amazing advertising artwork promoting the new Dune movieIt was Pride Month here on my blog. I focused on queer reviewing for the whole month (and a little bit of May). I wrote twenty-eight specific-to-Pride reviews. Twelve of those were June 2026 DRCs (out of twenty June 2026 DRCs reviewed this month, and a slightly appalling SEVENTY-FOUR June DRCs I received. Seriously...one less than my LibraryThing home group's annual goal in one month?! Who do I think I am, Biblio-Terminator?).
I'm torn between The Invention of Nature, a biography of my elder sibling in gay-maleness Alexander von Humboldt, and Medea Sang Me A Corrido as my favorite Pride reads. I thoroughly loved Villain but it was less clearly queer than Hench so got a hair less luuuv from me. The Summer Boy was a lovely read, a story I felt was aimed directly at me; yet it wasn't as energetic, as actively pursuing my attention as my two favorite candidates. I read two Steven Rowley stories, liked both, but...not quite enough to warble my fool lungs out over them. It was a good 2026 Pride crop, one to savor in memory, and makes me very glad I didn't pressure myself with a numerical goal so I didn't fret about "making progress" or other such artificial stricture. I'm labeling this tracking project a successful trial. Maybe I'll aim for a numerical goal in 2027. I have a solid eight months to decide, no rush....
In June overall, I wrote thirty-six reviews. I received a slightly appalling SEVENTY-FOUR June DRCs; thus my reviewed-DRCs percentage is a barely tolerable 48.6%. I'm obviously quite greedy, and a fast reader, but THAT is worrying me. It could be years before I review those generously gifted-to-me books! I must work on my s(h)elf control.
Of the sixteen reviews for not-QUILTBAG books in June, one stands out like a lighthouse in the living room as a "please please pleasepleaseplease read this book": The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. It's important. Please read it. Get it from your library if you don't want to spend money on it. Just read it. Please. In those sixteen non-QUILTBAG reviews there were no fictions that I found terribly exciting. The crappiest book I read in June was Puck, and I am not kidding when I tell you the one I'm talking about here gets lost in one's search-results options because the hockey-romance craze is INSANE! Puck-the-character adapted here from Shakespeare turned me off completely.
So I soldier onward to July, and the third quarter of 2026. I expect to see a dramatic decrease in my blog's engagement because Bluesky no longer allows me to access it through my browser...it insists on being the only thing on my screen, being vertically formatted, and thus unreadable for me. I do not expect them to reverse course so I'll be on their site at most a few times a day. I hate it when tech scum make decisions for me. They *never* get it right. ENSHITTIFICATION is real. Like the way the goddamned motherfucking AI decided I wanted to capitalize "enshittification" when I did not.
The second quarter of 2026 saw me write reviews for 105 books in total, sixty-three in their publishing month. That's out of a total of 171 DRCs received for this quarter, or 37% reviewed in the month they were published and 60% of my total reviews written. I was most eager to read The Violence: My Family's Colombian War because Author Adriana is an old friend's daughter-in-law, who happens to be a very talented writer. It was a great success in the marketplace, and with me. The second of my two current possibilities for 2026's six-stars-of-five read is a non-fiction book for the first time ever: A Bird's IQ: Innovation, Intelligence, and Problem Solving in the Avian World is by Louis Lefebvre and translated from French by Pablo Strauss. It was a surprise to me how much of Author Lefebvre's earlier novel-writing training held over into his non-ficton prose creation without making it feel as though he was book-horning pretty sentences into places they felt brummagem or incongruous.
Overall, I liked non-fiction a lot more than usual this quarter, with some tippy-top reads as well as a true shocker coming from that genre. The shocker was Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living by Peter Jones; self-help's a genre I view with great skepticism based on what "They" tell you it is, ie a way to fix problems. It's much more interesting to me as a barometer reading of the culture's current obsessions, and the average person's most pressing personal fears. This book managed to be a bit of both. That was a pleasant surprise, plus I liked Author Peter Jones's presentation of self.
Looking ahead to July, I'm not going to kid around: I have forty-two DRCs of July-date reads unreviewed out of forty-three received (as of 1 July, it could go up as the month wears on). I want to get half of those reviewed. I plan to prioritize political books as we head into midterms this quarter. I've got a lot of political-reads noted already from years gine by. I've always held back because so many people I know just flat refuse to put in the work of reading the books. That's no longer something I can factor in to my review-writing queue. The stakes are too high to pander to lowest-common-denominator reading habits.
Can't make y'all read the books, or the reviews, but you'll have to make a conscious choice to skip them.
