June reads

 How am I doing, getting the prior month's reading list shared on a timely basis?  Well, I did manage to get June 2026's books up before the end of July.  So bonus points for me.

• The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi.  A slasher/thriller set in a retirement home, where some of the residents find themselves unconvinced of the naturalness of a spate of their friends' deaths.  Led by 70+ year old heroine Rose DuBois, they decide to investigate when the authorities don't seem to be getting anywhere.  Both humorous and mean-spirited, this was a decent read.
• Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros.  Number two in the dragon fantasy series.  Still fun, still spicy.
• Vivatera by Candace J. Thomas.  When I have to fly, I usually pick up a couple of books at a thrift store so I can abandon them at the airport when I'm done.  I got this one.  It was awful.  Self-published, maybe, but also sort of seems like AI wrote it?  Terrible but I finished it just to spite myself.
• Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz.  Accessible science book about the cognitive processes of dogs, giving us some insight into how our best friends think, feel about and experience the world.  I am trying to give my own dog more space to sniff on our walks after it, and give him way more hugs and kisses (because I know that he likes it).
• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.  An epistolary novel following the correspondence of Sybil Van Antwerp, retired lawyer, divorced mother of two adult children and prolific letter writer, even in the days of email.  There is small-scale drama - family dynamics, adult romantic relationships, the past coming back to haunt - and while it took a while to get into for me, I did enjoy it quite a lot by the end.
• The Wild Girls by Phoebe Morgan.  Four schoolgirl chums reunite at a luxury safari resort, ostensibly for one's birthday.  But they end up stranded, isolated and getting picked off one by one.  Intriguing concept, meh book.
• Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard.  Ooh! Young adult dystopian fantasy novel that I stumbled on completely by accident (see above re thrift store book)?  Yes please!  Red bloods are the regular people, serfs and servants, poor and beaten down.  Silver bloods are the rich, powerful, imbued with godlike powers.  So what happens when Mare Barrow, Red-blooded thief, is found to have powers like a Silver?  Add in a couple of handsome young princes, court intrigue and treachery and rebellion and you've got a party.  Lots of fun.  Looking forward to the next one.

May reads

 I read a bunch in May because Mr. Mouse and I had a week's vacation where we did stuff (hiking, trail running, road bike riding) in the mornings, then hunkered down to read through the early afternoons until it was time for beers.  Solid strategy.

• Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill.  A debut fantasy novel with heavy folkloric overtones.  An acolyte, desperate to obtain the patronage of a god, gets sent back in time by the trickster Fox to try to save her own ancestors and, by doing so, save herself.
• I See You've Called in Dead by John Kenney.  Bud is an obituary writer and, one day, feeling sorry for himself, gets hammered and writes his own obituary.  But then he inadvertently submits it for publication.  The newspaper wants to fire him but the HR department has now classified him as dead, and you can't fire a dead person - until the glitch in the system is worked out.  Bud uses this time to figure out WTF he wants and he does this by going to the wakes and funerals of strangers.  I liked this one.
• Clown Town by Mick Herron.  The most recent installment in the Slough House / Slow Horses British spy series.  Decent, although it's been so long since I read the last one that I didn't really remember what was going on in the longer story arc.
• Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker.  Mr. Mouse and I recently watched the Mindhunter series on Netflix and while we liked the first season, were less enamored of the second.  I was interested enough to pick up the (non-fiction) book the television series was based on.  As it turns out, I ended up liking the book better than the show.
• Hungerstone by Kat Dunn.  Ooh I liked this one!  It's a vampire novel, a feminist retelling of Carmilla (previously read here), which is itself the novel that inspired Dracula.  
• On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz.  Wherein the author takes eleven walks, most in New York City, with eleven different experts, to see what she is missing with her inattention.  The experts include: her toddler, her dog, an artist, a geologist, a blind woman and a font designer.  I enjoyed some chapters more than others but mostly came away with wanting to read Horowitz's book, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know
• I, Medusa by Ayana Gray.  I liked this one too - another one in my unofficial series of modern retellings of Greek mythology.  This is a version of Medusa's origin story, and how a smart, young woman gets forced into being one of the most iconic monsters in mythology.
• The Maid by Nita Prose.  A murder mystery set in a hotel, with a slightly neuro-divergent chambermaid heroine.
• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okonafor.  A science fiction novel within a novel, with an irascible, Black handicapped protagonist, Zelu.  When she gets fired from her university job, in the wake of getting her novel rejected, she starts writing something completely different: a science fiction novel about robots in the aftermath of a global apocalypse that killed off all the humans. 
• Beasts of Carnaval by Rosalia Rodrigo.  A fantastical, fictionalized exploration of the effects of colonization on native peoples.  Sofia, a mestiza freedwoman, travels to Isla Bestia - where rich colonizers flock for the food, wine and various entertainments - in search of her twin brother, who disappeared there five years earlier.
• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.  Ooh.  Love this one.  Dragon fantasy that is kind of like Dragonriders of Pern crossed with Hunger Games but also pretty spicy.  Readers are apparently kind of pouty that the author hasn't finished #4 in the series yet.
• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.  This one is a re-read and, honestly, I have no idea how many times I've read it.  My copy was stolen from my fourth grade homeroom and completely fanned the flames of my youthful obsession with Greece.  Ostensibly written to be about naturalist Durrell's encounters with the fauna of Corfu when his family lived there from 1935-1939, it is as much about the crazy characters who are his family and friends as it is about critters.  I love this book.  One of my all-time favorites. 

