August 2026 Books
Not only do I want to bring back the photologs, but I'd also like to go back to covering the books I read each month here. I still don't want to meticulously log things, but I like writing about what I read. August is almost over and I don't think I'll be finishing any other books before the month ends, so I'm going to go ahead and recap them now, starting with the ones I loved the most.
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker (2025) 
This book was published five years after the pandemic, but it takes us back to that time in stark clarity, reminding us what it was like and how scary it felt for multiple reasons. The story centers around a half-Chinese, half-white woman named Cora Zeng, who fears both germs and the proliferation of anti-Asian racism that came with the pandemic. The book focuses heavily on that racism, making it a difficult but necessary read.
Cora is haunted by the ghost of her dead sister, who is pushed in front of a subway train at the beginning of the book, the perpetrator calling her a "bat eater" as he shoves her onto the tracks. Along with dealing with her haunting, Cora is also wiping up the entrails of dead Asian women in New York City. She's a crime scene cleaner who's seeing more and more hate-related deaths as the pandemic wears on.
It's gory and bloody and not for the faint of heart, but pin-pricked within the darkness are "moments of light-soaked joy," which Baker quotes from John Green in the afterword. I laughed with Cora and her friends, Harvey and Yifei, even as I was cringing over the crime scenes. It's full of details that will stay with me and characters who have carved out spaces in my heart. A ghost story, a crime novel, and a heartfelt story of growth and love all in one. I highly recommend it and plan to read more of the author's work ASAP.
The Summoning by J.P. Smith (2021)
Another one that gets five hearts from me, and coincidentally it's another one that takes place in New York City and involves both ghosts and a subway accident. This one follows Kit Capriol, a struggling actress who lost her husband 20 years ago in the 9/11 attack. She was raising their daughter, Zoey, on her own until, at 14 years old, Zoey witnessed a woman being pushed in front of a subway train. In shock, she fell and hit her head, slipping into a coma.
To help pay the bills and keep herself afloat in the worst kind of situation, Kit turned to the dubious occupation of a fake medium, offering seances to reach people's dead loved ones. She does enough research ahead of time and relies on her acting skills to make the seances convincing, and even though she knows she's grifting people, she justifies it by the sense of comfort it brings them.
The problem is, the seances are starting to become more real, and the line between Kit's reality and the unknown becomes more blurred as the story goes on. It's the kind of book where I can't say too much more than that for fear of spoiling it. It's an intense mystery that kept me guessing until the final few pages, and even then I was surprised. I can see the ending being unsatisfying for some, but I loved it and felt it wrapped things up nicely. It felt like a natural conclusion to all of the buildup that came before.
Smith has an almost ethereal way of writing, with scenes flowing along and enveloping you like the wind. His prose is beautiful, and I was pleased by the way he wrote Kit in particular. Sometimes you can easily tell when a woman was written by a man, but not so in this case. She felt real, and I found myself alternating between sympathizing with her and being frustrated by her. She's a complex character, and this is a complicated story.
Here Is New York by E.B. White (1948) 
Yet another one about New York, but this time it's non-fiction. This slim book is E.B. White's love letter to New York, written when the city was becoming a global monolith. White is one of my favorite writers of all time, and I have a goal of reading everything he's written, both for adults and children.
While reading this it's nice to imagine that you're strolling around New York with White as he talks. This book finds him on a return trip to the city where he once lived. He moved to Maine long before and is returning as a favor to his stepson, to write a long-form article for the magazine where he works.
New York is in the middle of a heat wave, and you can tell White is somewhat reluctant as he begins, but as he moves along, his observations become deeper and more ruminative, offering a living history of the city. The ending is staggering in its prescience, when he notes that "the intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition."
The Worst Kind by J.R. Erickson (2024) 
This is the second in the Dear Celeste series, and I didn't enjoy it as much as the first. Celeste Cleary is an advice columnist who recently had a near-death experience and came back from it with the ability to see the dead. She's now taking on cases for some of the people who write to her, and this latest one has her helping out a woman who's trying to find her birth parents. Her father, however, was a very bad man who potentially murdered her mother. Wherever Celeste's search ends up, you know it's not going to be good.
I should say up front that there are trigger warnings galore for this book. The father abused his daughter and is an all-around terrible person. The worst kind, as the title suggests.
I found the alternating perspectives much more jarring this time around, taking me out of the story and giving me a bit of whiplash. The ending was rushed, as well, and the reveal didn't feel earned. There was a bit too much going on and too many characters to keep hold of, and the culprit kind of came out of nowhere.
That said, I found the moments with the ghost as well as Celeste's journey really effective. I'm intrigued by her backstory, which gets touched upon in each book, and I'll keep reading to see where it goes. I do love the descriptive detail and sense of place that Erickson creates in her books. They're well-written and intriguing, and I'm looking forward to the next in the series. This one just didn't hit me like the first one did.
We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer (2024) 
This book kind of just made me angry. It started off with a promising premise. The main character, Eve, and her girlfriend, Charlie, have just moved into a new house that they plan on fixing up and flipping. On a wintry night during a snowstorm, a family shows up and says they'd like to look around, as it's the father's childhood home. Creepy. Unsettling. There are lots of places where this could end up.
Instead, it went completely off the rails and felt like a bunch of Reddit No Sleep tropes crumpled up into a confusing ball of nothing. This book started as a No Sleep story, and the novel version feels like the author trying to pad out what was originally a short story. The horror could be chilling at parts, but ultimately it was all so cliched that it fell flat. Eve and Charlie were as two-dimensional as you can get. The story made no sense, and I didn't care enough about what was happening to bother looking up the Morse code or other augmented reality-type tidbits that were sprinkled throughout.
I feel kind of bad for knocking this book so much, but yeah, wasn't a fan. Two stars for some of the horror elements being satisfyingly creepy and a promising start.