Just under the wire for Julian Hawthorne’s June 22^nd birthday I read a chapter in his novella “Kildhurm’s Oak,” which I left off reading a while back. I need to get back into reading him.

Read the monthly offerings by E.H. Timms and the weekly stories (a serial this time!) from Kaje Harper. (She’s planning a new collection! Great news!)

Read J. Scott Coatsworth’s “Flames,” where Alex must talk to his hospitalized partner Gio after a fire puts him in a coma. Having been through something like that I will say Scott has it all perfect. (So perfect I almost didn’t want to continue reading it! But I did.) Scott’s literary sensibilities are on the romantic side and not a second of it feels contrived or mawkish. It’s in his collection “The River City Companion.”

Am doing some reading for the Book Tube “Rocket Summer” event promoting early Science Fiction and I’m going to list those in a separate post later this month.

I got a book on the Filmation TV shows/movies. “Animation By Filmation,” by Michael Swanigan and Darrell McNeil, with an introduction by Lou Scheimer. Been bumming through that.

Read some stories in Crippen & Landru’s Edward D. Hoch collection “The Case Of the Flying Graveyard,” about his Avengers*-like INTERPOL detectives. Read “The Case Of the Musical Bullet” (nifty plot twist.) and several others. Great fun! Hoch was a master of his craft.

I’m bumming through an fine anthology “The Black Fantastic” which will be covered in a Queer Sci Fi column, but I’ll mention here I read the story “The Secret Lives Of the Nine Negro Teeth Of George Washington” by Phenderson Dejeli Clark. The introduction to the anthology calls it “…a compact tour-de-force…” and I can’t improve on that!

And I read “At The Rialto,” by Connie Willis from her collection “Impossible Things.” Not every story mentions Boolean logic, Quantum Theory and May Robson’s performance in “Bringing Up Baby.” Oh well! That’s Hollywood! Isn’t it? (And I actually saw Ms Willis at a convention once! Didn’t get to meet her, I was in a line to meet Robert Silverberg!)

See you next month!

———jeff baker, july 20, 2026

*Footnote: Steed and Mrs. Peel Avengers, not Marvel Comics Avengers.