September 2026
September felt like a weird dream- living in a new house with no idea where anything is or belongs. Trying to learn new patterns. Trying to not drive to the old house on auto-pilot. The heat was brutal too. I made my fourth trip to NM this year to attend my Granny Renee’s memorial service. That was a hard trip, but very important for grieving and healing.
Anyway, here are the books I finished and my reviews of them:
Fiction Books
Dali wakes up with no idea who he is (like Grace in PHM). His memories didn’t stick. He is part of a team of four clones on a deep space mission to make first contact with an alien planet. The crew is twelve light-years away from Earth. Sandy is the warship Magellan commander. Kari is the ship scientist/botanist. Helios is the ship doctor. Dali is the humanities expert tasked with communicating with the two alien races on Bee. The story feels like a sci-fi adventure book, but it is packed with ideas about the social, political, religious, and scientific implications of first contact with aliens. The author assumes that other sentient creatures would have their own drama, motivations, and lies. The story has plenty of science, action, discovery, and plot twists. I found it to be creative, unique, and entertaining. Thanks for sending this one to me, Mike.
This is for interstellar adventurers, scientists, and artists.
(Rated R, Score 8/10, audiobook read by Neil Shah, 13:03)
The Warden and the Wolf King by Andrew Peterson (Wingfeather Saga #4)
Janner turns thirteen at the start of the book and gets blind-plopped in the middle of nowhere as part of a Durgan ritual designed to test the young man’s skills at survival, orientation, and navigation. During his trip back, the Fang army attacks Ban Rona with an air assault- Bat Fangs. Kalmar alerts the backup troops about the secret assault and saves the city from being overrun. Leeli discovers that her whistle harp has the ancient power to turn the tide of battle. She also uses her dog-speak gift to send messages and reinforcements where needed. The Fangs pull back, and the city stands for the moment. Kalmar knows that the only way to win the war is to cut the head off of the snake- Kalmar goes after Gnag the Nameless in the Castle Throg. On his way, he finds Janner and a young troll he rescued and befriended named Oood. The trio heads toward the deeps of Throg. On their way, they go through Clovenfast, and they meet the queen and spark hope in the creatures there. On the doorstep of the deeps, the broken cloven army takes out Oood. The boys make it into the Castle Throg, steal the ancient stone, and run away from a Bonnifer Squoon spider creature. But Gnag isn’t in his castle. He is capturing Leeli. The boys are captured at the bottom of their escape route from the castle, and the children are taken to the Isle of Anniera, where Gnag forces the jewels to open a secret chamber called the Fane of Fire, where he steals a much bigger ancient stone of power. The final battle is a crazy mix of all the creatures, including the dragons, ridge runners, fangs, and cloven. The end of the book is a story of ultimate sacrifice as the Wingfeather brothers seek to heal the fangs and the cloven who will be the seeds that begin the renewed kingdom of Anniera. This is my favorite book in the series. It is the most complete. It ties up almost all of the loose ends. It takes you through the darkest depths, and tension and sorrow and loss, but restores your hope. It’s a reminder that we are all loved and named by the Maker. It says that little boys are made out of much more solid stuff than we give them credit for. Let’s challenge, teach, and grow them. Let’s help them do dangerous things, carefully.
This is for adventurers, seekers, and healers.
(Rated PG, Score 10/10, audiobook read by the author, 13:46)
The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell (Impossible Creatures #2)
Christopher Forrester is a guardian. He guards the way between our world and the Glimoria Archipelago- a magical place where all the impossible creatures live. He is called back to the Archipelago by Jacques, the tiny dragon, to investigate the death of the dragons. Naravirala, the ancient sphinx, guides them in their investigation. On their way to find the ancient dragons, they rescue a princess, Anya Argen, who is being hunted by her evil uncle, Claude Argen, who seeks to be king. The children face many dangers in their quest to save the dragons. They evade assassins who would kill Anya so that Claude would inherit the throne. The children are aided by the berserker Fidens Nighthand, and his love, the scientist, Irian Guinne, who have established a massive sanctuary for creatures in need. Nighthand is my favorite character behind Jacques. The berserker does not feel fear, and so, cannot love, because to love is to risk loss, and that is terrifying. I love the characters and plot development in this story almost as much as the first book. I enjoyed the way Rundell describes difficult things like the internal poison of revenge, or the depth of treachery in gold. I love all the magic, and wonder, and power that the impossible creatures bring into the story. I love way the story leads to the inevitable ruin of greed. As with the first book, I loved the language, the world-building, the adventure, and the deeper truths. We are already looking forward to book 3.
