{"id":5188,"date":"2026-07-31T20:48:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T00:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=5188"},"modified":"2026-08-16T20:05:47","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T00:05:47","slug":"july-2026-books-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2026\/07\/july-2026-books-read\/","title":{"rendered":"July 2026 books read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em>Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World<\/em> &#8211; Edward Humes, 2024. Nature\/Enviro selection, quotes TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Cuckoo&#8217;s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage<\/em> &#8211; Clifford Stoll, 2005. This was recommended by multiple people (I don&#8217;t remember where) and it&#8217;s indeed great. Plus it led me to Stoll&#8217;s amazing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kleinbottle.com\/\">Klein bottle<\/a> site.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Kidnapped<\/em> &#8211; Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. For a Catherine Project group; quotes TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em> &#8211; Jean Rhys, 1966. Great Books, quotes TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>The Night Bookmobile<\/em> &#8211; Audrey Niffeneger, 2008. I was hoping this was another novel like <em>The Time Traveler&#8217;s Wife<\/em>, but it&#8217;s a slim graphic novel, almost a picture book. I didn&#8217;t like it much but was having trouble putting my finger on exactly why &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/review\/show\/139742988\">this Goodreads review<\/a> did the work for me!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Billy Budd<\/em> &#8211; Herman Melville, left unfinished in 1891, published in 1924 in a version assemebled by his widow; I&#8217;d like to read one of the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Billy_Budd\">updated versions<\/a>. Re-read (after many decades) because of Far Out Film watching <em><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Beau_Travail\">Beau Travail<\/a><\/em>. A very interesting contrast between the two.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Romola<\/em> &#8211; George Eliot, 1863. Great Books selection; quotes TBD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Little Men<\/em> &#8211; Louisa May Alcott, 1871. Children&#8217;s book group selection, re-read but I barely remembered it. What a weird mix of wacko kid behavior\/observation and sentimental stories, with what feels like quite a bit of padding (&#8220;let&#8217;s stop everyone who comes to the schoolroom and make THEM tell a story!&#8221;) <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Flaubert&#8217;s Parrot<\/em> &#8211; Julian Barnes, 1984. For the Massachusetts Center for the Book <a href=\"https:\/\/www.massbook.org\/readingchallenge\">challenge<\/a>, &#8220;A book found at a Little Free Library, tag sale, or used bookstore.&#8221; I picked this up from a free library in an old newspaper kiosk on Main Street because I&#8217;ve wanted to read it for a long time. I owned a copy for many years but never actually got around to it, so this felt good, and it&#8217;s not long. I wrote: &#8220;A wonderful book-length essay on Flaubert in a variety of forms, coated in a tiny bit of fiction &#8211; I don&#8217;t think it needed to be a novel, but it&#8217;s delightful in any case.&#8221; I really enjoyed it.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Pride and Prejudice<\/em> &#8211; Jane Austen, 1823. I became addicted to the <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/trungles.com\">Trung Le Ngyuen<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/trungles.com\/post\/3mqqsmgb7ck22\">read-along thread<\/a> and had to re-visit. Then off to the 1995 BBC and 2005 film adaptations, so it turned into a P&amp;P month. Thanks, Trungles!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>Number One Joy Street<\/em> &#8211; 1923. This first in an anthology series of children&#8217;s stories and poetry was in my grandmother&#8217;s collection and I remembered it fondly. It came up for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pgdp.net\/wiki\/DP_Official_Documentation:Smooth_Reading\/Smooth_Reading_FAQ\">smooth reading<\/a> on Distributed Proofreaders so I was happy to help get it ready for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/ebooks\/79207\">Project Gutenberg<\/a>. Alas, it doesn&#8217;t hold up as well as I hoped. I think as a child I enjoyed the illustrations more than the content.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em>How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming<\/em> &#8211; Mike Brown, 2010. An engrossing and enjoyable science memoir about Brown&#8217;s discovery of a tenth &#8220;planet,&#8221; Eris, leading to the demotion of Pluto.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn&#8217;t finish a book group selection (Second Monday), which is unusual for me. It was <em>The Russian Debutante&#8217;s Handbook<\/em> by Gary Shteyngart, which I had been looking forward to. But it was not funny to me and very long, so I gave up after 150 pages. I still enjoyed the discussion but it didn&#8217;t make me regret dropping the book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t finish a book group selection (Second Monday), which is unusual for me. It was The Russian Debutante&#8217;s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart, which I had been looking forward to. But it was not funny to me and very long, so I gave up after 150 pages. I still enjoyed the discussion but it didn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monthly-lists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5188"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5232,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5188\/revisions\/5232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}