This took a while. I am up to nine books for the year and making headway on #10. The summer is my heavy reading time so hopefully there will be more updates soon. Four fiction books and one set of hysterical essays this time around.

Honestly We Meant Well by Grant Ginder: I loved the chaos of People We Hate at the Wedding, the first Ginder book I read. This doesn’t quite match it, but also provides a wealth of pretty shallow people who entertained me, but didn’t try to make me root for them. Set on a Greek vacation, pretty much nothing goes right for anyone, but in the most hilarious ways. Ginder has a special touch, and I can’t wait to read more of his work.

Third Wheel by Nick Spalding: I keep coming back to Spalding’s books even though they sometimes read like first drafts. Typical “young English people have messed up situations because of romance” as in most of his books. This time it’s when a woman comes between two guys running a successful YouTube channel. They annoyed me at times, but his books are such easy reads that I can’t really get mad.

Euphoria by Lily King: After enjoying King’s Writers and Lovers so much, I went right into this one. I enjoyed the book at the end, but sometimes have this weird bias against a fictional narrative based on the lives of real people. I just get mixed up on what is real and what is not. Still, she did a great job contrasting the privileged lives of researchers in remote communities of the South Pacific. The level of detail was astounding.

All the Lonely People by Mike Gayle: Another one where my interest waxed and waned. I read a bunch of Gayle’s stuff more than a decade ago, but those were more the rom-com variety. This had a much deeper storyline as it contrasted the current life of a man who had emigrated to England decades ago and the difficulties he had fitting into his new country. The alternating chapters of present day and the past worked for me until one revelation late in the book which somewhat soured me on the story. But Gayle created realistic and deep characters, which kept me from just walking away.

James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes by James Acaster: I have enjoyed some of Acaster’s standup comedy, but I heard about this book on an unrelated podcast. Essentially, it is just a bunch of embarrassing and silly stories that have happened to him throughout the years. He had talked about them on a friend’s radio show, where they were dubbed “scrapes.” In book form, they are hysterical and engaging. I ripped through this in near record time, laughing all along the way. Highly recommend this one.