in 1970 and awarded The Lost Booker Prize in 2010.

• Learning to Heal: One Woman’s Journey Through Medicine by Liz Casper records her experiences in medical school, practice, and as a cancer patient. She illustrates each step in her career with a story about a particular patient, which makes her memoir feel immediate and human. Excellent!

• Here One Moment by Lianne Moriarty. Her books always give full entertainment value. I prefer the audiobooks because the Australian accents give the stories a real sense of place. 

• Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party by Graham Greene is a short book that will linger for a long time. I read it with a group of Bookstagrammers working our way through all his novels, one every other month. 

• Dunbar by Edward St. Aubyn, a  retelling of King Lear. This was a highlight of the month. Every Hogarth Shakespeare I've read had knocked my socks off. Interestingly, Dunbar reimagines King Lear as the battle between an aging media mogul and his offspring over who will control his empire. Sound familiar? The book came out only months before Succession aired, which told King Lear through the same plot. Sometimes ideas get plucked from the universe at the same time. 

• Harm Done by Ruth Rendell. Book 18 in her Inspector Wexford Series, this one involves domestic violence and the victims seeking protection at the local women's shelter. 

• A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. I’m an Anne Tyler completist so am reading all of them. They all involve families but this one didn't have much plot beyond following a particular family in Baltimore (of course) through several generations in one house. 

• Risk Management by Reid Winslow, a dual storyline thriller that built to an exciting ending. Read my review here. 

• The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell, also in his Empire Trilogy, which I read out of order but it didn't matter. This is the story of the British community in Singapore when the Japanese invade in 1941. It is a long, shaggy story highlighting the disparities between the British and Asian inhabitants. It is definitely one of the top books of my reading year.

• A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes, linked short stories. The opening story retold Noah's Ark from the perspective of a bug stowaway and was hilarious. The rest of the stories had a link -- strong or weak -- to Noah's Ark. All in all, a mixed bag, but I think that of all story collections.

• Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Pacific Northwest by Foster Church. The third TBR 26 in ‘26 for me in July. While a lot of the specific information was outdated (my fault for waiting so long to read this 2010 book), there was still plenty here to inspire a long list of road trip ideas. 

• The Summons by Peter Lovesey, his 3d Peter Diamond mystery. I was happy to find that this one brought Diamond back to Bath, the setting of the first book. 

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.