It took me a long time to finish this list, and I did start it in July, like usual. There’s just a lot to recommend from what I was reading. And a few things I’m not going to recommend, mentioned below. A good reading month, all in all.
Read a recently published history of 1929. I like the author and his contemporary reportage. He was trying for something with this history book, and he did okay, but I’ve read a lot of histories of that time period and felt he added little new. I think the only insight I took from it might have been unintended. It is rather appalling to me how many bad political decisions have been made at Mar A Lago throughout its lifetime. Mar A Lago was the E.F. Hutton estate in the 1920s, and there were economic summits there. Since you all know about the crash and resulting Depression, you know how well those summits went.
Read some mediocre books by favorite writers, including a spy rom-com that I had apparently started before and quit in the middle. Ironically, I tried to quit in the same spot, remembered that, and powered on. The book was okay, but not worth recommending. It ended up being my late-night reading.
Also read a mystery anthology that I was stunningly unimpressed with. But one story caught my eye. When I looked at it again to recommend it to you all, I couldn’t remember it by title. Then, once I found it, I couldn’t remember it at all, just that I liked it. So there are no mystery shorts here. Guess I wasn’t as impressed as I thought.
Here’s what I did like in July.
July, 2026
Abdurranqib, Hanif, “Introduction,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. The introduction (which you can read as a sample) to this volume is worth the price of admission all by itself. A strong essay about writing and sports, and the importance of a writer’s perspective, this piece was a great start to a great volume. I underlined a lot of quotes here, but I think the one I love the most is this:
I tend to think that my favorite writers are writers who seem to create with their back to the audience, which doesn’t come from a place of contempt, but rather, comes from a place of awareness. If one cares too much about the perceived interest of potential readers, you end up catering to a vast nothing, the vastness of no audience at all.
Read this even if you don’t like sports writing.
Akam, Simon, “Precipice of Fear: The Freerider Who Took Skiing to its Limits,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. In some ways, this essay is about the acceptance of premature death in certain extreme sports. In other ways, it focuses on the personality types who actually are interested in those sports, sometimes for the high risk factor. Interesting on many levels, particularly with human psychology.
Davis, Zack, “One Must Imagine the Detroit Mechanix Happy,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. A wonderful, thoughtful essay on loving teams that are lovable losers—and on being part of those teams. On coaching those teams. Here’s a lovely quote (one of many) from the piece:
Sport, like life, demonstrates that no matter how badly things are going, no matter how much you may lose, you have to get up and try again. Not because you have to, but because you believe you’ll succeed.
The essay deals with this in a lot of ways, the most surprising being the quote from Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In fact, the title comes from the final line of that essay, transformed from Sisyphus to the Detroit Mechanix. Worth reading.
Febos, Melissa, “Nothing is Gayer Than My Love For Women’s Basketball,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. This essay starts off the book, because Abdurranqib actually put the essays in a reading order like a good editor does, rather than alphabetically by author like a lazy editor does. This essay is very short, and almost serves as the book’s thesis statement because it charms and it provides a strong perspective on sport. I can identify with this quote:
I never saw my idols like this: aggressive and jubilant, unified and yelling, glowing with sweat and self-satisfaction. These players are not just a spectacle of something I find beautiful, they’re proof to that younger self of what is possible.
Wow, do I get that. I was an athletic little girl who was consistently denied the opportunity to play sports once I turned eight or so. Title IX came too late for me. (It wasn’t implemented in my region of the country until I was out of high school…six years after passage.) I sometimes cry during women’s sporting events, because it is such an uplifting and amazing thing to me. So, yeah. I get this. And loved the essay.
Fedarko, Kevin, The Emerald Mile, Scribner, 2013. I discovered this book through a mention in Runner’s World. They listed books about extreme adventures in the Grand Canyon (which isn’t far from where I live) and called this one a classic. Yeah, well, wow. Not only does it have history of the discovery, and a lot of other neat trivia, there is an actual thriller through line. This is the best book I read in July. I was going to piece it out as I often do with nonfiction, and after the beginning, I pulled it into my regular reading spot, and devoured the book in two days. It is a thriller, but because it is also life, the ending kinda sputters. No matter. I might even reread this (which is unusual for me). It truly is a classic.
Gjone, Helen, “The Ballet School,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. A heartbreaking essay about the way that some programs in sport, particularly in dance, tear the participant apart rather than help them achieve their best. It’s an old-fashioned attitude that probably has destroyed more people than it ever helped. This piece is from a survivor of an especially harsh program.
