Our reads in July 2026

Another month,another pile of books. Share your reading life with us all.

Dusty's TBR for July
Ted Sturgeon - Venus Plus X
Edgar Allan Poe - Masque of the Red Death✔
Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London
Isaac Asimov - The Naked Sun
Daniel O'Malley - Blitz

Currently Reading
In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente

On Deck
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
The Yith Cycle: Tales of the Lovecraftian Great Race and Time Travel ed. Robert M. Price

Ordered/Requested
BLAME! Master Edition, 2 by Tsutomu Nihei
Platform Decay by Martha Wells
The Regicide Report by Charles Stross

June 30 observations: Right now, I'm between sf novels and preoccupied with reading Baudrillard's America for the semiquincentennial. At least two of my ordered/requested titles should be promoted to on deck status this week: The hold fairy has Player Piano ready, and she is just waiting for me to make the trip to the branch library in the heat, and I expect to take delivery on the copy I ordered of There Is No Antimemetics Division.

Currently reading - Bear Head - Adrian Tchaikovsky

I have Ode to the Half Broken - Suzanne Palmer to read next and have Green City Wars - Adrian Tchaikovsky on hold at the library. I want to get to Halcyon Years - Alastair Reynolds. I might bump that one up next as I really like Alastair Reynolds and that one keeps getting bumped for library books.

My planned SF&F books for July are:

Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Valiant by Jack Campbell
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame edited by Robert Silverberg
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

I am currently reading Zero History. Then I’ll take a SF break and read A Gentleman in Moscow. After that it will be either The Windup Girl or Altered Carbon both of which have been on my TBR list for awhile.

Weird… can’t get my touchstones to work right now…

>7 Neil_Luvs_Books: Have you read A Gentleman in Moscow before? I thought it was great.

Ah,just enjoyed the gothic extravaganza of Poe's Masque of the Red Death. Naturally Roger Corman's 1964 film came to mind,with the over the top dramatics of Vincent Prince ,perfectly cast as the wicked Prince Prospero,and the inevitable cheesy Corman stuff somewhat mitigated by the magnificent photography of Nicolas Roeg (who can forget that little red coat bustling through a dark wet Venice in Dont Look Now?)
Cant believe that in a mere 16 years they will be celebrating the 200th anniversary of EAPs birth
Read this for a reading challenge for another group.

The July line-up is Interference, The Faith of Beasts, This Brutal Moon, and Mutiny at Vesta.

>9 dustydigger: And, of course, the inspiration for one of fantasy's great moments of comedy in Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic. I don't need to quote it, do I?

>8 Karlstar: this will be my first time reading A Gentleman in Moscow. A few of my family members whose opinion I value read it this past year and highly recommended it. My partner also read Towles’s Rules of Civility and gave it high praise too.

I’m looking forward to reading it in a couple weeks.

>11 RobertDay: Ah I do love Death in the Discworld series.The way he always talks in capitals is unfailingly amusing.
''I WAS AT A PARTY'' he said somewhat reproachfully.''I THINK IT MIGHT GO DOWNHILL VERY QUICKLY AT MIDNIGHT...THATS WHEN THEY THINK I'LL BE TAKING OFF MY MASK''
I love that ''somewhat reproachfully'' lol.
That terrible ravaged face of a plague victim? Not a mask.

I finished A Jura for Julia today, and what a blesséd relief it was after the Eric Frank Russell I read immediately before it. My review below.

I'm now in genre-adjacent territory, reading Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore's fall out, which is a long way from fannish squee but (so far) avoids descending into serious media criticism with all the obscurantism that usually entails. It is also pretty uncompromising so far on the personality of Patrick McGoohan himself, but given what we know about the man I would not expect any less. He would probably approve.

Finished Shrine of Stars, started Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.

>14 RobertDay: You might enjoy Julia if you haven't read it. It is a retelling of 1984 with the titular character as the protagonist. I thought that it was very well done.

I'm reading Earth 7, a recently published literary SF novel set in a future depopulated world ravaged by climate change. It follows two women who fall in love at the end of the world. I'm enjoying it a lot.

I just posted my review of The Incandescent by Emily Tesh.

>18 Stevil2001: That's a very interesting review, especially as I've never read either Emily Tesh (though I may do in future) or J.K. Rowling (who I almost certainly will not).

I suspect that very few magical school books are written from the p.o.v. of teachers because so few writers have themselves been teachers. But your review also makes me think this: the UK is a country that for very many years has been run by people who went to private schools. What sort of a country would it be if it was run by people who had been to magical private schools?

>19 RobertDay: You can definitely tell Tesh was a teacher, she gets the mentality and the mechanics very well!

What sort of a country would it be if it was run by people who had been to magical private schools?

Could they be any worse?

>18 Stevil2001: great review, very thoughtful.
I liked it quite a bit too.

I finished Escape Velocity by Christopher Stasheff today. It starts out seeming to be a silly, spoof type of book, but gets a bit more serious as it goes. I enjoyed it.

>21 amberwitch: thank you!

Finished up The Faith of Beasts. I felt better about it than the first book of the trilogy (...or is it?), but it remains to be seen whether the authors can get to a convincing ending that doesn't depend on a total deus ex machina.

It seems that my science fiction reading this month will be female fantasy writers- is that a contradiction in terms?

I have started Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz which I am enjoying and so I will probably complete the trilogy

I also hope to get to Red Moon and Black Mountain by Joy Chant which is also part of a series.

Both books were published in 1970 and sold well.

>25 baswood: Deryni Rising has been on my TBR list for some time now. I’ll be interested to read your review when you finish it.

>26 Neil_Luvs_Books: I've also been curious whether a re-read is called for, my recollection merely is that the setting and plot were atypical of my usual fantasy reading when I first read in the late 1980s, without specific memories of how good the books actually were.

Just started Volatile memory by Seth Haddon for one of the book groups. Short and engaging, thus far (chapter 3). It's a finalist for both Aurealis and Lambda awards, which is how it reached our radar.