Sunday Summary mainly functions as my personal record of book-related topics that have captured my interest over the past week. It also acts as a public memory prompt and bookmarking system.
Books Read/Reading This Week.
Finished:
The Trees by Percival Everett [2021]
Currently Reading:
the long way to a small angry planet by Becky Chambers [2015]
Book-ish Thoughts
I deleted my NetGalley account this week. That’s the end of an era.
I also treated myself to a remote page turner for my Boox Palma and Kindle. I hope it will make for easier reading.
Books Out This Week (and Last)
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) [Bobiverse: Book 1] by Dennis E. Taylor
The Sacred Space Between by Kalie Reid
On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle [Trans. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell]
Slow Gods by Claire North
Violet Thistlewaite Is Not a Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz
Outlaw Planet by M. R. Carey
The Haunting of Paynes Hollow: A Novel by Kelley Armstrong
The Haunted Library: Tales of Cursed Books and Forbidden Shelves [Compiler Tanya Kirk]
Woman in the Pillory – Penguin Modern Classics by Brigitte Reimann [Trans. Lucy Jones]
Books That Others have Tempted Me With:
Collective: The Collaborative Art of Anthologies, edited by Dan Coxon and Pete W Sutton [Out Oct 2026] via Ann VanderMeer
The Delusions by Jenni Fagan [Out March 2026] via Jenni Fagan
Sunday Summary mainly functions as my personal record of book-related topics that have captured my interest over the past week. It also acts as a public memory prompt and bookmarking system.
Books Read/Reading This Week.
Finished:
Volative Memory by Seth Hadon [2025]
Currently Reading:
The Trees by Percival Everett [2021]
Book-ish Thoughts
We’re thinking of 2026 already?
To be fair a couple of weeks ago I was thinking of 2026 as Waterstones had a 2026 pre-order promotion as I was looking at books coming out in 2026.
Some most anticipated in H1:Glyph, Ali Smith (Jan)Loss Protocol, Paul McAuley (Feb)If We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light, Kim Choyeop (Mar)Nonesuch, Frances Spufford (Mar)What We Are Seeking, Cameron Reed (Apr)The End of Everything, M John Harrison (Jun)Isabel J. Kim, Sublimation (Jun)
Womble from Runalong The Shelves has been doing a “Wombling Along” post for the last few weeks, highlighting reviews and other articles that caught their attention over the past week.
This is mostly going to be about books and book-ish things that have come to my attention — and possibly serve as my own public bookmarking system.
We all understand that acquiring books to read later and actually reading books are two entirely separate hobbies, don’t we? Good.
Here is a curated selection from my recent acquisitions, starting with ebooks — some of which were irresistible deals priced between £1.99 and 99p:
Victorian Psycho by Virgina Felto
A Ghost Hunter’s Guide to Solving a Murder by F.H. Petford
An Academy for Liars by Alexis Henderson
Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson
Model Home by Rivers Solomon
The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry
Artificial Wisdom by Thomas R. Weaver
What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
How to Defeat a Demon King in Ten Easy Steps by Andrew Rowe
Reignclowd Palace by Phillipa Rice
Cold Eternity by S.A Barnes
And now the physical books…
All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles
Once Was Willem by M. R. Carey
The Healing Season of Pottery by Yeon Somin
The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi
House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2) by Veronica Roth
Carrion Crow by Heather Parry
Play Nice by Rachel Harrison
The Most Unusual Haunting of Edgar Lovejoy by Roan Parrish
The Haunting of William Thorn by Ben Alderson
Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
Have you read any of these, or are there any you’d like to read?
Selected by a panel of 80 literary professionals, the winners were chosen from over 1,300 book submissions representing more than 300 publishers.
For over 30 years, Lambda Literary has championed LGBTQ books and authors. We believe that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer literature is essential to preserving our culture — and that LGBTQ lives are affirmed when our stories are written, published, and read.
