half way through 2026 so here are a few reading recs

half way through 2026 so here are a few reading recs

• my love of (addiction to?) rss outweighed my loathing server maintenance, so, I plugged a screen into my 11 year old Mac mini and got it cooking again. A power outage a few weeks ago rendered it kinda dazed and confused enough that I couldn’t just reboot it over and over again like I usually do to get it to reset to a (mostly) working state (yes, I know that UPS batteries exist but they so noisy, and this thing is so tiny and easy to stash under a shelf). All is now well, and I even wrote a silly script that does a health check of the few services I run every once in a while and kicks them if they’re misbehaving, which seems to be working with great effect. The Miss Trunchbull school of programming for great excellence.
  
• rewatched Wake Up Dead Man. I am an absolute sucker for mysteries and this series has been delightful
• the kids and I are watching The Dragon Prince together. It is a lot funnier than I assumed it’d be, and we’re enjoying it
• it is well aligned with the summer my older kid is having, going to 2 weeks of D&D camp + the weekly campaign at the game store down the street
• there has been much javascript written over the last few weeks. New game and stuff are cooking
• mostly been watching my partner and kids play video games and not playing heaps myself, but, there are a few Pokemon ROM hacks I’m curious to check out
• the Lord of the Rings read through continues. Wild how absolutely and completely the Peter Jackson films have colonized my memory of this story!
• which gets me to the real goal of this said post…we’re more than half way through the year(ish), so here are some quick call outs of stuff I’ve read and enjoyed

Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series gets a fair bit of attention. These books came to me highly recommended by friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Folks dig ’em — I dug ’em! Of the lot, I think that Harrow the Ninth was tops for me because I found the primary protagonist more compelling, and to be less bound up by the burden of being a Whedon-esq anti-hero. Also, it was fun to learn the Muir is into Homestuck because there are defo some architectural similarities in story construction (pushes glasses up nose).

Along a similar vein (get it?), but more mycelia than bone and blood are Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds and The Sunforge. They play in a similar space to the Locked Tomb books with long time, empowered folks, and a lot of interiority across a few characters’ perspectives.

Hold your horses, this next paragraph includes some minor spoilers for Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar! You can safely skip it if you wish to avoid such things.

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar is a perfect thing and I think that she’s one of the greatest writers doing the dang thing right now. Also, I should read more short stories. I’m not usually a short story reader. One of my fav. things in This Is How You Lose the Time War is when 1 of the characters recommends an actual, IRL book to another character…which convinced me to go find that book (obscure, not easy!) and read it. Reading that book totally and completely layered in some cool new stuff in the story of Time War. Similarly, through Seasons of Glass and Iron the short stories include reference to other stories, but, often times (most obviously with the very last story in the collection) the story previously referenced will actually be one of the later stories. I know it isn’t novel, but it is so expertly done here. Just absolutely delicious.

I literally read The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed because it had a title reminiscent of another book I adore, A Memory Called Empire. No regrets! I tend not to enjoy “hard” sci-fi that is super uber concerned with the mechanisms of light speed travel and stelar trajectories and what not. I usually don’t like that stuff because it so often has nothing to do with the story, it is there as set dressing and flex. This book probably wouldn’t be classified as hard sci-fi, tbh, but, everything that is tangential to that stuff that is here is there for a reason, and fun to read because it layers in more world building that avoids the trap of sneaking in a whole-dang wikipedia article into a chapter.

Last but not least, Moss’d in Space by Rebecca Thorne. Cozy romantasy in space!

Published July 11, 2026