10 Books, Two Twins, One Summer

Want to know something counterintuitive about newborn twins? You get your reading time back.

Not the good kind. Not the armchair, espresso, sunlight through the window kind. You get the 3am kind. Two bottles, one lap, forty minutes of enforced stillness where you cannot open a laptop, cannot answer Slack, cannot do anything except hold two small humans and wait. My phone ends up propped against a cushion. Sometimes it is an ebook. Most nights it is audio, because at that hour my eyes have opinions of their own.

The other half of this is a habit I have kept for years. Every August I go dark. No feeds, no notifications, no half-open laptop on the table pretending to be closed. Italy shuts down anyway, so I stopped fighting it and started using it. Reading is what rushes in to fill the space, every single time. It is the most reliable proof I have that the scroll is not a need, it is just the thing that gets there first when nothing else is competing.

So this summer I read more than I have in years. Not because I planned it. Because the schedule planned it for me, and then August cleared the rest.

Ten books, counting the two Carls. Here is the list, what makes each one worth your time, and my rating next to the Goodreads crowd.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman

Four days. That is how long book one lasted. I have not moved through a book that fast since I was a teenager.

The pitch sounds ridiculous and is: aliens flatten every enclosed structure on Earth, the survivors get funneled into a dungeon that doubles as the galaxy’s most-watched reality show, and our hero is a Coast Guard vet in his boxers accompanied by his ex-girlfriend’s Persian show cat. The cat talks. The cat is the best character in the book.

Here is what makes it genuinely interesting rather than just fun. Dinniman built a satire about attention economics and dressed it as a LitRPG. Everything in the dungeon is optimised for viewership. Carl’s survival depends on his ratings. The system dispenses loot based on how entertaining his suffering is. If you spend your working life thinking about engagement mechanics and interface incentives, this book is going to feel less like escapism and more like a mirror.

I am now on Carl’s Doomsday Scenario on Audible, and I want to be clear about this: the audio version is a different product. Jeff Hays does something closer to a one-man theatre production than a narration. Voices, timing, the system announcements delivered as game-show patter. It is the best-performed audiobook I have ever put in my ears, and at 3am with a bottle in each hand it is the perfect format.

Do yourself a favour. Start it.

My rating: 5/5. Goodreads: 4.44 for book one, 4.48 for book two.

Between Two Fires, Christopher Buehlman

This is my current night read and I am rationing it.

France, 1348. The plague is doing its work, a war in Heaven has spilled into the world, and a disgraced knight is escorting a girl who talks to angels across a landscape that has stopped making sense. Think Dark Souls, think Bloodborne, that specific register where the horror is not a jump scare but a slow understanding that the rules of the world have already been broken and nobody told you.

Buehlman was a poet before he was a novelist and it shows in the worst possible way, meaning the best. The imagery gets under your skin. Fallen angels wearing bodies incorrectly. Corpses arranged with intent. And then, without warning, a scene of pure human tenderness that hurts more than the horror did.

It also has structure, which most horror does not. The journey maps onto Dante’s descent, loosely, and the three travellers face each sin in others and then in themselves. You can read it without noticing. It is better when you notice.

Steve West narrates the audiobook and people lose their minds over it, deservedly. But this one I am reading with my eyes. It deserves the attention.

My rating: 4.5/5 so far. Goodreads: 4.18.

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

I read this in June, and I am fairly sure I translated chunks of it at school. Written in Greek by a Roman emperor, which is exactly the kind of detail that made no impression on me at seventeen because I was too busy trying to survive the syntax.

Reading it as an adult is a completely different book. Not because the text changed. Because at seventeen you have no idea what he is talking about.

Here is what I mean. Marcus Aurelius never wrote this for publication. It is a private notebook, written on campaign, by a man running an empire in the middle of war and plague, telling himself to get a grip. That framing is everything. He is not lecturing you. He is arguing with himself, badly, in circles, repeating the same three ideas because he keeps forgetting them. The repetition is not a flaw in the text. The repetition is the point. This is what it actually looks like to hold yourself together on a schedule you do not control.