This is for dragon riders, alchemists, and young royals.
(Rated PG, Score 10/10, audiobook read by Sam West, 7:06)
Mission Critical by Mark Greaney (Gray Man #8)
Gray Man teams up with Anthem (Zoya) and Romantic (Zach Hightower) in Poison Apple, a sub rosa (off-the-books) CIA program. The CIA has a mole who is selling secrets to the Chinese, Iran, and other anti-American actors. The action starts with Gray Man finding himself in the middle of a shootout during a compromised prisoner handoff. The prisoner has info about the CIA mole, and the bad guys kidnap him from the CIA to keep him quiet. Anthem escapes a death squad ordered to execute her at a CIA safehouse, and cons her way over to the UK in search of her father (General Zakharov), who is supposed to be dead, but is actually an active Russian spymaster working in the UK. Romantic is ordered to lean on the short list of CIA employees who had access to all the recently compromised ops to scare out the mole. The chase leads to the Five Eyes spy conference where the leaders of all the English-speaking intelligence agencies will meet in Scotland. The ultimate plot is against that conference. A bio weapon is being made to infect the top spies with pneumonic plague. It’s up to Poison Apple to spoil the attack.
Like the other Gray Man books, this one is filled with violent action, snark, subterfuge, and vigilante justice. It begs the question: Who are the “good guys”? What if the good guys are also bad? Is it ok for the good guys to do bad things to the bad guys to protect the rest of us? I found it fascinating that this book about weaponized plague would find me right after finishing a book about Ebola and the great lengths we went to to not weaponize it accidentally against ourselves.
I recommend this book to Mitch Rapp, Jason Bourne, and Gray Man fans.
(Rated R, Score 8/10, audiobook read by Jay Snyder, 17:01)
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Some books are therapeutic. This little book is that type. Mackesy wrote this book for everyone- from eight to eighty-year-olds. It’s filled with over 100 beautiful drawings of the boy, the mole, the fox, and the horse as they interact. The dialog is simple and very profound. The boy is lonely when he meets the mole. The mole loves cake. The fox is usually silent because he’s been hurt by the world. The horse is the strongest. The characters look at the wild which is scary and beautiful with storms, night, snow, and spring. I love this book and reread it often. It reminds me of many good, healthy truths.
This book is for everyone. It is deeply therapeutic. Get the hardback and read it with a warm beverage to refresh your soul.
(Rated G, Score 10/10, Hardback)
Non-Fiction Books
What’s Wrong With The World by G.K. Chesterton
I borrowed this book from my friend Jason many moons ago and finally got through it. The language is 1910 England English, so it was a bit more challenging than the other books I've read lately. Chesterton undertakes a study in five parts of the broken bits of society and argues that we already know how to fix them; we just haven’t had the discipline or courage. The five parts are: 1) The homelessness of man. 2) Imperialism. 3) Feminism. 4) Education. 5) The home of the man. Running through all parts is the theme that reformers have confused the cure with the disease by trying to radically reinvent the family rather than by going back to the fundamental family unit as it has been successfully used in the past. People want a fancy new future, not boring disciplines and structure. Instead of industrial capitalism or state socialism, Chesterton argues for distributing property back to families willing to use it well. He calls it Distributism. On feminism and education, he argues that we are getting “progress” at the cost of our freedoms. He suggests that women’s suffrage is a way to suck women into the drudgery of the modern workforce rather than a way to give them equal rights. In a similar way, he suggests that the modern education system is just creating little cogs to fuel the economic/industrial machine, when it should be creating whole, free individuals. The point is that we get obsessed with the novelty of the future, rather than focusing on the successful/proven methods we can study from the past. Thank you, Jason, for letting me borrow this book. I’ll get it back to you soon.
This is for a philosophical revamp, and thinkers who appreciate old truths.
(Rated PG, Score 8/10, audiobook read by Bernard Mayes, 6:54)
No One’s Coming by Kevin Hazzard
This is a fascinating book about mixing airplanes and lethal infectious diseases. Phoenix Air is the company who gets the phone call, when situations are impossible like moving ebola victims without infecting the modern world. Ebola is a terrifying disease. We send doctors all over the world to fight the disease. But what happens when those doctors get sick. They want to come home and fight the disease with the people they love. This book is about how the people at Phoenix Air went above and beyond their duty, and literally invented the art of safely transporting patients with infectious diseases. There were no rules for how to properly handle situations like this and the fear and red tape in the way were monumental, but the crew at Phoenix Air stepped up, innovated, and pushed through safely. There’s a quote I use at work for situations like this: Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. The crew at Phoenix Air had a long history of knowing the rules and dealing with elevated risk and danger from their time hauling explosives. This put them in a strategic position to invent biomedical transport when the need arose.
Thanks, Phil for recommending this one.
This is for airplane people and medical people.
(Rated R, Score 9/10, audiobook read by Nick Mills, 8:04)
The biology involved in climbing Mount Everest was a little bit lost on me until I read this book. The summit of the giant mountain is almost 30,000 feet. Airplane pilots learn to deal with hypoxia starting at about 10,000 feet. The author was part of an expedition attempting to summit Everest in May, 1996. The book covers the trip through base camp and each of the other camps on the mountain as the group acclimates to the altitude and the elements. The author includes some of the history of the mountain and how climbing it had become more commercialized as guides are highly-paid to get inexperienced climbers to the top. During the climbing season in the book, there were several different climbing teams working their way up the mountain and each had different guides and different skill levels. Several groups attempted to summit on May 10. Some made it. Others are still there, frozen in death. It was fascinating to read about the way the lack of oxygen caused the climbers to lose cognitive function and make poor decisions in the weather and the altitude, and how communication deteriorated leading to the death of several climbers. The human will to overcome difficulty and suffering is unbelievable. One climber was left for dead by his teammates twice and still managed to get himself low enough to be rescued properly after spending two nights (I think) unprotected on the mountain. I climbed several mountains in my youth, and I now can confirm that I have no desire to tackle Everest.
Key takeaways: Oxygen is important. Always climb with a buddy. Careful communication is important in crisis. Nature is unforgiving. Even the professionals make mistakes. Getting to the top is not the only goal because you still have to survive the trip back down.
Thank you, Lucas for recommending this one to me.
This is for climbers, adventurers, and sherpas.
(Rated PG-13, Score 8/10, audiobook read by Philip Franklin, 9:08)
Currently Reading-
Many Waters by Madeleine L’Engle
Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri
I track my books in a database called Goodreads. It might help you manage your reading lists.
Final Thoughts-
How do you say goodbye to someone who had been such a big part of your biggest moments? How do you honor them well? How do you process all the grief without it getting stuck somewhere behind your Adam’s apple? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. I’m still discovering them. When we traveled to Alamogordo in southern New Mexico for Granny’s memorial service, we were each trying to answer those questions. My dad and my uncle asked me to give her eulogy. I spent a lot of time working on crafting the right words. There are some words in there that make me cry every time I read them. I think that those words that are the closest to the truth about who she was and how much she meant. Those are the words that are closest to describing her properly. I’m sure what I said wasn’t perfect, and my delivery was interrupted by my allergies (tears), but my hope is that it helped the people there remember Granny in a beautiful way, and that it captured the essence of what she means to my family and her community. My Granny was a wonderful lady. She will be deeply missed.
Thanks for adventuring with me.
Joshua