Hunt, Nick, “Traveling at the Speed of the Soul,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. This essay is more about travel, particularly world travel, than it is about sports. It discusses that discombobulated feeling you sometimes get when traveling, particularly when you lose a lot of hours to time zone changes. I thought about this one for days afterwards, which is always the mark of a good argument.
Idle, Eric, The Spamalot Diaries, Crown, 2024. I bought this charming little hardcover when I attended Spamalot here in Las Vegas in February. Eric Idle kept a diary of the first-run of Spamalot twenty years or so ago, and didn’t think much of it. Then, cleaning his house to downsize, he found the diary and decided to publish it to coincide with the revival. It’s really a fun little book that shows just how difficult putting on a Broadway show can be. I marked it up, even though it’s a first edition (Oh, bad me) because I liked a lot of the quotes. Producer Bill Haber said at the read-through that he had the utmost respect for writers:
They sit in a room with an empty piece of paper and then suddenly all of you people are employed!
Exactly. T
here are lots of fun tidbits like that. Writers, this is a must read. Theater fans, you’ll like it too. And I don’t have to tell Monty Python fans to get it. They probably already have a copy.
Kelly, Devin, “Stumbling Can Be Lovely,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. A piece that follows Zack Davis’s. It has similar themes. In this one, Devin Kelly writes about learning how to ride a bike when he was in his thirties. Stumbling, falling, all those things we do as kids and try to avoid as adults. This is a fun read.
Marshall, Elizabeth Dilts, “Elizabeth Matthews: ASCAP CEO is Women in Music Executive of the Year,” Billboard, April 18, 2026. Wow, I wish book publishing had a woman like Elizabeth Matthews. She pays attention to artists’ rights on all levels. She is working hard to make certain that songwriters (and the rest of us, by extension) are going to survive the copyright landmines that are ahead (and right now) due to AI and corporate greed. This is worth scaling the paywall to read.
Pandit, Niharika, “Imane Khelif: Refusing the Violent Fiction of Binary Gender,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. This is a short argument in story form, and it’s worth the read. It discusses the hatred that Imane Khelif, a female boxer of color, received in the Olympics in 2024. Read this one, then read it again. The analysis is worth thinking about.
Rosenberg, Lisa Williamson, “Black Girl, Blue Leotard,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. Such a difficult essay to read, because I understand it on a gut level even though I am not Black. But it describes my experience in a lot of spaces where I did not properly fit in. Rosenberg describes her love at age six of ballet, and the way that she, like the girls in Helen Gjone’s essay, were bullied out of that love. Only Rosenberg’s mother put an important and wonderful spin on the situation, one that Rosenberg clearly remembers decades later. My favorite essay in the book for so many reasons…
Score, Lucy, Rock Bottom Girl, Bloom 2023. Whenever I sit down to recommend a Lucy Score book, I am always reminded that she made the to
tally stupid decision to make her ebooks exclusive on Amazon. I mostly read paper, so I can get her books anywhere, but for you ebook readers, you’re stuck with Amazon. I’ll wager she’s regretting this decision as the AI slop fills Amazon decreasing everyone’s ebook sales. Sigh.
Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. As always, her books start great and go strong, slow down terribly for the sex scenes (which I have learned to skip because they don’t add anything plotwise) and go on for just a hair too long. I’m ready to be done with the book before she is. But the characters are great and the dialogue witty as hell. Marley moves back to her hometown where, it seems, no one has moved on from high school except her…and in her opinion, she failed at going out into the real world. She learns some lovely life lessons, the (real) high school kids are marvelous, and the hero is a tad too perfect, just like he should be. So this is a fun read.
Silva, Daniel, Ransom, Harper, 2026. I continue to be impressed with the way that Daniel Silva is negotiating the current political insanity. When he started these books in the 1990s, the world was a very different place. His hero, Gabriel Allon, was an artist and part of the Mossad. Silva dealt with U.S. politics and he was far to the right of me. But now we’re much more aligned, because he’s a sane person. I’m not even sure Israel was mentioned in this book. The U.S. was mentioned in passing. Allon is retired, and yet gets roped into a case involving a reliable bad guy, a Russian oligarch. Not the best Silva, but a quick and entertaining read nonetheless. I’m not even sure how to tell you to start this long-running series, because the world has changed so much. But it is worth reading.
