I worked on the list of books for July back in July, even though I wanted to just sit on the back deck and read all summer. I’d have invited you over, but, well, (shaking Kindle), “Book!”. But life got away from me, and I never did post the July list.

As I mentioned in June, some book clubs don’t post at the start of every month, so when I do my curation, I invariably miss some updates from delayed announcements. Last month, I curated before four clubs made five book announcements involving trickster gods, amnesiac ghosts, and a sniper. Sounds like a good mix. 🙂

For the rest of the month, I added 69 new book club rows, with 66 distinct titles across those rows (with 7 from a previous month plus 3 duplicates within the month for an addition of 59 books to the database). I was more aggressive, though — I only said yes to 18, maybe to 8, and a whopping 43 were no. 🙂 (Including duplicates, of course). That sounds great, right? Except, cough, well, it was actually the highest yes rate of the year. Oops. 🙂

2026 so far

The full July club list

Bestsellers

• Bestsellers: 69 (across 19 sub-lists from Amazon, G&M, Indie and NYT)
• YES: 17 (see below)
• MAYBE: 9
• NO: 43

Here is the list I said YES to, after removing all the books that were already in a club.

The full bestseller list

This is the list of all “new-to-me” books after removing ones already considered.

Dropping a Club: Jeselnik

I’m slowly weeding clubs and sources from consideration, starting with those that don’t contribute to my “YES” column. They may be great books, but they are not right for my tastes.

Jeselnik’s Book Club is on the chopping block this month. It’s still in my list above, as is Library Sciences, but they become automatic retireds in the future.

Until the next book…