April reads

Late to post and not that many books read in April.  It happens.

• The Comfort of Ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear.  Finally finished the Maisie Dobbs series and I must say that, for me, it went out on sour note - I thought the final book in the series was the weakest by far.  I haven't enjoyed the sections of the most recent volumes that have Maisie focused more on her family (I don't care a fig about her daughter Anna).  Family took up a big chunk of this last book, plus an inordinate amount of time was spent with the characters reminiscing about events of the prior seventeen books.  I already read them - I don't need you to rehash them.  I guess it was time for the series to end.  I did, however, love many of the previous installments and do recommend the series.
• Blood of the Old Kings by Sung-Il Kim.  Wherein three strangers unite to save their home.  Epic fantasy with journeys, dragons, the corpses of dead sorcerors and two of the three protagonists are women.
• Atlas of Unknowable Things by McCormick Templeman.  My notes say that I really liked this one but, honestly, I can't remember it at all.  Set in a gothic college campus high in the Rocky Mountains, a historian arrives to study its manuscripts whilst secretly searching for an artifact.
• Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward - I liked this one too, and funnily enough, it is also set high in the Rocky Mountains.  This time, abused siblings Riley and Oliver run away from home, searching for Nowhere, a hidden sanctuary for children like them, built on the ruins of a former movie star's ranch.  Or is it a cult?  Or worse?  This one is pretty dark and pretty good.
• Rosemary & Rue by Seanan McGuire.  I was looking for a different Seanan McGuire book and picked this one up instead, the first of the October Daye urban fantasy series.  October "Toby" Daye is half human, half faerie, and all caught up in the fae world, despite her best efforts.  A knight for Faerie, she's a bit of a P.I. and has to solve the murder of a fae countess before a curse ends her own life.  Didn't love it but enjoyed it enough to see what the next book has to offer.

March reads

I ended up going back to my folks' house for a few days mid-March for some family time.  Because it was mid-March in Maine, the weather was such (snowing, raining, cold and gloomy) that we spent a lot of time indoors, watching the college basketbasket tournament and reading.  