Fiction and poetry
Bisexual Fiction:How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster by Muriel Leung
Gay Fiction:Henry Henry by Allen Bratton
Lesbian Fiction:The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Transgender Fiction:Firebugs by Nino Bulling
Bisexual Poetry:Interrogation Records
Gay Poetry:How to Kill a Goat and Other Monsters by Saúl Hernández
Lesbian Poetry:Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Transgender Poetry:Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski
LGBTQ+ Poetry:Cowboy Park by Eduardo Martínez-Leyva
LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction:Metal From Heaven by August Clarke
Nonfiction and memoir
Bisexual Nonfiction:You’re Embarrassing Yourself by Desiree Akhavan
Gay Memoir/Biography:Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch
Lesbian Memoir/Biography:My Withered Legs and Other Essays by Sandra Gail Lambert
Transgender Nonfiction:Pretty by KB Brookins
LGBTQ+ Nonfiction:The Other Olympians by Michael Waters
I do want to share the LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction one:
Metal From Heaven by August Clarke (Erewhon)
The Palace of Eros by Caro De Robertis (Primero Sueño)
Markless by C.G. Malburi (Levine Querido)
The Sunforge by Sascha Stronach (Saga)
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle (Tor)
The good news for UK readers like myself is that Solaris will be publshing Metal From Heaven at the end of the month — and should be available in any good (or even not-so-good) bookstore.
Good News About Two Lovely People
ONE: Let’s start with a book that’s been years in the making—one I had the privilege of beta reading twice. Both times, it made me cry.
TWO: Historian Sacha Coward has a new publisher—Manchester University Press! That means Queer As Folklore: The Hidden Queer History Of Myths And Monsters is returning to shelves in December 2025.
‘Queer as Folklore’ takes readers across centuries and continents to reveal the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy. Featuring images from archives, galleries and museums around the world, each chapter investigates the queer history of different mythic and folkloric characters, both old and new. Leaving no headstone unturned, Sacha Coward will take you on a wild ride through the night from ancient Greece to the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, visiting cross-dressing pirates, radical fairies and the graves of the ‘queerly departed’ along the way.
I’m going to buy another copy, because the original publisher—despite securing crowdfunding and the book becoming a Sunday Times bestseller—didn’t fully pay out the royalties owed to him. I’m also more than happy to gift a few copies!
It’s been a bit of a busy reading week
I’ve made some progress on The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater (I’m reading the hardback, so it limits when and where I can read); I listened to more of The Devils by Joe Abercrombie, but not as much as I would like; I got a good chunk of Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology read, but I did get thrown by the novella by John Langan, as I was reading the ebook and didn’t know that I’d made a longer-reaching commitment and thought it was a bit slow (it was ultimately excellent). I also started and finished a reread of Crypt of the Moon Spider, and now I’m reading In the Shadow of Their Dying by Michael R. Fletcher & Anna Smith Spark.
And if you’re curious this my The StoryGraph reading round-up for September.
I do need to revisit and share some of my bookmarked items—like the 116 genre books being published this month—but I’ve run out of Sunday. Maybe next week?
Womble from Runalong The Shelves has been doing a “Wombling Along” post for the last few weeks, highlighting reviews and other articles that caught their attention over the past week.
This is mostly going to be about books and book-ish things that have come to my attention — and possibly serve as my own public bookmarking system.
Let’s start with this stack of… I’m genuinely not sure what to call it… books?
It was inspired by Roseanna Pendlebury
Thinking about the things I would love to have read by the end of the year, and pulling together a few piles to drawn from as an aspirational to do list.I will not read all of these. I mean, I possibly theoretically could. But I doubt it. They're just the ones I really want to get in, if I can.
I badged mine as “the stack of books it would be nice to have read by the end of the year.” I added three caveats:
But since I’ve made the pile with the intention of prompting myself to read them, I’ve started with The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater. One chapter in, I’m intrigued—but also wondering why I haven’t heard much about it from others.
I haven’t reviewed my recent reads:
The Last Hour Between Worlds (The Echo Archives #1) by Melissa Caruso [2024]
Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha Wells [2017]
The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association by Caitlin Rozakis [2025]
If I get the time, a joint review of The Last Hour Between Worlds and The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association might be fun. Both are excellent, and both explore parenting in a fantasy setting—though in very different ways. Each had great twists and turns, and both had me emotionally gripped. I highly recommend them.
