Weakly Struggle | July 19 2026

[00:00:00]Welcome to the weekly struggle where I talk about what I've read, what I'm in the middle of reading, and what's coming up next. And I'm going to be honest with you, this last week sucked. Word got its hands around my throat and would not let go. Not leaving a whole lot of time for reading. So, I didn't get read nearly as much as I had planned to. Shouldn't be surprised.

[00:00:21]But what did surprise me is looking at my July TBR, what I had planned to read this month. I'm almost done. I got to finish about a week ahead of schedule.

[00:00:32]So, there is that. But what I did manage to get in this week was a superhero story, two short stories, a little berserk, and and some monster. We'll take a quick look at what I read, what I'm in the middle of reading, and what's coming up next. The first book I finished was The Return of the Griffin by JCM Burn. And yeah, that's Griffin, not Griffith. Different menace entirely.

[00:00:57]The Return of the Griffin is part of JCM Burn's Hybrid Helix series. The one that kicked off the series was Whisting, which I reviewed a while back and loved.

[00:01:07]The easiest way I can describe this whole series, it's a superhero story wearing a space opera cape. Space opera just meaning it's a big galaxy spanning sci-fi, empires, wormholes, spaceships, the whole scale of the thing. But at the center of this, you have Rohan, half human, half alien, hybrid that used to make a living as a weapon called a griffin. And as the title might give away, the war naming he's trying to leave behind is exactly what comes roaring back this time. What I love about these books is the tone. Burn is clearly having a blast writing them, and it's contagious. The banner is really funny and warm and kind. It's all character first and the jokes are doing double duty and telling you who these people are and then the action kicks in and it's big and it's kinetic and it lands.

[00:02:04]It's a book that knows exactly what it wants to be. Gives you that and doesn't waste your time.

[00:02:10]Here's my honest verdict. And this one's more about me than about the book. Four and a half stars. And I want to be clear, there's no gripe hiding underneath that half a star. I just don't hand out five stars easily, especially this early in the series. A five for me is a book that's proven it can stick the landing across the long ride. And I'm only a couple of turns in.

[00:02:34]Burn calls books in this series turns, which is a nice little detail that I find a little weird, but in a good way.

[00:02:41]So, think of that half star as me giving the series some breathing room. It's not a knock. This was a fun time, an easy recommend, and I tore through it faster than anything else in my list this week.

[00:02:53]And yeah, this one gets my manga approved reading seal for sure. And the second one I finished couldn't be more different if it tried.

[00:03:01]And I snuck this in just at the last second on Saturday. Naz Monster by Nauki Yurrosawa.

[00:03:09]I'll get these names right.

[00:03:11]This is perfect edition volume one, which is the big omnibus that collects the first two original volumes. So, we're talking about 400 pages. I started it and finished it on Saturday, the actual last day of the week, beating the buzzer, just barely. This one's a straight psychological thriller. No powers, no swords, no monsters in the literal sense.

[00:03:36]It's set in Germany in the 1980s and it follows Dr. Kenzo Tenma. He's a golden boy. He's got the career path all lined up in front of him. And to help that out, he's engaged to the director's daughter. And then he makes one choice.

[00:03:51]Two patients come in. One is a critically injured boy and the other is a town's mayor. The boy arrived first. So he operated on the boy.

[00:04:03]And that decision cost him everything.

[00:04:06]the career, the engagement, all of it.

[00:04:11]And then years later, he finds out what the boy grew up to be, a monster.

[00:04:18]What hooked me on this was that the whole thing is built on that one decision.

[00:04:24]And it will not let Tenma off the hook.

[00:04:27]He did the right thing in every measure a doctor has. All lives are equal. Treat the patient in front of you. And the story keeps turning around to ask him and asking you whether he's responsible for everything that came after. And that is a hell of an engine to build a series on. And Johan, the boy, is one of the most unnerving villains I've run into.

[00:04:52]There's nothing theatrical about him.

[00:04:54]He's quiet. He's polite and hollow.

[00:04:58]And yours is smart enough to let that do all the work instead of dressing it up.

[00:05:03]But the real reason I put away 400 pages in a single day is the pacing.

[00:05:08]Usawa's art is grounded and clean. Real hospitals, real streets, faces that look like actual people. And he keeps the thing moving so steadily that you're reading along and look up and you're 100 pages further than you planned on reading. Four out of five for that first chunk. And it's the same reasoning I give for the Griffin and One Piece for that matter. This is just the opening act of a very long story. This one's 18 volumes.

[00:05:38]And a lot of what I just read is just laying track. I fully expect the numbers to climb. I'm a little concerned that with as much as happened in this first book, it can't keep it up for the entire series. And if you're wondering how I managed to fly through 400 pages in a single sitting, it's because I didn't have the overhead of recording the reactions, setting everything up. I was just sitting in my chair reading. And I think that's how I'm going to work these first volumes because I want them to be spoiler-free for the first review.

[00:06:10]And part of spoiler-free is no reaction.

[00:06:12]I did that with One Piece. I'm doing that with Monster. I'll do that with Good Night Pun and anything else. If it's if it's a long series, the first one will be spoiler-free and all the rest of them the gates are wide open.

