01 | September | 2026 | Paroxysm of Giggles / Critical Mass

August was mostly low-key, but highlights included Donald’s and Clint’s birthdays, a work project completing, and attending our first Ed Sheeran concert!

TBR Reads

My official August TBR consisted of 4 books. Of those, I have read all 4:

I’ve been excited about reading In Stormy Weather since I first heard about it and added it to my Anticipated Books spreadsheet. It was a Book of the Month selection, so I acquired a copy that way and it stayed in a prominent position on my desk until I read it. I really liked that Quincy and Sebastian each had valid reasons for their actions and honest thoughts and doubts about their careers. I would even put this one on my re-read shelf.

The best part about The Tempest Blade was that all of the POVs from the series came together to tell the final installment of the series. I appreciated how the author was able to highlight each character’s unique personality and show how this informed their actions.

It’s hard to believe that it was only this month that I cracked into the second book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I feel like I’ve been reading them forever. By forever, I mean non-stop like a chain smoker. Carl’s Doomsday Scenario features Carl and Donut’s exploits on the third floor of the dungeon. The first stop is race and class selection. If you’ve ever played DnD before, this is foundational to your whole strategy on playing the game. I appreciate that Carl and Donut were given a chance to see what the dungeon was like before having to decide.

Resist Me is the second book in the Harden Heights series, and was just recently published. I enjoyed it and I liked the dynamic between Ford and June. However, there were some things that were a little … distracting? … to my enjoyment of the story. I’m all for body positivity and showing main characters of all sizes, but this was an odd mixture of June always thinking that she’s less than because of her size, rivals and antagonists always picking on her for her body, and her friends always not understanding and just saying that she doesn’t understand that she’s an absolute smoke show. The other part was the Harden brothers’ finances. Ford is the money guy for their organization, so this was elaborated on more than in the first book. They have an underground betting business, some kind of ties to the company their mother owned, and trust funds that have been frozen by their father. Throughout the book, they are both displaying a lot of disposable income and are also worried about their financial future when their businesses are threatened in different ways. I’m not sure how to reconcile the two. But there is enough intrigue and loose ends to keep me busy and coming back for more.

Random Reads

My non-planned reads include:

On August 1st, Donald and I went to the second annual Pages of Glass: Romancing the Glass City event. The night before, we attended the Meet & Greet event where we had the opportunity to talk with a selection of the authors that were going to be selling their books at the event the next day. Little did Charissa Gracyk know when she sat at our table that she was sitting with two ex-Navy Nukes! She described her books as featuring classic Protector-type male leads who often had military backgrounds. I picked up the first book for two of her series, and started with Reactivated: Oz. It is a mix of a military thriller, a mysterious death, a mysterious organization who did some experimentation on the ex-SEALs, and some paranormal abilities that they had gained via the experiments. The series was available on Kindle Unlimited, so I was able to binge all seven books within the week! They were a solid mix of action and romance with good characterization.

I picked up Not Bad For a Girl at an indie bookstore near the Pages of Glass event. The store, Gathering Volumes, had been mentioned as one of the best indie bookstores in Toledo, so I had wanted to stop by while I was in town. I picked this one up because it followed a girl in IT who works in a male-dominated office and she has to deal with people not taking her ideas seriously due to her sex. (The whole ‘women are “bitchy” with a negative connotation, and men are “assertive” with a positive connotation’ thing – I’ve run into this countless times in my own professional life.) She is moved to a team that works remotely and there’s a incident that leads her team to assuming she’s male. The shenanigans that take place are frankly wilder than I had anticipated!

In All the Wrong Plays, Will was caught up in a scandal involving his team owner’s wife and exiled to a ~~soccer~~ football club in Europe. He’s hoping to do well here so that next season a team in the US will be willing to take him back. It’s one thing to be a great soccer player in the US, but quite another to try and break into an established European football club. Even more difficult is navigating personal relationships when the cute girl you met is the daughter of the new club owner and sister to the team’s star player. Sophia is the only member of her prestigious family who does not care about football whatsoever. She just wants to be a photojournalist, which her family sees as a cute hobby. Unfortunately, her intern assignment is to be the stand-in photographer for her family’s football team when the normal photographer is out on medical leave. Both forced into situations they are not comfortable in, Will and Sophia find each other. I thought this was a really cute story. Technically, it was the second book in the series; the first one covering Sophia’s brother’s romance, but you could read this as a standalone. I agree with some other reviewers that this ending was a little bit rushed, and I would have liked to have seen a bit more of the family dynamics between all the characters in the end.