And if you’re looking for something cosy in an SF setting, The Murderbot Diaries is turning into just that. Nice to see that Martha Wells has the adventures of Murderbot well under control.
It’s October this week. The clock is ticking to get my reading in before the World Fantasy Convention 2025 announces the various award winners. I’m seriously going to need to weave in some novellas alongside the anthologies.
The issue I’m having with Heartwood is that all the stories centre on the mythos at the heart of the wood—and speeding through them would do them a disservice.
I’m sure I’ll figure something out.
The dive into my BookTok bookmarks is going to have to wait until next week.
A review of Network Effect by Martha Wells, which I’m going to avoid until I’ve got to it myself.
A takedown of The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand. I read the last paragraph, as I still hope to finish The Stand and then read the anthology.
More praise for Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha
An older, very serious discussion on the absolute canon to read
And so much more!
Next week, I may wade into “what’s a reviewer for?”—as that was today’s hot topic on Bluesky.
This is the third review from my challenge to read the 2025 British Fantasy Award Best Anthology category.
In the introduction, Charlotte Bond writes:
Whatever your taste, whatever you’re looking for, in these pages, you will learn one thing: how to fight like a girl.
And I did — though I also found a few stories that weren’t to my taste, which is a shame. With fewer stories than the other anthologies I’ve read so far, the weaker ones stand out a little more — but never mind, there are still some standout tales here.
K T Davies’s The Seamstress, the Hound, the Cook, and her Brother surprised me the most using a triptych to follow a crime through different eyes. Having seen the situation build from competing viewpoints, the shifting perspectives give the reader deeper insight into the final scene.
Shifts in perspective are definitely a theme.
One perspective I enjoyed — though I felt a little cheated by — was in A Human Response by Dolly Garland. Here a women’s body is replaced, and she finds herself trapped. Slowly, she pieces together what happens to her. The character is supposed to be without emotion, yet she has emotional reactions, which feels jarring. It also fades to black at a key moment in the ending, which I think robbed the character of the agency Garland had built up.
In In More Trouble Than She’s Worth? by Cheryl Morgan, the narrator lacks agency, but her perspective offers some great observations. For example:
I like the chrome in the sick bay, but am not convinced by the white. My crew have odd taste at times. I, by the way, am Sagaris, an Artemis Class cruiser of the Queen’s Amazon Navy, General Thomys commanding.
And
I got him though, didn’t I?, I thought proudly to myself. You can’t scrag a target without wobbling a few crew stomachs. A little non-fatal discomfort does the little ones good.
In this tale, the crew picks up some very precious cargo. Morgan uses the situation to explore how women can be both mothers and fighters — and how that differs from their enemies. This one made me cry.
The arrogance of men was explored by directly and successfully by both Gaie Sebold and Juliet E. McKenna.
In Ambition’s Engine, Sebold takes us to high society, where a newly appointed Chief Defender of the Dominion’s Transport hatches a plan to get more from a train ride than he was commissioned for. Sebold packs in commentary about war, colonialism, and the arrogance of powerful men.
With Civil War, McKenna examines the impact of a change in monarch when the King has no male heir. She explores the options available to the court and the guilds. This was a like watching a royal game of chess and I didn’t see final the move until it was too late. Very cleverly done.
In the introduction Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall suggest:
‘…perhaps now we can look beyond a direct kick back against the idea that women can’t fight, and start to reintegrate more traditionally acceptable forms of feminine power with that warrior archetype.’
And they’ve proved with this collection that fighting and feminine power take many forms — from the bloody, to the subtle, to the fearless — with motivations that defy the ‘warrior archetype’.
If you don’t need convincing that women can fight, this collection is for you. There are some excellent stories here.
And if you do need some persuasion, this collection is also for you — though you might end up a little more paranoid than before, as not all fights are direct confrontations or fairly fought.
Anthology Details
Title:Fight Like a Girl – Volume 2 Editors: Roz Clarke, Joanne Hall Publisher: Wizard’s Tower Press Publication Date: Autumn 2024 ISBN (Paperback): 9781913892845 ISBN (EPUB): 9781913892852 ISBN (MOBI): 9781913892869 Format: Paperback, EPUB, MOBI
Gav Reads 