• The Consequences of Fear by Jacqueline Winspear.  #16 in the Maisie Dobbs series - which, if I'm honest, diminishes in quality as the series goes on, as though the author is maybe just a little tired of the whole thing - finds our intrepid sleuth in September 1941.  Europe is reeling under Nazi occupation and Maisie finds herself investigating a murder that has implications for Britain's war effort.
• Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey.  When a faculty member dies under suspicious circumstances at an elite magical boarding school, non-magical Ivy Gamble, private investigator, is hired to figure out what happened.  Things are complicated by the fact that Ivy's magical and estranged sister is an educator at the school.
• A Sunlit Weapon by Jacqueline Winspear.  Maisie Dobbs #17 (which I liked better than 16) is in October 1942, following women pilots and American servicemen and a possible threat to Eleanor Roosevelt, who is visiting England. 
• Women of the Post by Joshunda Sanders.  Based on true events, this is the story of the all-Black battalion of American women soldiers, sent to England to sort out the millions of pieces of mail languishing in warehouses and get them to the servicemen who badly need the morale boost.  I had no idea about this piece of WWII history - there's a movie? - so I enjoyed learning about it.  I didn't think this book was terribly well written, however.
• Listen to Me by Tess Gerritsen.  A murder mystery from the Rizzoli and Isles series (#13, but I don't think it's crucial to read them in order - these are popcorn books), wherein Jane Rizzoli (detective) and Maura Isles (medical examiner) investigate the murder of a well-liked nurse, all while Jane's nosy mom Angela starts getting suspicious of new neighbors down the street.
• Code Name Helene by Ariel Lawhon.  I LOVED this one.  Another WWII novel (there's been a lot lately, I know), this is a historical novel based on the TRUE story of Nancy Wake, an Australian socialite who became a spy and a French resistance leader against Nazi Germany.  She began as a journalist, segued to helping Allied servicemen escape from occupied France over the mountains to Spain.  Then, after the Nazis learned about her, she escaped to England herself - but then went back to France to help arm and organize the Maquis rebels as they fought against their German occupiers.  Amazing woman.
• The Black Ascot by Charles Todd.  This is the 21st murder mystery in the Ian Rutledge series by mother-son duo/pseudonym Charles Todd.  Rutledge is battling his own shell shock from WWI while trying to solve a decade-old murder.
• Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Profession Wiseass by Dave Barry.  This is a memoir, not a straight humor book or funny novel like so many of Barry's books.  As such, there are some poignant moments, especially when dealing with his parents.  But it's still pretty friggin' funny!
• A Cruel Deception by Charles Todd.  This one is from their Bess Crawford series (#11), with heroine/nurse Bess Crawford assigned by a superior to find wayward soldier who has abandoned his duties and salving his mental WWI war wounds with opiates.  I liked this one okay but Bess Crawford is no Maisie Dobbs.
• Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth.  Ooh I liked this one too!  This is an adult fantasy novel by Divergent author Roth, following a group of late 20/early 30-somethings who are plagued by serious PTSD following their defeat of a world-destroying dark entity.  Trouble is, it doesn't look like he has stayed defeated.
• Clytemnestra by Constanza Casati.  As previously noted, there seems to be a trend recently with authors novelizing Greek mythology.  There are mixed results but I quite liked Clytemnestra, bringing to the forefront Helen of Troy's sister/wife of Agamemnon/queen of Mycenae who ruled in her husband's absence and paid him back for the murder/sacrifice of their daughter.

Next month: I finally finish the Maisie Dobbs series!

February reads

Only six books in February.  This is because (I think) we had guests over the Presidents' Day holiday weekend and whereas normally I would have hunkered down and plowed through a bunch of books, I had to be sociable instead.

• The Incandescent by Emily Tesh.  A grown-up, queer-friendly magic school ("dark academia") novel wherein the heroine, Dr. Walden, must protect the 600 school kids from demonic incursions.  Great world-building, interesting characters.
• The American Agent by Jacqueline Winspear.  #15 in the Maisie Dobbs series.  Maisie is back on the case when an American correspondent is found murdered in her London flat.  As these later books go on, I find myself less engaged when we have to explore Maisie's home life with newly-adopted daughter.  This installment was (thankfully) not so heavy on the child bit.
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.  Another science-adventure-in-space from the author of The Martian.  I didn't like this one quite so well, which is weird for someone who DOES like science fiction and fantasy and aliens and all that.  Movie coming out soon starring Ryan Gosling, apparently.
• Dark Sisters by Kristi DeMeester.  Wow - I don't remember this one at all.  Hold on ... [looks it up] oh yeah.  Three centuries of witches and persecution and a curse.  Didn't love it - seemed scattered.
• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.  I've read Kristin Hannah books before about women in war - this one is about two French sisters in WWII, one actively in the Resistance against the occupying Nazis, one resisting the best she can.  
• Hemlock and Silver by T Kingfisher.  This one I liked: Anja - a plus-sized, competent spinster (35 years old lol) - wants nothing more than to putter around her laboratory, manufacturing antidotes to common poisons.  She reluctantly gets drawn into royal intrigue when the king hires her to find out what's wrong with his ailing daughter.  Again, good world-building, interesting characters, humor but also tension and violence.  I am a T Kingfisher fan.

January reads

 Ooo I'm on top of it this month!

