August 2026 Reads

Summer-reading mode continued through August, as it should, with a stack that's almost entirely crime fiction, except for one book:

Nonfiction
Don't Call it Art. This is the latest in Austin Kleon's series of small-format books on practicing art, which is a collection of advice he gleaned from watching his kids create in that wonderfully uninhibited way kids have (until grownups ruin it for them). One tidbit sticks out for me among all the gems: focus on the verb rather than the noun, meaning do the work of writing, or drawing, or making music instead of worrying about whether you're a writer or artist or musician.

Ficton
Continuing on with the Vicky Bliss series by Elizabeth Peters, I ready Trojan Gold (fitting, since I started it about the time The Odyssey came out, although it takes place in Germany and there's very little about the actual Trojan War in the book) and Night Train to Memphis, which moves the whole Vicky/Sir John/Schmitt art history/art theft (and busters of art thieves) trio to Peters's (and her biggest heroine's) natural turf of Egypt, but bringing in more modern (i.e. the 1990s) issues into the story. Both are a lot of fun. 

C. and I visited Montreal in early August, and on our first evening in the city we were exploring the neighborhood near our hotel and stumbled upon (thanks to my searching for it on my maps app and steering us in that direction) an English-language bookstore that had a significant inventory of books by Canadian authors. There I picked up the thriller 6:40 to Montreal by Eva Jurczyk, which involves several deaths on a stranded train and a main character who may or may not be running away from her husband and may be being stalked by a crazed yoga influencer. The plot gets twistier as it goes along and ends on a shocker. 

Also while I was in Montreal, I picked up a A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny, probably the most famous Quebecois writer, at a Goodwill bookstore in another neighborhood (a. I go to a lot of bookstores on vacation; and b) why don't we have Goodwill bookstores here?). The only Penny book I'd read before was the political thriller she wrote with Hillary Clinton, so I was all new to the Inspector Gamache series, and this book dropped me right in the middle of it, with Gamache retired from the police force and running the law enforcement training academy, where he's determined to root out the corruption. 

Finally, I read The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie. I haven't read all that many books by Christie, I'm not sure why. Even though I've seen at least a couple of television dramatizations of the story and remembered at least part of the solution, I enjoyed reading about Miss Marple demurely outwitting the police and figuring out the puzzle.