Hahaha, I read virtually nothing this month. Had 0 time, because my household gained two foster teens. One of these is a permanent placement, but the other is in crisis and will be moving on soon, after which my life will stabilize again.

We’ll see if the one who’s going to be here long-term can be gotten into the habit of reading books. Fingers crossed!

Short stories:

“The Unfinished Basement” by A. R. Capetta

A story about ghosts and hauntings.

“The Quality of Mercy is not Strain’d” by Archita Mittra

A cyborg enslaved by a corporation over long centuries forms a bond with an abandoned droid on a dead planet.

“Bertie Changes His Mind”, “The Inferiority Complex of Old Sippy”, “Jeeves and the Impending Doom” by P. G. Wodehouse

I get all these stories from this Substack: https://substack.com/@lettersregardingjeeves

“Bertie Changes his Mind” is the first Jeeves and Wooster story I’ve read from Jeeves’s perspective. Managed to be completely hilarious, despite swapping out Wooster’s comical turns of phrase for Jeeves’s dry wit.

I also liked the “Impending Doom” one! There’s a swan attack in it.

Books:

“Mr. Justice Raffles” by E. W. Hornung

Back into it with Raffles, as Hornung wrote quite a few additional stories and this one novel about the character, set in the years preceding his canonical death in the Boer War. Since the narrator of the stories is Bunny, who survived the war, I wondered whether they’d be told from a perspective of grief and nostalgia. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In this novel, Bunny and Raffles are young again, and all of the tribulations they’ll ultimately go through have yet to occur. Basically, it’s a reboot and I was bored.

Comics:

The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag

My teen daughter made me read this one! (As of this month, I have a teen daughter.) She said it was her favorite, and I can see why. A bittersweet summer romance between a girl and a selkie. As a parent, I loved the book’s message of, “Communicate, darn it!”

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, deluxe edition volumes 1 and 2, by Hitoshi Ashinano

This has become the series I read when my children are hovering. Note that I got through two omnibuses in one month, despite finding little time to read anything else. That’s a lot of hovering. In these circumstances, it should make perfect sense why I’ve been motivated to read a story about a quiet, slow winding down of the world. Ashinano imagines a gorgeously atmospheric post-post-apocalyptic Japan. This is the first science fiction I’ve read in a long time that makes me want to live in its pages. A slow-crawling end of days sounds perfect to me!

Spy Family vol. 8

This volume spotlighted Mrs. Yor Forger! Since she was introduced as an assassin, her career seemed to take a narrative backseat to her husband’s spy escapades. So I didn’t expect the series would give us an entire arc about one of her missions. It’s a refreshing change of pace.