Reader’s Notebook, 8/4/26

Well, July was quite the reading month. I knocked out nine books. NINE BOOKS!!! Three were rather slight things I loaded onto the Kindle for our trip that I won’t bother to include here. This entry includes five of those July books and then the first book of August.

Headstone, Purgatory, Green Hell – Ken Bruen
Three more gritty, grimy crime novels from Bruen before our time in Ireland. Even though we did not visit Galway, where all his books take place, I was still on the alert for some of his most notable characters to cross our path while in Dublin.

Table For Two – Amor Towles
A month ago I read Towles’ Rules Of Civility, which I enjoyed a lot. This is a collection of several short stories and one novella, the novella following one of the main characters from Rules Of Civility after she passed out of that book’s focus.

I also enjoyed these quite a bit. None of them break any new ground, but rather reinforce how easily Towles can whip up these thoroughly charming and interesting characters that the reader quickly cares about. I wish more authors would follow Towles lead in polishing and publishing ideas that may not be meaty enough for an entire novel. I realize in 2026 there is very little market for that kind of work so few publishing houses will be interested in getting behind such works for anyone other than the most successful novelists. One can always hope, though.

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook – Matt Dinniman
Book three in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, this one set in a level filled with countless subterranean train lines. Too many, if you ask me. I couldn’t keep track of all the lines and stations and the significance of each. But this got pretty good at the end, so I’ll stick around to see what the next level holds.

Big Fan – Michael Schur and Joe Posnanski
These two old friends explore what it means to be a fan, not just of sports but of anything, really. There are plenty of serious moments – they speak with a PhD to try to come up with an academic theory of what being a fan provides humans – but most of it is exactly the light-hearted, often silly stuff you would expect from this duo. Their chapter about attempting to get a hug from Mookie Betts is pure, joyful genius. More importantly, it got me back into Joe’s podcast, which Schur often appears on. I listened to it years ago, and I’m not exactly sure why I stopped. Did it go behind a paywall for a while? Was I mad at baseball, their primary topic? Well, I’m still mad at baseball but I re-added it to my always packed queue of things to listen to.