• The End of the World as We Know It (anthology).  This is a collection of short stories by horror writers, all based in the universe of Stephen King's The Stand.  The Stand is one of my favorite SK novels and it was interesting to see other fans' takes on it.
• Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this Maisie Dobbs mystery, set in 1938, Maisie is enlisted by the British Secret Service to infiltrate Nazi Germany to affect a Dachau prisoner's release.  The man is a British engineer, very valuable in the war effort.  Maisie poses as his daughter and, while she waits for the Germans follow through on their promise to release him, tracks down a missing woman from her past and also finds herself again in the wake of her husband's death.
• In This Grave Hour by Jacqueline Winspear.  Finally returning to England in 1939, as Britain enters WWII, Maisie Dobbs throws herself back into work, investigating the murders of Belgian refugees from the Great War.  
• To Die But Once by Jacqueline Winspear.  This is book #14 in the series - which ends at eighteen and then what will I do? - and Maisie and her team are back at it, investigating the murder of a young apprentice who was involved with a wartime government contract.  Organized crime looms large but Maisie is more than up for it.
• Bittershore by V.V. James.  Ah ... apparently this is a sequel to Sanctuary, which I haven't read.  Didn't really matter, in this fantasy/thriller focused on mother and daughter witches, Sarah and Harper Fenn, regrouping after being run out of town after a literal witch hunt.  Meh.  I guess there's an AMC show based on these books?
• The Island of Last Things by Emma Sloley.  Set on (in?) Alcatraz in the middle of a planet-altering apocalypse, this novel follows two zookeepers in the last zoo on Earth.  Dark but surprisingly hopeful.
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.  One of my BFFs from college said that he did a book report in ninth grade on this one, but this is the first time I've read it.  Being true crime (indeed, basically inventing the genre), it's not my usual read but boy, was it fascinating.  Meticulously researched via indefatigable interviews, this book switches POVs between the decent, hardworking Clutter family and the two men who brutally murdered them.

And so now I'm going to have to try another classic true crime: I've got Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil on my list now.

December reads

I must have been busy doing holiday stuff in December because I only read three books.  That's the fewest in a month all year; the next fewest was five in September.

• The Poppy War by RF Kuang.  The first in a trilogy of "grimdark" military fantasy, this novel follows Rin, a gifted orphan who enters an elite military academy.  She discovers that she has supernatural powers and this catapults her into the war that grips her country.  Didn't love it.
• A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs, this one jumps forwards a few years to find a struggling Maisie trying to lose herself, first in India and then, on her way home to England, in Gibraltar.  Thinking to just solve the murder of a local photographer, she finds herself drawn back towards the machinations of the British secret service as WWII looms ever nearer.
• How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristin Perrin.  The second novel in the Castle Knoll murder mystery series, Annie spends the inheritance she received in the first book by investigating a pair of murders.  These are enjoyable but lightweight mysteries, not quite to the level of Maisie Dobbs or Inspector Gamache.

So I ended up reading 106 books this past year.  I didn't have a goal, just wanted to track how many books I would read in 2025.  I have a goal for 2026 though: more.

November reads

Ten read in November (thank you, long weekends).  The first one barely counts as I read the bulk of it in October, but I didn't finish it until November.

• I'll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara.  I'm not really a true crime girlie, but after the author's untimely death, I'd read enough about the book to be interested.  And I knew nothing about the Golden State Killer at all.
• The Devils by Joe Abercrombie.  I adore Abercrombie's First Law trilogy and successive in-universe book.  His voice is very clear in The Devils but it's a different world with its own wonderful, scary, heart-breaking and very, very, very flawed characters.  Loved it.
• How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin.  As a girl, Frances learns via a palm-reading session that she will be murdered.  She spends her whole life preparing and attempting to prevent such a thing.  After her demise, her great-niece Annie must solve her aunt's murder in order to inherit her estate.  Fun, low stakes.
• The Care and Management of Lies by Jacqueline Winspear.  NOT a Maisie Dobbs novel (we'll get back to those shortly) but set in England during WWI as a young farmer's wife must keep things running on the home front when her husband and her best friend enlist.  I liked it quite a lot.
• Elegy for Eddie by Jacqueline Winspear.  Yes, the next Maisie Dobbs novel as our intrepid psychologist and sleuth investigates the murder of horse-whisperer Eddie.  WWII is drawing ever nearer and Maisie is uneasy about her fella's involvement with Winston Churchill and his ilk.  Really good installment.
• Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear.  In this one, Maisie investigates the murders of two young Indian women, working in London as household help.  She also starts listening to her heart.
• Shift by Ethan Kross.  Non-fiction, about trying to get a grip on, and adjustment to, one's emotions.  Interesting but didn't offer as many actionable tips/tricks as I had hoped.
• Never Leave the Dogs Behind by Brianna Madia.  This is Madia's second memoir, covering her struggles in Moab, post-divorce.  She's a bad ass, no doubt, but reading this was especially poignant given that one of her beloved dogs, Dagwood, just died last week.
• What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher.  I guess this is the third installment in the Sworn Soldier series: I've read the first, What Moves the Dead, but not the second.  I do like these books, set in olden times, with some alt-reality and dead things that flail around in the dark.
• Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar.  This one is written like a true crime book, with the author as the main character, but it is, in fact, a novel.  I liked this a lot, liked the hybrid feel of it.  

