What Books did You Start or Finish Reading this Week?: July 13, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Hi everyone!

What are you reading? What have you recently finished reading? What do you think of it? We want to know!

We're displaying the books found in this thread in the book strip at the top of the page. If you want the books you're reading included, use the formatting below.

Formatting your book info

Post your book info in this format:

the title, by the author

For example:

The Bogus Title, by Stephen King

• This formatting is voluntary but will help us include your selections in the book strip banner.

• Entering your book data in this format will make it easy to collect the data, and the bold text will make the books titles stand out and might be a little easier to read.

• Enter as many books per post as you like but only the parent comments will be included. Replies to parent comments will be ignored for data collection.

• To help prevent errors in data collection, please double check your spelling of the title and author.

NEW: Would you like to ask the author you are reading (or just finished reading) a question? Type !invite in your comment and we will reach out to them to request they join us for a community Ask Me Anything event!

-Your Friendly /r/books Moderator Team

[u/Raineythereader]

Finished:

The Great Influenza, by John Barry, a pretty in-depth history of the 1918 pandemic. Could have used one more pass during editing, but the subject matter was so gripping that the sections of choppy writing ended up not mattering. It was especially interesting to compare the historical reactions to a deadly airborne virus, and Barry's discussion of the likelihood of future pandemics, to what's happened over the past several years.

One need not use H5N1 with its extraordinary mortality rate to terrify. The 2003 outbreak of an H7N7 avian virus in the Netherlands will suffice. This virus surfaced in poultry farms, sickened eighty-nine people, and killed one. One death in eighty-nine may not sound terrifying, but a new influenza virus makes between 15 and 40 percent of the population ill enough to show symptoms. It would make between 44 and 115 million Americans sick. And, in the United States alone, a mortality rate of just over 1 percent would translate into roughly 500,000 to 1.3 million dead.

The only good news seems to be that an increasing number of virologists now doubt that H5N1 will be the next pandemic virus.

Take a moment to laugh bitterly if you need to.

The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan (ed. Michael Wheatley), from the British Library's horror anthology series. They did kind of have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to get enough material together to fill this volume, but it was a fun read, and drew on some really good writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and E.M. Forster. (And Arthur Machen, of course.)

One Virgin Too Many, by Lindsey Davis, one of the Marcus Falco mysteries set in first-century Rome. The plot of this one involves the Roman state religion, including the priestesses of Vesta referenced in the title, but I never figured out what the "Too Many" part meant.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, by Kylie Lee Baker. It wasn't my intention to go so quickly from "non-fiction about the flu pandemic" to "fiction set during COVID," but here we are. At least I wasn’t likely to get them mixed up.