[00:06:25]And then because I had a couple hours left, I did have a goal in July of reading a couple stories from Ken Leu's The Paper Managerie and I got that done. And the title story for that, the paper managerie is amazing and will break your heart. I read the title story, the paper managerie, and the one right after that, the advanced reader picture book of comparative cognition. That's a mouthful. These are literary speculative fiction, which is a fancy way of saying they've got fantastical elements, sci-fi elements at the core, but they're written with a care and emotional weight from capital Literary fiction. The ideas serve the feelings, not the other way around. The title story is a famous one and it earns every bit of that fame. It's the first piece of fiction to win all three of the big genre awards in the same year. The Hugo Award, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award.

[00:07:27]It's about a boy, his Chinese immigrant mother, and the origami animals she makes for him that come to life. And underneath that, it's about heritage and shame and the way a kid can shove away the person he loves the most because loving them is the thing that makes them feel different from everybody else. I won't say more than that because there's a lot of power in how that lands, but it was it was a wonderful sad story. The second one, the comparative cognition story, is a lot stranger and experimental. It's put together like a children's picture book.

[00:08:06]explaining how animals think and Leo cuts that against a woman who's quietly falling apart. It didn't quite land as good as the first one, but it's a fun read. I'm not going to give those a star rating. It's just too early, just like the Ted Chang from last week, because I only read two stories in the collection, and that feels wrong to grade an entire book based on a couple stories. One fair warning on this one. Seriously, if you're in a fragile place, Paper Menagerie might need to wait. I also managed to put a dent in Berserk, but not quite the dent I wanted. I'm still working through Deluxe Volume 5.

[00:08:44]That's volume 15, if you're counting the original run, and I got through chapters 95 through 100. And here's the thing that keeps slowing me down with manga specifically. I don't just read it. I record my reactions and I go chapter by chapter. And that is not something that I can do curled up with a cup of coffee.

[00:09:02]It takes setup. It takes time. It takes me being fully switched on, which was really hard to do this week. So, unfortunately, when the week gets crazy, manga is the first thing to go. Of course, no spoilers in the recap, but you know, Berserk is Berserk. Still the gold standard of dark fantasy. Still gorgeous, still gutting. I've got three chapters left in this volume and that rolls me right into what I'm in the middle of. So, I'm currently reading two things. So, the big one I finally cracked open Gideon the Ninth by Tempam Mior.

[00:09:37]I'm about 200 pages in and the story itself is just starting to grab me.

[00:09:43]Definitely like the characters and the sense of humor in this one. And yeah, the the pitch definitely caught my attention. lesbian necromancers in space. But from what I hear, this wildly undersells how much attitude and skull and bone gothic weirdness is crammed into this book. And gothic here just means there's a move of death and decay and grand crumbling places. It's the last full novel I need to finish this month. So, it's got my full attention and I will probably have it finished by Thursday. And then, like I said, I have three chapters left in Berserk Deluxe Volume 5. That one's getting finished.

[00:10:20]I may decide to dip into volume six as well. I need to figure out how I want to split up that video.

[00:10:27]On deck after that, I'm adding the last thing for my July TBR. The last book I committed to finishing for this month, and it's a short one on purpose, and that is called A Short Stay in Hell by Steven El Pek. It's a novella, just over 100 pages, and from what I gather, it's existential horror about a very ordinary man stuck in a very specific version of the afterlife. Infinite libraries, cosmic scale, big unsettling ideas dressed in simple clothes. I hear it's the kind of book that quietly ruins your afternoon in a good way. And it's short enough I can actually finish it even within a cramped week. And that leaves the rest of the week open for whatever manga I can get squeezed in. I will 100% get to Vagabond this week. And if I happen to sail through that, I'll sail right into One Piece Omnibus number two.

[00:11:19]We shall see. And here's something I noticed that was pretty cool. I beat myself up all week because I wasn't getting enough reading time in because of work. But then it clicked. After these two books, I'm done for the month.

[00:11:34]I have no more commitments. I get to read whatever I want to, not what some list told me to do. So all the next week, I can do what I want and it's mostly going to be manga.

[00:11:45]I beat myself up all week long because I thought I was behind schedule and it turns out I was ahead of schedule. So I beat myself up all week for nothing. Let this be a reminder to me and to you.

[00:11:58]Sometimes you're doing a lot better than that voice in your head says you are.

[00:12:02]So, crowning a book of the week turns out to be pretty easy. Return to the Griffin.

[00:12:08]And again, I'll remind you that yes, Berserk got a higher rating, but giving book of the week to Berserk would be like handing best meal to my favorite restaurant when all I really did that week was go in and order an appetizer. I already know I love it. It's in a category by itself, so it's not really in the running for this. Monster is the one that actually gave me pause.

[00:12:32]because it came in right at the buzzer and it's more serious piece of work. But it's a four for me at this point and more than that it's the first slice in something enormous. I'll be sitting with Monster for months. Ask me again in volume two, three, four, and we might have a completely different conversation. It might be in the running for book of the week, but The Return of the Griffin is the one that made this rough, stressful week fun. It's the book I picked up to escape and it actually let me escape which is exactly what I needed this week. And I'll toss in an honorable mention to the paper managerie title story which hit a lot harder than I thought it would.

[00:13:17]But again, that's not a full book. The Return of the Griffin is a complete finished top to bottom good time. Best read this week. So that's the week.

[00:13:29]lighter than I wanted, but better than I feared. Tell me down in the comments, what are you reading right now? Anything new? Are you stretching yourself and exploring new grounds like I am? Why or why not?

[00:13:42]And you know the drill. Like, subscribe, and keep reading.