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August 2026 opened with devastation, losing my cat of nearly 20 years just hours before the calendar rolled over into August, and ended with a lot of fun - Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando, where my wife does an annual birthday trip for the first couple of weeks of the event and I generally come down from our home in Jacksonville on the weekends while working during the week. This year is really cool being an anniversary year, and we were able to do the Premium Scream Night for the first time, which was really fun - next to no one in the park and "free" food and drink. (For this event, you pay quite a bit more than a normal HHN ticket, so the more accurate term is "included". But we got to eat quite a bit of food and at least now know where we want to continue to spend our money through the rest of the event. :D)

Along the way, I managed to read an additional 18 books, bringing me to 129 on the year. Some were excellent, others were a bit of a letdown. Below, you can see which were which.

I also wrote a couple of commentary pieces as well as copied a post to this site that I still fear will eventually be taken down from its original home, and in the interests of free speech and maintaining an important - and dissident - voice, I chose to ensure that it would survive at least somewhere online so long as I remain capable of hosting a site myself. I even made a few changes to said site, the most prominent of which is a new "What I''m Reading" section along the right side in desktop mode, though I do need to work it a bit better for mobile at some point in the near future.

And now, on to the book reviews...

The Book Reviews

Blog Tour: Everything We Found by Kerry Lonsdale

For this blog tour, we're looking at an excellent and exciting conclusion to a series readers thought for nearly a decade had already concluded. For this blog tour, we're looking at Everything We Found by Kerry Lonsdale.

First, the review I posted to the book sites (BookBub.com BookHype.com /

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Book Review: On The Mark by Florence Hazrat

Misses The Mark. This is a book that should have been completely objective. It should have been completely neutral on all things politics. It would have been an easy five stars and utterly useful for everyone had it been.

Solid Expose That Could Have Been Better With More Balanced Treatment. First off, kudos to the authors for just how well documented this book is - roughly 27%. They build the case of their central premise well, and seemingly damn near every sentence has a footnote attached, at least at times. Yes, there are a lot of anecdotes and (brief, mostly) profiles of various people, but again - *very* well documented anecdotes and profiles.

Really the only even slight negative - enough for me to deduct a star and think it reasonably objective - is the authors' left of center viewpoints embedded in the narrative as simply axiomatic truths, including their far too common recommendations for future actions section (since all such books are seemingly required to have one) being the all-too-common Democratic/ Democratic Socialists approach of "more money" and "more regulation". This is one area where your mileage will absolutely vary based on your own political views and how well they line up with the authors', but there is also so much good, solid information here that even with these opinions baked in so heavily, they never come across as overly preachy so much as simply 'there'. Similar to a superhero story where you never get an origin or explanation, they simply exist, period, and the narrative moves on and never explains or questions said existence.

Solid Biography Of Little Known Founder. I'm not so sure that I would go so far as the title of this book in claiming that Morris is 'forsaken' in modern American history, and despite Greenberger's claims, he never really looks at the modern legacy of Morris enough to really solidify his claim in both the title and the closing words of the texts. This noted, Morris certainly doesn't get the zeitgeist or educational attention that several of the other Founders - specifically, the ones who became President but also a few others who held more central national government positions than Morris ever did ( Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Jay, etc).

Solid Thriller Will Make You Think - And Has Interesting Real-World Implications. This is a book that takes a passage that I literally preached my first (and so far only) "official" sermon on - John 8's "Woman Caught In Adultery", the famous "go and sin no more" encounter - and spins it into a modern day almost Dan Brown meets National Treasure type of tale where the action is tight, there is at least some travelling around... and a lot of shadowy figures are always *right there* lurking.

Fun Tech-Based "Magical Realism" Romance. This is a really fun "magical romance"... for the tech crowd - be they professionals (as our primary characters here) or "simply" enthusiasts. Set in Silicon Valley and its startup culture, this is one that takes a rather interesting spin on the "do over" idea and really uses it to examine a lot of deep questions and issues... while never actually feeling like it is diving so deep as to be a more philosophy tome ala say Atlas Shrugged. (Which is an awesome story itself, but also explicitly has an 80 page *actual philosophy tome* buried within its story.)

Solid Thriller. This is one of those mysterious road trip thrillers where things start out clearly "off"... and turn rather explosive indeed. For those new to Dunnett, this is a pretty solid introduction, as it really does show off everything you really need to know - and that I've come to deeply enjoy across several books now. (Including having The Lies, the conclusion of his Detective Erica Sands series, to read here in the coming weeks before its release in just over a month!)

Revolutionary. If you've ever wondered how a revolution could actually happen in the 2020s world... this is exactly such a tale. Set in post-Arab Spring Africa, this is one of those thrillers that shows exactly how a Katniss Everdeen type revolution could happen in the real world in 12K clarity.

Interesting Blend Of Mystery And Romance With Atypical Setting And Characters. This is one of those books that is officially listed as a "book 2" but that can absolutely be read as a standalone. The story here starts slow, with a lot of setting up of both our characters and the remote setting they find themselves in... because they were each explicitly seeking out such a remote locale, for reasons of their own.

More Comprehensive Than Some Yet Still Misses Key Elements. I read this book on my morning walks immediately following finishing Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar (about mandatory parking requirements in the US and featuring heavy discussions of some things and even sources that Gray discusses more briefly here), and I'll be following this book with Killed By A Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall. Clearly, I have a th [Continue Reading]

Quite Possibly Walker At His Absolute Best. I've been reading Walker's books for a few years now, and they've pretty consistently been rather amazing. Truly.

This one, even with its perhaps a touch disjointed start (though well within established norms of many different versions of multi-character tales such as this), is quite likely his best to date - which is saying much, given how powerful his earlier stories were as well.