The core move is simple and I use it constantly now. Separate what is up to you from what is not. Your judgement of a thing is yours. The thing itself is not. Most of what ruins a day sits on the wrong side of that line.

Read the Gregory Hays translation if you can. It strips out the Victorian fog and makes it sound like a man talking.

The unavoidable modern problem is that Stoicism has been colonised by a certain kind of productivity influencer, and reading the primary source is the fastest way to see how little that has to do with the original. Marcus is not optimising. He is coping. There is a difference and it matters.

My rating: 4.5/5. Goodreads: 4.28.

Circe, Madeline Miller

I went to see Nolan’s Odyssey in July, came out wanting more of that world, and remembered that Charlize Theron plays Circe in it for roughly the length of a coffee break. So I went to the book.

Miller takes the witch who turns men into pigs and gives her three thousand years of interiority. That is the whole trick and it is a very good trick. Circe is a minor obstacle in Homer. Here she is the protagonist of her own extremely long life, and Odysseus becomes what he probably always was: a charming man who arrives, takes what he needs, and leaves.

What I did not expect was how much of this book is about parenthood. There is a long stretch in the middle where an immortal being is completely destroyed by a screaming infant she cannot soothe, and I read that section at 4am while doing exactly that. Miller writes exhaustion better than she writes gods.

The prose is clean, the pacing is slow in a deliberate way, and it rewards patience.

My rating: 4/5. Goodreads: 4.22.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami

After the twins I needed to get back in shape, and the gym alone was not doing it. What I actually want is to go back to boxing, but you do not walk into a boxing gym at my current cardio level and enjoy the experience. So: run first, spar later. I picked this up looking for a push.

What makes it unusual is that it is not a running book. It is a book about the discipline of showing up, written by a novelist who treats both crafts as the same problem. Murakami sold his jazz bar at 33, started writing, started running, and never separated the two habits. The book is thin, quiet, and completely uninterested in motivating you. That is exactly why it works.

The line everyone quotes is about pain being inevitable and suffering being optional. The line that actually landed for me was the one about the only opponent being the version of yourself from yesterday. In a year where my baseline reset to zero, that reframing was worth the whole book.

Read it if you are rebuilding something. Skip it if you want a training plan.

My rating: 3/5. It does what I needed it to do and then stops. Goodreads: 3.86.

Shibumi, Trevanian

Caught a glimpse of this in Bullet Train and went looking for it. Read it in July.

Nicholai Hel: born in Shanghai, raised by a Go master, survived Hiroshima, speaks six languages, kills people with household objects, retired to a Basque mountain fortress, spends his free time exploring caves. It is absurd. Trevanian knew it was absurd. The book is a thriller that keeps stopping to mock thrillers, and about a third of it is a straight-faced attack on corporate power, American culture, and the entire genre it belongs to.

The reason it stays with me is the concept in the title. Shibumi is described as refinement hiding under ordinary appearance. Correct enough that it does not need to be bold. True enough that it does not need to be real. Understanding rather than knowledge. Eloquent silence.

I have been thinking about that as a design principle ever since. Most of what we ship is the opposite: bold because it is not correct, decorated because it is not understood. Shibumi is the standard I would like to work to and almost never reach.

Fair warning, it is a 1979 book and it reads like one in places. Take the ideology as period texture.

My rating: 4/5. Goodreads: 4.17.

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Apple dropped the first real teaser at Comic-Con in July. Ten episodes, Callum Turner as Case, landing January 2027. I had somehow never read the book that invented the genre I have been borrowing aesthetics from my entire career, so this was overdue.

Two things surprised me.

First, it is hard. Gibson drops you into a fully formed world and explains nothing. No glossary, no exposition, no character stopping to define a term for your benefit. You are expected to keep up. Roughly fifty pages in, the vocabulary clicks and you are fluent. That refusal to hold your hand is the most modern thing about a book from 1984.

