Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - July 2026 edition

Cafe Society
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So here we are, July about to slap us in the face, heat beginning to ramp up, Europeans buying out our Ranch Dressing supply like crackheads who found a stash of 100$ bills, and the World Cup marching merrily onward. Interestingly, only the Spanish station in our area is broadcasting the World Cup, but who needs to understand the commentators really?
Meanwhile, we’re all just over here reading- and likely peeking over the book occasionally at the TV.

So Whatcha all Readin?

Print:
In the immortal words of Morrissey, “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before”: I am still trying to get through Blitz by Daniel O’Malley, but honestly I am so over the WWII part of the story, it’s just padding, literally nothing is happening.

Clockwork Boys is my June T. Kingfisher selection. It’s a reread, but I barely remember the story since it’s almost 10 years old, so it’s like a new read for me.

Khadaji was one of the earlier members of SDMB, and he was well-known as a kindly person who always had something encouraging to say, particularly in the self-improvement threads. He was also a voracious, omnivorous reader, who started these threads 'way back in the Stone Age of 2005. Consequently, when he suddenly and quite unexpectedly passed away in January 2013, we decided to rename this thread in his honor and to keep his memory, if not his ghost, alive.

Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - June 2026 edition
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Last month: Bye June!

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Started today on Piper at the Gates of Dusk (The New World, #1) by Patrick Ness | Goodreads. It’s described as the beginning of a new trilogy, but really is a continuation of his Chaos Walking series. Those were pretty good YA books, despite the first one having one of the most heartbreaking animal deaths ever. In general, the story is about humans living on a planet with the native aliens, and some of these people having an involuntary telepathy called Noise.

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For a book club, I read Ancestral Night, by Elizabeth Bear. Space opera about a salvage crew who gets in over their heads. Pirates! Lost alien civilizations! Secret codes!

Did. Not. Like.

On the upside, there was an interesting bit of tech: the Fox, a cranial implant that allowed you (or the government, in extreme cases) to dial up or back on any emotion. And there was an interesting corollary: Clades, communities where people agreed to set their Foxes in sync, so that they would always feel the same way about everything and never disagree. And there was a really lovely bit of writing about the black hole at the center of the galaxy.

On the downside, the main character was annoying. Many, many pages were full of her angst, often interspersed with dialogue: one line of dialogue, one or two pages of whiny internal monologue.

The author used neologisms unnecessarily: “year” became “an,” “month” became “decian,” “day” became “dia,” and so on. But at some point in the book an event took “the better part of a week,” breaking that.

The humor really didn’t land for me. Dumb puns followed by characters complimenting each other on their verbal cleverness, and I was like, “Elizabeth. ELIZABETH. You’re the one making the joke and issuing the compliment. Have some dignity!”

Worst of all, though, was the plot. It’s one of these mysteries where events happen and the plot behind them, the history, is slowly revealed even as more events happen. I love this type of time-play, usually. But when I tried to figure out the chronological sequence of events, it made no fucking sense at all. Characters would secretly give a code to another character, and then send the character off to die, making it pointless that they’d given them a code. Other characters would want an item, and instead of going and taking it (spoiler: they’re pirates, and the item was on an unarmed ship, that’s literally what pirates do), they’d concoct this incredibly elaborate scheme involving mass murder just to lure someone to a place where they’d not take the item anyway. It was full of this sort of nonsense, where characters’ behavior could only be explained by assuming that Elizabeth Bear forgot their motives and previous actions.

It was infuriating.

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I read his book The Rest of Us Just Live Here and while I liked the end, I felt over all the premise wasn’t developed enough, so I’m interested to see what you think of this book.

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Another vote against that book, I think nobody in the SDMB likes it.

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I am on the last third of Theodore Dreiser’s novel ’ The Genius ’

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My grandfather loved that book.

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:waving_hand::waving_hand: :waving_hand: :waving_hand: :waving_hand:

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Still crankin’ through Denise Chong’s The Girl i the Picture, about Kim Phuc, whose naked, napalm-burned body became one of the iconic images of the Vietnam war. Then on to Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey

On audio, I’m re-listening to Kenneth C. Davis’ Don’t Know Much About the Civil War , and am realizing how much I’ve forgotten about that topic.

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Just picked the July/August issue of Rolling Stone from the library. I am happy to see an article about the late Cynthia Albritton. She was an artist!

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Oh, yeah – for my bedside reading I’m re-reading Bag Man by Rachel Maddow. Life was so much more satisfying when the Senate and the courts didn’t kowtow to obviously corrupt politicians.

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I listened to that podcast series while on a road trip a couple of years ago. Good stuff.

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Finished Ironwood by Michael Connelly. When a drug bust at the Catalina airport goes horribly wrong, a deputy sheriff is killed and another is critically wounded. As Detective Sergeant Stilwell is investigating, he is pulled into a four-year-old case involving a serial murderer who just might be living on the island.

Another fine read by one of my favorite authors. And next up is a book by another favorite author, Revenge Prey by John Sandford.

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Today I read It’s Hard To Be an Animal, by Robert Isaacs. Nebbishy Henry suddenly has the power to understand the speech of animals. However, he’s also distracted by a budding romance with manic pixie dream girl Molly. This book was what I imagine a Hallmark Channel movie is like, and yet…I didn’t hate it. If you like to eat sugar with a spoon right out of the bag, maybe you won’t hate it either.

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Finished A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century, by William F. Buckley, Jr., which had some interesting anecdotes; and 1776, by David McCullough, which was excellent.

Next up: Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary, by Maddie Ballard; and The Sea in Winter, by Christine Day.

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Finished Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary, by Maddie Ballard, which was interesting; and The Sea in Winter, by Christine Day, which was okay.

Next up: The Case of the Lonely Heiress, by Erle Stanley Gardner; and The Jaybird, by MacKinlay Kantor.

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Today I read about 100 pages of How to Survive a Horror Story, by Mallory Arnold. Then I flipped to the end to confirm that I knew how it would end, then I went to Goodreads to enjoy all the negative reviews. I guess props to Ms. Arnold for getting a novel published, but the writing was very poor.

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I saw it on my Home page and thought :Well, this is a premise done to death (pardon the pun) What is she going to do to make it stand out from the rest?" And apparently the answer is nothing.

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Yeah, I didn’t want to leave a comment where the author would see it, but it was a stinker!

Starting today on Dungeon Crawler Carl #6, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride.