July felt really long yet not nearly long enough. There’s stuff I remember doing this past month that feels like happened many more weeks ago, yet I still can’t believe we’ve reached the Sunday of summer already. I hope everybody else has been enjoying their summer, wildfire smoke and heat waves notwithstanding. I showed a fair amount of restraint this month, grabbing only a couple books early on and then another pair right at the eleventh hour.

Let’s see what I picked up.

New Books

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck is a horror novella I’ve been wanting to check out for a while now. Early in July, a couple of friends talked about having read it, which got me thinking about it more than normal, so when I saw it on sale somewhere for $15 I decided to just grab it. Part of me wants to wait until October to read it, but another part of me just wants to start it soon as a sort of side dish since The Count of Monte Cristo is going to continue to take me so long.

There is No Antimemetics Division by qtnm is a book I first featured in one of these posts back in October 2021. It was randomly recommended to me on Goodreads back then, and the premise really grabbed me. It follows a division of an agency that combats “antimemes”, which are phenomena that, by their intrinsic nature, discourage or prevent people from spreading knowledge about them. But how do you research and combat that which endeavours to thwart your very memory of it? By appearances, this book had a cult following that grew over the last 5 years, resulting in it receiving wider publication with a new hardcover edition last year. I found out my favourite local bookshop had a copy on hand, so I decided to finally pick it up.

Push the Wall by Frank Miller sat in the display window of my local bookshop for weeks, immediately catching my eye. I was a big fan of Frank Miller’s Sin City as a teenager and young adult, so the styling of the cover immediately had me fixated. I haven’t read anything by Miller in a while, but with his work having meant so much to me once upon a time, I knew I needed this book. I resisted picking it up for a while, as it’s a hardcover that’s a little pricier than normal, but thanks to a financial boon at my disposal I decided to pick it up alongside another book I’ve been wanting for a while.

Angel Down by Daniel Kraus was that very book. Unlike There is No Antimemetics Division, which showed up on Novel Discoveries nearly five years ago and was only just obtained, this novel was just featured back in May. Ah, the duality of my book-buying habits. I was originally just going to read it from the library, but the fact that this horror novel won the Pulitzer and is about a group of soldiers finding an angel shot down on one of the biggest battlefields of World War One was just too enticing not to pick up for myself. This will likely be a Halloween read for this year, which is really starting to creep up on me now that I think about it.

Novel Discoveries

Meanwhile, Back in Nokomis by Will Ferguson is a nonfiction book that caught my eye because of the author. I’ve enjoyed a number of Ferguson’s books, but I’ve enjoyed his nonfiction the most, so I’m excited to check out this collection of travel essays about places across Canada. The country is so big, but I’ve only see such a small slice of it, so I find myself sometimes gravitating to books like this to better appreciate this vast country of ours.

A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith is a book I learned about from a video by the author Jason Pargin talking about why he thinks building a settlement on the red planet will never happen in any of our lifetimes. Though I’m inclined to side with him, I felt encouraged to check out this book because of how in-depth he says that it gets, presenting things realistically rather than idealistically without just wanting to shoot the idea down outright. This will almost certainly be a library read.

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Until next time, thank you for reading!