Bookmarked 2026 Week 28: New Releases and Adaptation Dramatics

How was your week? What are you reading? Here’s a look at what I read last week and links I bookmarked.

What I Read

Last week I was away for work in Illinois, where I used to live. It was a quick trip because on Thursday, I also went back home to Jamaica for the long holiday weekend. You would think I would get a lot of reading done – but not this time! My mood was a little all over the place and I just couldn’t settle down enough to read a lot. But – I did finally finish the debut novel, Honey by Imani Thompson.

It’s the story of Yrsa, a PhD candidate at Cambridge, who sort of accidentally on-purpose kills a philandering professor, and discovers that she likes the thrill of the kill. Sometimes, the novel seems to suffer from trying to do too much, trying to be too deep while also trying to show how Yrsa is a serial killer in the making … I wish we had focused more on that instead of long passages on her thesis work of Afropessimism, but the escalation and her thought process was fascinating to read. Sadly, the ending was abrupt and unfinished. This wasn’t even a cliffhanger ending – it was a … is this the end?? … let me pull up the page count on the eBook to confirm that there really are no more pages … because this can’t be it! I’d consider this book a cross between Molka, Monika Kim and My Sister the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Brathwaite.

I also finished a novella, Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle by Renan Barnardo. The plot was engaging from the beginning. A spaceship sent to a World that should have been habitable for humans, but turns out that it wasn’t. The ship heads back home, but there’s not enough oxygen for everyone. There are some twists that make the story interesting, but because this is such a short novella, some of the action and plot points were just too quick. Still, the ending was also beautifully done and overall a solid story.

Currently Reading

This week, I’m in Wisconsin for work, and I want to get through the only 2 novellas I haven’t yet read on The 15 Novellas Nominated for 2026 Locus, Nebula and Hugo Awards – The Death of Mountains, Jordan Kurella and Lives of Bitter Rain, Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Bookmarked

⮕ This past weekend was Independence Day (July 4th) in the US and as I have done for the past few years, I listen to James Earl Jones Reads Frederick Douglass Speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” It’s a powerful reminder of perspective.

⮕ A new month means you get a FREE choice from a select few books at Amazon First Reads if you’re a Prime subscriber, and check out the Best Books of July 2026, as chosen by the Amazon Editors. Are any of the choices on your radar to read? I’m eyeing Cool Machine, Colson Whitehead, because I’ve loved the books I’ve read by him – The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. But Cool Machine is the 3rd book in the Harlem Trilogy and I haven’t read the others, so I’d have to go through those first.

⮕ Goodreads Editors Share Their July Book Picks and Readers’ Most Anticipated New July Books. So many choices! There’s always some gems on these list, and I spotted a new release by an author I’ve read before, The Mortons by Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld. The cover is gorgeous!

⮕ Library Reads also publishes a monthly list of top 10 fiction and non-fiction books chosen monthly as shared by public library staff.

⮕ As a genre lover, I was looking through Goodreads Readers 104 Most Popular Fantasy & Science Fiction Books of the Past Three Years to see how many I had read, how many were already on my reading list, and what else I could add to it (as if it’s not big enough already). One I will recommend from now to forever on this list is Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor. It was selected as the text for Great World Texts Student Conference, and 750 high school students spent the academic year reading it and making art based on it, which they showcased at the conference hosted at Uinversity of Wisconsin. Here’s a recap of the event which mentions some of the amazing things the students recreated – from videos of them trying the recipes in the book, to a board game built around the warring robots in the novel.

⮕ Thanks for the inside look behind the scenes in Book Prizes Don’t Work How You Think … it’s more random than you might have imagined … it’s purer than you imagined. Hmmm …

⮕ One of my favorite books, Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi is getting an adaptation … but … this week the author said she wants nothing more to do with the project! Yikes!! Here’s a good breakdown of what it means when an author has the rights to write a screenplay (adaptation) of their work … and the reality.

⮕ What book to screen adaptation on The Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in July and A Bookish TV Guide: What We’re Watching July 2026 is on your radar? I’m looking forward to Enola Holmes S3.

⮕ Check out Libro.fm Summer Listening List: Audiobooks for Every Moment of Your Summer.

That’s it from me. Cheers to the week ahead!