July 2026 Reads

July's reading list was pure summer, glass-of-lemonade, in-the-hammock enjoyment.

Nonfiction
I got Austin Kleon's latest book (more on that next month) on preorder, and that reminded me I hadn't finished reading his previous book, Keep Going, which is all about how to maintain a creative practice when the world is going to sh*t around you. I'd gotten stumped at the first piece of advice: establish a routine. I'm working on it! (I also learned that I'm a weirdo for my most productive time of day being the afternoon.)

I picked up Down the Nile by Rosemary Mahoney at the used bookstore because I will read anything about Egypt. It's a fascinating travel memoir about the author's efforts to obtain a rowboat (truly--the search for the boat takes up about half of the book and takes the reader onto a deep dive into the culture of upper Egypt and its attitudes toward women and westerners). For a memoir, we learn very little about the author's life prior to this adventure.

Fiction
We pretty much skipped the Fourth of July this year, for obvious reasons (though we did attend our town's parade and regretted it). I spent much of the day rereading The Great Gatsby for the first time since high school, figuring reading a book about the worst kinds of excesses by the worst kinds of Americans ("careless people") would be a fitting tribute to the day. It was even more depressing than I'd recalled--and thoroughly apt.

The rest of the pile is mysteries and thrillers: two by Elly Griffiths, the first in the Ruth Galloway mysteries, The Crossing Places, which I enjoyed, and a modern gothic thriller crossed with a murder mystery, The Stranger Diaries, which was overall pretty good, although the climax was a little anticlimactic. (One thing I like about Elly Griffiths's books is that her main characters are mothers.) The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager, a thriller with a supernatural element, I read while staying by myself at a lake, which is the best place to read this kind of book. Finally two more in the Veronical Speedwell mysteries by Deanna Raybourn. Is Veronica my new Amelia Peabody? Well...maybe. I do enjoy her spunk and the twisty plots that involve all kinds of royal intrigue.