That was a good bunch - I rather liked most of them.  What have you all been reading?

October reads

 Lots more books read in October, due to a week of vacation in a place with no TV or internet, and actually getting them posted timely here, due to getting my shit together somewhat.

• Night Shift by Stephen King.  A re-read of his first collection of short stories because I didn't want to start in on my horde of library books until vacation started.  You know how I feet about his short stories.  You should probably read them, this one or Skeleton Crew to start.
• Nestlings by Nat Cassidy.  Reviews seem to think it's akin to a lovechild between Rosemary's Baby and Salem's Lot, which I guess I can see.  I found it weird and not entirely cohesive, plus I didn't like either of the main characters.
• Fever House by Keith Russon.  A couple of enforcers sent around to collect for their boss end up with a severed hand that incites madness, bloodthirsty killing and uncontrollable rage.  The hand makes its way across the city, wreaking havoc.  This is supposed to be a sprawling horror/crime novel and sprawling is right - the interconnections didn't really interconnect for me and the ending is a clear set up for the sequel.  Didn't care for this one all that much.
• Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth.  At this point, I'm on a roll with books I don't love.  When Abby's mother-in-law dies, she goes all in to save her husband, fight the mother-in-law's ghost and create the perfect family for herself.  The gross parts are fun and it's definitely got some funny parts - but again, I just didn't like the protagonist.
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.  In which we switch gears from horror to fantasy.  Piranesi lives in a labyrinth world, ruled by tides and populated only by him, birds, statues and dead bodies.  This is a weird one, with ruminations on knowledge and belief, but I did like it.
• You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron (which sounds like a pseudonym to me, which is fine).  A young adult slasher in book form: a bunch of kids who work at a live action haunted house, set up like a summer camp in a slasher film, actually find themselves face to face with a masked killer on the last night of the concession.  It was cute, I guess, and pretty murdery.  But also pretty light-weight.
• The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs novel!  Maisie is hired by American parents to track down the English nurse their son fell in love with during WWI, before he was killed.  But it looks like he was killed by his own men ... Good one.
• Hawk Mountain by Connor Habib.  Todd, single father and English teacher, gets gaslit by a former high school bully, Jack, after a chance (?) meeting at the beach.  Jack insinuates himself into Todd's life and things escalate A LOT from there.  This is like two totally different books and ends up going completely off the rails.  I sort of liked it until I definitely didn't.
• A Lesson in Secrets by Jacqueline Winspear.  Back to Maisie Dobbs, who does an undercover job  for the British Secret Service as a professor in Cambridge, as Europe rolls inexorably towards WWII.  I am so glad I found out about this series - I do love British murder mysteries.
• A History of Fear by Luke Dumas.  University of Edinburgh graduate student Grayson Hale achieves notoriety when he murders a fellow student and then claims the Devil made him do it.  The novel is from the POV of Daniela, a reporter, as she goes through the evidence after Hale is found dead in his cell, reading Hale's memoir and adding her own comments and portions of third party interviews.  Twisty, slow burn, unreliable narrators.  Pretty good.
• The Songs of Trees by Davie George Haskell.  What ho - non-fiction!  Haskell visits a number of trees around the world over a period of years, commenting on their connections to the life around them: fungi, bacterial colonies, other plants, communities of animals, indigenous people, the owners of the corner bodegas.  Everything is connected, in this increasingly fragmented world.

September reads

So overdue!  We were on vacation for the first week of October, when I normally would have posted my September reads, and then when we got back, I had to dive right into the Sixteenth Annual FMS Scarelicious October Movie Series.  Who has time to read books?  I only got to a few in September, actually:

• An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear.  Another Maisie Dobbs mystery wherein the intrepid sleuth investigates goings-on in rural England during the hop-picking season.  I learned quite a lot about hops, but this wasn't one of my favorites.
• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear.  Book #6 in the Maisie Dobbs series.  I did like this one, a lot, as Maisie and Scotland Yard try to catch a madman blowing people up across London as 1931 comes to a close.
• Skeleton Crew by Stephen King.  It has been a while but I reread this short story collection in anticipation of the movie version of The Monkey coming out.  He's so good at short stories and this collection has quite a few good ones.
• Mrs. March by Virginia Feito.  The titular Mrs. March, an Upper East Side housewife, starts to become a bit unraveled when it appears that an unlikeable character in her author husband's new novel is based on her.  I didn't love it but I appreciated the end - didn't see it coming.
• The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty.  The final volume in the Daevabad trilogy.  Djinn and ifrits and demigods all along the Nile.

Stay tuned soon for my October reads!