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook follows Carl and Donut on the fourth floor of the dungeon, where the have to navigate the tangle that is the floor’s subway system (featuring all kinds of different trains). I think this book has the largest growth in Carl’s capabilities; he becomes more strategic and comes up with some brilliant and unhinged solutions to the challenges of the level. It’s gory and gross at times (all the time), but that’s more than made up for by the fast pace and fun vibe. Carl’s sensitivity to the other crawlers and NPCs make him a very likable character, even when he has to do unspeakable things or make morally grey decisions.

After bingeing the Reactivated series and getting immersed in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, I decided to take a bit of a palate-cleansing break after The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook and pivoted back to romance with This Summer Will Be Different. I’ve been enjoying Carley Fortune’s books and this one is no different. Lucy is our main character and she has a gem of a ride-or-die best friend in Bridget. Bridget is her rock and has been keeping Lucy together through some rough times. Lucy is in full-on maid on honor duty with the last minute details of Bridget’s wedding when Bridget suddenly drops off the radar, then asks Lucy to drop everything and meet her in her childhood home on Prince Edward Island – no reason given. This story is told in two timelines: present and past-catching-up-to-present, where we find out that years ago, Lucy broke one of her BFF’s cardinal rules, Do not fall for my brother. I won’t spoil anything for you, but I will say that I was pleasantly surprised with one of the twists in the book, where Lucy and Felix make a very mature decision about their relationship. I’m also in awe of Lucy’s patience with Bridget. I love my BFF, but guaranteed I would have cornered her down faster and made her tell me why she suddenly needed to blow up our lives right before the wedding.

The Gate of the Feral Gods is – in my opinion – the most chaotic installment so far. There are these bubble things that contain each contain four different biomes: air, land, water, and subterranean. All of the crawlers are divvyed up amongst the 1,000+ bubbles. You can’t go to another biome before you conquer your biome’s castle, and you can’t help out crawlers in other bubbles before you conquer all of the biomes in your own bubble and it “pops.” This book has the same madcap fun and mayhem of the other books in the series, but also is a bit more… of a grind? I haven’t quite put my finger on what it was about this book that was less entertaining than the others. Carl feels more responsibility for the NPCs and their plight feels a bit heavier in this book. I feel that we spend most of our time in one biome, a little bit in another, and next to zero in the other two biomes. Carl has a much better grasp of what’s going on than the reader, and we find out along the way that he’s been doing a lot more scheming and planning off page than you might expect. Do not miss the epilogue.

Ah, The Butcher’s Masquerade. This installment did not disappoint! Mayhem, creativity, and crawlers coming into their own as they face Hunters for the first time on the sixth floor of the dungeon. We finally get to see the outcome of that jaw-dropping epilogue from Book 4. I think what truly made this book special for me was the growth in the relationship between Carl and Donut. So tender and heartfelt. And Mongo is just his own loveable ridiculousness. (If you want to be super technical, I finished this book on September 1st. I could have finished it on August 31, but I wanted to get this blog post written and published on time for once, so I painfully put down my book with less than 100 pages to go and got to writing. You are welcome! The book won’t be counted in my stat’s and I’ll likely include it in next month’s wrap-up post, but I was so close to completion, I wanted to mention it here, too.)

My Thoughts on This Month’s Reading

August brought a lot more of the fantasy/supernatural element to my reading than usual. I enjoyed having a few good series to devour. I know that my media consumption comes in waves; I’ll be really into reading all I can for a while, then really into watching things on YouTube, or become absorbed in a TV series. Eventually, I make my way back to all of my different media habits, but I’ve been enjoying this book-heavy summer so far.

Links to my reviews (on StoryGraph) of each of the books read this month are below, along with my star rating.