Monthly Reads: May 2026

What I’m learning, looking at this, is that I should have written more book reviews this month. Because Canticle, We Burned So Bright and Sailing to Sarantium could all be Book of the Month and I only reviewed one of them.

Monthly Reads: April 2026

If this looks super light, well, that’s because by my standards it obviously is, but also I started Tom’s Crossing on the last day of March and it was twelve hundred freaking pages long.

Book of the Month is Cursed Daughters, with The Door on the Sea and The Reanimator’s Fate very close behind. I’m enjoying For Whom The Belle Tolls way, way, way more than I thought I would, but I’m not done with it yet so it isn’t eligible.

Monthly Reads: March 2026

Book of the Month is the most excellent The Black Hunger, by Nicholas Pullen. This was kind of a bleh month overall, but Slewfoot and Trad Wife were pretty good too.

Monthly Reads: February 2026

Book of the Month is Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress. The John Lewis and Malcolm X books were really solid as well.

Monthly Reads: December 2025

Honestly, this wasn’t a great month, with more DNFs than usual. We’re going to call Shadows upon Time the Book of the Month, and The Blackfire Blade, The Scour, and His Majesty’s Dragon were standouts among the rest.

Monthly Reads: November 2025

Book of the Month is Matt Dinniman’s This Inevitable Ruin, because shut up, that’s why.

Monthly Reads: October 2025

I’m genuinely not sure how I pulled that off, given that this isn’t a summer month– Storygraph has me at just barely under 7,000 pages for October, which looks ridiculous until you realize June was 11,500.

At any rate, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride is Book of the Month, followed very closely by Mark Twain. Hastings’ Vietnam book is excellent as well but I’m only about halfway through it.

Monthly Reads: September 2025

Book of the Month is … somehow, The Butcher’s Masquerade, by Matt Dinniman, with a special “yes, I’m serious, and no, I can’t explain it” runner-up award for You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White.