July’s Reads

Now moving gently into the second half of 2025, and it is the July reading round up! As I am both maintaining and recording my reading habit for the whole of 2025, I decided to have a quick look at numbers at this half way point.

At the end of June, I had read 76 books/audiobooks/short stories. I then read a further 12 in July, bringing my total at this point to 88 books/audiobooks/short stories. Here my numbers get a little confusing, as many of the books I read fall into more than one genre. Furthermore, I have just described the books as I have gone along. You can see an overview of my reading list here and the mixture of genres/descriptions here. As far as I can tell, the overwhelming single majority genre is (not unexpectedly) Horror, followed closely by an accumulated total of non-fiction, true crime, memoir, biographical, and other descriptors that basically roll into the overall heading of Non-Fiction. As a secondary descriptor, there is a very heavy theme of World Literature and Humor/Comedy in my choices.

Here is the 12 book line up for the month of July.

There were a few this month that simply disappointed me with their ending, and so it ended up not being my favourite list this time around.

I have to bring up Grave Yard Shift by M. L. Rio at this point, because this novella made a difficult reading month much worse quite honestly. I was riveted by this story. I thought I had my mojo back. I was tearing through it no less, during a month when I had not wanted to read anything at all. Then I reached the ending. The absolutely terrible, flatly abrupt ending, and I was enraged. In a fit of temper, I gave it two stars. Even in the height of my ire I could not bring myself to give it any less. I had waited to read this book, invested in it, and it had the temerity to just stop? I’ll leave it a few months, then maybe re-read it, just to check I was right about it the first time… The worst effect of this whole situation was that I then kept finding the endings of all the short stories I read lacking, and struggled to appraise anything well. That is what a temper tantrum will do for you. Ruin your month.

A strong contender for this month was When the Wolf Comes Home by Nat Cassidy. This one has gained a lot of traction in Horror enthusiast circles and was a great enjoyable read. The ending still managed to twist away from what I expected it to be. I enjoyed the writing too, and will look out for more by the author. This book was one of the highlights of the month. I found myself reading it quite slowly compared to some; this was not a bad thing, I was struggling to read throughout this month and still enjoyed this.

Easily the best book of the month for me was 13 Park Lane by Naomi Clifford. This was a fascinating read, not least because, for all my true crime reading, this case was unknown to me. It is a bizarre combination of non-fiction (based on an actual, historical murder case), informed and well-researched guesswork, and dramatisation. These tools are all used to bring the Victorian murder to life from the perspective of the killer. I found this book hugely enjoyable, and definitely suggest giving it a chance.

As always, my thoughts on everything I have read are available in brief on each of the book pages in my read list. Here I talk about books that have stuck out to me for some reason, but that does not mean I have not loved and enjoyed everything I have read, so if something suits you, feel free to take a look at the book pages or ask me about it.