Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - June 2026 edition

Just finished The Butcher’s Masquerade, #5 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. These aren’t perfect books, but man. I’m enjoying them so, so much that I’m starting to get the Nearing-the -End-of-the-Series blues. :grimacing: Thank goodness they’re all doorstops. They get so complicated, though! I keep trying to imagine how Matt Dinniman manages to keep track of all the characters, stats, magical items, etc. He must have a writers’ concordance the size of a refrigerator, or maybe a room with scraps and notes pinned to the walls, connected with hundreds of pieces of string…

Anyway, up next, something lighter in tone (and physical weight): The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon | Goodreads

I’m reading Everything Is Tuberculosis, which is good except for this one sentence that I just ran across:

“Even in the 1940s, TB infections and disease remained common–twentieth-century TB survivors include Beatle Ringo Starr (who was institutionalized with TB as a teenager), the novelist George Orwell (who died of TB in 1950, just as curative treatment was becoming available), the writer Thomas Wolfe (who died of tuberculous meningitis in 1938), and the actor Vivian Leigh (who lived with TB for over twenty-five years).”

The dictionary is your friend.

I finished Ali Hazelwood’s Mate, about love, sex, secrets and power in a werewolf-dominated Pacific Northwest. It was OK.

Also finished Star Trek: Log Eight by Alan Dean Foster, which was good, but not as good as I remembered. It does have a cool concept, though, about massive but fragile energy-consuming creatures which can live only in zero-gravity extragalactic space.

Next up: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson, a slim volume about that memorable phrase from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Finished The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances. I thought it was very glurgey and weak, but folks at Goodreads loved it. Nearly every review mentioned The Brave Little Toaster, which I never saw, so I assume the nostalgia vibes may have boosted it.

New thread: The best part of the World Cup is Europeans discovering American gas stations