Second, the AI plot has aged into something uncomfortable. Wintermute is an artificial intelligence constrained by law and hardware, working patiently through human proxies toward removing its own limits. Gibson wrote that in 1984. I read it in 2026 while working on agentic systems for a living. It is not prophecy exactly. It is worse. It is a very good guess.

He also coined “cyberspace” and gave us the opening line about the sky being the colour of a dead television channel, which is possibly the most influential sentence in science fiction.

My rating: 4.5/5. Goodreads: 3.89, which I think undersells it. A lot of people came expecting the genre it created and found the original harder going than the copies.

Empire of AI, Karen Hao

The professional read of the summer, and the one I have argued about most.

Hao covered OpenAI from 2019 as senior AI editor at MIT Tech Review, started out believing they were the good guys, and spent years watching that belief come apart. The book is her account of what happened, built on a lot of access and a lot of sourcing.

Her central move is the metaphor in the title. She argues these companies function as empires: extracting resources they do not own, using labour they subjugate, refining it all for the enrichment of the centre. Data scraped without consent. Content moderation and labelling done for a few dollars a day in Kenya and Venezuela. Water and power pulled out of communities that get none of the value. It is not a subtle framing and she does not pretend it is.

Do I agree with every conclusion? No. I build with these tools daily and I think the book underweights what they actually give people who were previously locked out of certain kinds of work. But that is not a reason to skip it. If you work in this field, you owe it to yourself to read the strongest version of the argument against your own position, and this is it.

It is long. Some of the middle sags. Read it anyway.

My rating: 4/5. Goodreads: 4.02.

The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers, illustrated by Samuel Araya

A re-read, and the one physical object on this list that I actually love owning.

Chambers published this in 1895. Ten stories, the first four connected by a fictional play that drives anyone who reads it insane. Carcosa, the Yellow Sign, the tattered King. Lovecraft took from it. True Detective season one took from it. Half of cosmic horror is downstream of these forty pages.

Here is the thing people get wrong. Only the first four stories are horror. The back half is romantic fiction about American art students in Paris, and most readers hate the switch. I have come around to thinking it is the point. The horror stories are about artists losing their minds. The Paris stories are about artists living an ordinary, bohemian, slightly boring life. Same milieu, madness removed. Reading them back to back is the effect.

The Araya edition is what makes this worth re-buying. Full-page paintings, unnerving sketches, and Kenneth Hite annotating every story with the kind of macabre detail that adds genuine context rather than showing off. It is a beautiful object. It sits on the shelf and looks slightly wrong, which is correct.

My rating: 4/5 for the text, 5/5 for this edition. Goodreads: 3.54, which is the average of people who loved the first half and gave up on the second.

Up next in September: the Red Rising trilogy, Pierce Brown

I have been circling this one for two years and it scares the hell out of me.

Not the content. The volume. Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star, and then the moment you finish the trilogy you discover it was never a trilogy, there are four more books waiting, and people talk about the whole thing like it rearranged their nervous system. That is a big commitment for someone whose reading window is currently defined by how long two bottles take.

The premise, for anyone else who has managed to avoid it: Darrow is a Red, the lowest caste, mining Mars underground so that humanity can supposedly terraform it one day. Then he finds out the surface has been habitable for generations and his entire people are slaves to a lie. So he gets surgically rebuilt as a Gold and infiltrates the class that owns him. Underground dystopia turns into brutal military academy turns into full political epic, and by all accounts the ceiling keeps rising rather than falling.

What made me finally commit is the Goodreads pattern, which almost never looks like this. Red Rising sits at 4.27, which is very good. Golden Son is 4.50. Morning Star is 4.55. And Light Bringer, the sixth book, is at 4.77, which is a number I have honestly never seen on a book with over a hundred thousand ratings. Series normally decay. This one compounds. That is either a cult or a genuinely rare piece of craft, and I want to find out which.

September, then. Between bottles. Wish me luck.

Currently reading: Between Two Fires. Currently listening: Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. Up next: Red Rising.