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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 /

[Read Full Review]

Book Review: On The Mark by Florence Hazrat

Misses The Mark. This is a book that should have been completely objective. It sho

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

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 Greenb

Solid Thriller Will Make You Think - And Has Interesting Real-World Implications. This is a book that takes a passage that I literally pre

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 Valle

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 r

Revolutionary. If you've ever wondered how a revolution could actually happen in the 2020s world... t

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, w

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

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 versi