Hello Friends! I hope you’re all as ready for August as I am — we are deep in the dog days of summer here, and it is hot in Tampa.
I’m heading to Puerto Rico at the end of the month, which has me thinking a lot about the island’s ongoing water crisis. It’s not just the drought — it’s years of underinvestment and mismanagement, on top of a wave of Americans moving in and displacing local Puerto Ricans. It’s hard to watch a place you love struggle like that.
Closer to home: my birthday was August 6th, and I actually took three full days of PTO and did nothing — well, I did things, just not work-shaped things. I’ve produced close to a thousand podcast episodes at this point, and if you’ve ever wondered how, the answer is “by working constantly,” which finally caught up with me this summer. I’ve been in a season of burnout — podcast, day job, personal life, all of it — and giving myself permission to slow down has been the whole project lately.
If you’re a romance reader, mystery lover, or just someone who traded self-help for fiction or fun non-fiction and never looked back — you’re going to feel right at home here. 🐛📚
What to Read Next is your well-read best friend, your favorite author’s bookshelf, and your Libby cheat code all in one place. Subscribe for curated book lists, reader essays, author recs, and all the library tips you didn’t know you needed.
One of the good things to come out of slowing down: I’ve been making local friends here in Tampa, mostly through my yoga studio. I’d been going since 2024 and never really connected with anyone — I was always just tagging along with a more extroverted friend. Eventually I realized I could just... talk to people. “Hi, how’s it going, are you new here?” Turns out that works. I’ve made friends across every generation — Gen X moms and their daughters, retirees living at a beautifully slower pace, and one friend who’s a college student and former yoga instructor of mine.
That last friendship turned into something I want to recommend to all of you: a monthly reading date. We each pick a coffee shop in our own neighborhood, meet up, catch up on life, and then do a silent 30-minute reading sprint together. They read high fantasy and dark gothic academia — not my genres at all — but it doesn’t matter, because we’re just reading near each other. I’ve since talked my friend Francesca into doing the same thing on the other side of town. If a full silent book club feels like too much, I really can’t recommend this enough: one or two friends, one coffee shop, thirty quiet minutes. It’s lovely.
Want to try it yourself? It’s low-lift on purpose:
Pick one or two reading friends — doesn’t need to be a bookish match, just someone who’ll actually show up.
Pick a coffee shop roughly halfway between you, or trade off neighborhoods each month.
Catch up for the first 10–15 minutes, then set a timer for a silent 30-minute reading sprint.
Bring whatever you’re into — you don’t have to be reading the same book, or even the same genre.
Make it recurring (monthly works well) so it doesn’t need to be re-planned every time.
This post contains affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Confession: I stopped tracking my books this summer, so I genuinely don’t know my June/July count. I DNF’d a handful of things. But two books broke through and I need to talk about them.
This is small-town cozy mystery gold. A very online, very left-leaning family relocates from DC to a small Southern town in the Carolinas that is completely obsessed with designer dogs, right down to a reality TV show filming there. Our heroine, Margot, is out here actively protesting the designer dog show when one of the dog trainers turns up dead — and she becomes the prime suspect. She teams up with her retired HOA-president neighbor and a former queen bee to solve it. It is Desperate Housewives meets Best in Show, and the reveal genuinely surprised me — which almost never happens with cozies at this point in my reading life. I did the audio thanks to PRH Audio. Put this one on your library holds list immediately.
This one’s more “millennial mystery” than cozy: a little less gentle than cozy, a little less gory than thriller, with humor and quirky characters set against a real contemporary backdrop. Our main character is in her twenties, gets caught having sex with her boyfriend on a Zoom call, gets fired, then gets dumped, and ends up moving back in with her parents and taking a job as a school crossing guard in a Chicago suburb. As a crossing guard, she witnesses what looks like a car accident that kills her local nemesis — except it’s not really an accident. Throw in three inherited show poodles, some mafia entanglements, and a killer you absolutely won’t see coming, and you’ve got a book I started at 9pm and finished by 9am the next morning (with a full night’s sleep in between, don’t worry). It didn’t feel like a quick read, but it flew by anyway.
I’m also still working my way through Dungeon Crawl Carl — slowly, on purpose, because I’m way too attached to these characters and I know some of them aren’t making it out. I did cancel my Kindle Unlimited subscription (not using it enough to justify it), so I may end up just buying the ebook to finish the series. I’ll probably resubscribe around the Black Friday deals in November.
If you’ve got book recommendations for me, I am always taking them — send them my way.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.