Today’s TTT is books on our summer reading list; as I normally do, I’m going to look back at the last quarterly TBR to see how I did. As it turns out, I batted .500 again! The ones I missed were a Cory Doctorow title on the internet getting worse, a book on black baseball in Alabama, GIRLS, a biography of Polk, and “something by Annie Jacobsen”. But first, the tease!

“How are you, Lyndon?” the physician inquired, as the boy dramatically writhed in pain. “Oh, I’m killed! I’m killed!” Lyndon cried. When the doctor suggested administering a “shot” for pain, his young patient’s hysterics escalated: “Oh, please doctor, don’t shoot me! I want to live awhile longer!” BAD BLOOD: LBJ, RFK, AND THE TUMULTUOUS 1960s. Jeffrey Smith.

Ten Books on my Summer TBR

(1) GIRLS, Freya India. I support her brilliant substack and ordered the book, so I definitely plan on reading this.It’s a reflection by a Gen-Z woman on the commodification of girlhood — how growing up on social media made them turn themselves into brands. Her writing is really good and I’m sure I’ll love the book once I can escape the clutches of Mr. Nixon & Mr. Kennedy.

(2) Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner. Working away at this one.

(3) Inventing a Nation, Gore Vidal

(4) Bad Blood, Jeffrey Smith. RFK vs LBJ. I’ll have a review posted for this one before the week is out. It’s a fast read and I’m so familiar with the context at this point that I recognize practically all the quotes being pulled.

(5) Rupture, Regina Kay. Dark urban fantasy, I think. Outside my usual range, and definitely outside the scope of my current obsession, but it’s a debut book from a friend.

(6) Black Baseball in Alabama: Rough Diamonds of Dixie, Shane Earnest. Somewhat similar, but in this case baseball and local history are definitely in my wheelhouse. The only reason I haven’t started this yet is because because 2026 is The Year of Presidents, apparently.

(7) End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers, Gord McGill. This is of both personal and academic interest to me; my family is full of OTR drivers, including my father, and I love reading about transportation. McGill writes on Substack at Autonomous Truckers.

(8) Communion, J.D. Vance. A memoir of coming back to Christianity via the Catholic Church. I should preface this by saying I read Hillbilly Elegy back in 2016, well before J.D. was a politician, let alone the vice president, so I’m reading this out of personal interest in the man and his story rather than as a politician: my personal interest is redoubled by the fact that I have a fascination with Catholicism that dates back to 2011 and which persists today. Although I worship in a different communion, Catholic authors and priests account for the overwhelming majority of my Christian formation. It helps, of course, that a strong part of my own conversion to Christianity involved Communion or the Eucharist.

(9) Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy vs Jimmy Hoffa, James Neff.

I’ve wanted to read this since seeing Jack Nicholson playing Jimmy Hoffa giving RFK as righteous telling-off in HOFFA.

(10) Six Crises, Richard Nixon. A pre-presidential memoir. Chatgpt suggests that this may not be a healthy choice for someone trying to escape dead presidents. I actually had a dream a few weeks ago that I met Nixon in a back-country dive bar and we talked about Ike and Dick as he shook his head ruefully.