My Favorite Reads of the Month (August 2026)

I dislike the term voracious reader, but I’m hard pressed to describe myself with another phrase. Passionate reader? Dedicated reader? I don’t know, but for several decades now, I’ve read about 10-15 books per month. Or tried to read 10-15 books per month, because I’ve learned to simply put down a book that I’m not enjoying and move on to the next with no guilt whatsoever. I’m not in school, though sometimes I dream that I am and that I have completely forgotten the assignment. In my waking life, I don’t give myself any assignment, other than writing deadlines. I’m not even a member of any book club. Well, I do have my own book club. When I am reading a book I’ve bought, I think about a friend who will really enjoy it and then send it to them when I’m done. No boozy meetings or discussions. And I presume the recipient will in turn pass the book on to someone else, though there is no obligation. They don’t even have to thank me. They certainly don’t have to write a book report. (Remember those?)

My pass-along approach to book buying along with a regular use of the local library has helped with the overcrowding of bookshelves in our house. Though having a second vacation home at a beach town in NC that we rent during the summer has expanded the capacity some. The general rule to avoid the hoarder label has been whenever a book comes into the house, one has to leave. I only want to keep books that I expect to re-read, though that’s more of an aspiration than an actual practice. I did just re-read Joan Didion’s The White Album, and was amazed at how little I remembered from my first reading, which must have been 40-50 years ago. The same could be said of books I re-read after a year or two.

Inspired by recommended reading lists from my friend John Schu and author Cindy House, I decided to write a monthly round-up of five of my favorite recent reads, meaning that I’m focusing on what I really enjoyed. My own taste lately leans toward non-fiction (including biographies and memoirs), but I do read some fiction. I’ll be mixing up the genres and subjects as best I can, so it’s not all music biographies or literary memoirs, two of my weak spots.

Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments section below, but please do keep it to recent releases. We don’t need to hear about the wonders of Moby Dick or Gravity’s Rainbow. (I confess to not finishing either one, but before I die…)

The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts

Dr. Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and an acclaimed scholar of African-American history and culture, took a deep dive into the life work of her white father, a sociologist who did extensive research on marriages between Black and white Americans. As a 21-year graduate student in the 60s, he started interviewing couples about just about every aspect of their marriage and its impact on their lives, as well as society’s impact on them. Despite decades-long research and a book deal, he never turned in a manuscript for publishing, and his work was confined to boxes of papers that his daughter came across after his death. Her own look at his work is sort of a hybrid of memoir and sociological study with many questions both personal and universal raised about race, marriage and parenting. The narrative has a slow build as the younger Dr. Roberts reads and researches her father’s work from beginning to end with some startling revelations for her and us. No spoiler from me here.

Turning to Birds: The Power and Beauty of Noticing by Lili Taylor

Like writer Amy Tan, actress Lili Taylor went from being a passive birdwatcher to a passionate birder over the course of a few years and decided to share that experience in a book. For those who are not familiar with the difference, a birdwatcher enjoys seeing birds, while a birder is obsessed with finding, hearing, seeing and documenting them. I’m a sucker for celebrity memoirs, though I’m so often disappointed with the all too frequent lousy writing, solipsism and false modesty. Not here though. Taylor tells the story of her personal transformation chronologically in a series of discreet or stand-alone chapters, so you can’t help but feel yourself caught up in a pursuit that becomes downright obsessive, as she finds herself counting birds, saving barn swallows and battling house sparrows. Yet, thanks to both her genuine modesty and eloquent writing, you feel like you’re reading dispatches from a friend, not a celebrity. I recently found out that my friend David Sedaris had Taylor read chapters from her book as an opening act at some of his shows. He said that not only was she an excellent reader, but she was also gracious with his fans at the post-show meet and greets. Which makes me wonder if the audiobook is even better. Let me know if you’re more of a listening reader.

Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other – and the World by Bob Windolf

The life and music of Bob Dylan and the Beatles constitute a veritable industry of literature. Someone else can take the time to count the number of books written about those icons of modern popular music. I was skeptical of the book’s premise. We Beatles and Dylan fans had heard about how Dylan inspired Lennon & McCartney to change their approach to lyrics and how Dylan’s move away from acoustic folk to electric rock was influenced by the Beatles (well, more like the Beatles c/o the Byrds). But Windolf shows that in reality the relationship between them was much more personal and persistent over the years. His extensive research and interviews touch upon their necessarily private meetings and correspondence for their entire careers. Not sure a non-music fan will enjoy the tale, but for those obsessed with those icons, this book is highly recommended. And if that isn’t enough, there are two more recent books in the same genre. I couldn’t get through the Dylan one, which was more analytical than anecdotal, but the Wings book, mostly an oral history, helped me to better understand McCartney’s music during his nearly 60 years as an ex-Beatle.
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After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace by Robert Polito
Wings: The Sory of a Band on the Run by Paul McCartney

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

Described by some over-eager reviewer as the “Bard of Suburbia,” Perotta indeed does seem to focus on the life and times of suburban Americans, like John Updike to whom he’s been compared over the years. Two of his novels (Election and Little Children) have been turned into movies, while The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher were adapted for TV series. Like Curtis Sittenfeld (and Updike), Perrotta writes well about sex, sparingly but in realistic detail without being prurient. He’s always been a breezy read. Too breezy? That’s what some critics have said about this one, written in the first person from the perspective of a successful but creatively frustrated middle-aged novelist who revisits both his hometown and a trauma-filled period of his 70s youth. For my part, I was engaged from beginning to end and I enjoyed the often-tortured inner monologue of the author reconciling his troubled past.

Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips

It seems that any writer worth their stripe has produced at least one memoir that delves into their past to explain their creative writing process. It’s another overcrowded field, though not comparable to that of celebrity memoirs. Generally, the more accomplished the writer, the better the memoir. In her ninth book, Phillips, a classic Southern-American novelist and short story writer in the rich tradition of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, looks back at her life growing up in rural West Virginia, as well as her own evolution as a writer. I recall reading Machine Dreams, her debut novel, back in the 70s and a few others later, but I had frankly lost track of Phillips’ output. Although she’s not been as prolific as, say, Joyce Carol Oates (for that matter, who is?), I somehow missed that she won a Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, Night Watch. A nicely slender book of 192 pages (size matters to me), Small Town Girls features 22 short essays, roughly in chronological order, about a wide range of topics, including her parents’ hardscrabble life, her affinity to dogs, the Hatfields vs. the McCoys, her adolescent appreciation of Jean Shrimpton, and the writing of Stephen Crane. My favorite essay, “The Widow Speaks,” uses Kenneth Tynan’s letters to expound upon the sometimes laborious process of writing, somehow integrating words of wisdom from nearly a dozen of her peers. That piece alone was worth the price of admission. I’m keeping this book and donating my how-to book of juggling to the local library to maintain bookshelf equilibrium.

Here are a few other non-fiction books I’ve read recently that I’d also recommend without any explanation or exposition:

• Days of Miracle and Wonder: Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland by Ashley Kahn

• Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News Into Art by Joshua Kendall

• End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse and the Unmaking of America by Chris Jennings

• The War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and Home by Wil Haygood

• The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer

• This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark by Craig Fehrman

Here are six interviews with writers from my “Author Author” series, my sub-sub-Substack of “Mergner He Wrote” :

Ashley Kahn on Paul Simon’s Graceland
Paul Alexander on Billie Holiday
Nadine Cohodas on Nina Simone, Dinah Washington and others
Judith Tick on Ella Fitzerald
David Sedaris on jazz
Nat Hentoff on Nat Hentoff

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