.Hi friends!

A special hello and Happy Pub Week to friend of the newsletter ! Her creepy, claustrophobic If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You comes out tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to picking up my pre-order on Tuesday after work. If you need a title for the “book that features an animal” box on summer reading Bingo, it includes a rabbit named Owen Wilson.

Speaking of Bingo, cards are due next Friday, September 6. Submit here.

And, now, what to read if …

You’re Psyched College Football is Back

Mississippi Blue 42 by Eli Cranor

The start of the college football season is one of my dad’s favorite days of the year. Depending on what kind of fan you are, it started over the weekend with “week zero” games or officially kicks off (pun intended) on Thursday with a slate of matchups. If you want more college football nuttiness, grab Eli Cranor’s Mississippi Blue 42.

It’s late summer 2013, and Special Agent Rae Johnson, the daughter of a prominent college football coach, has just completed FBI training. Her supervisors, seeking to take advantage of her knowledge, send Rae to Compson, Mississippi, to investigate dirty money flowing into the beloved college team’s program. A routine, if dull, investigation takes a fatal turn when the team’s star quarterback falls out of a window, lands on a big bag of money and dies.

Rae recognizes the case as an opportunity to make a life-changing arrest — in the first days of her nascent career — and begins to investigate the locals, going undercover against her more experienced partner’s advice, and forming relationships with the fans, coaches, players, and politicians who depend on the football program’s success. What she uncovers causes her to question the game that has defined her life.

Unlike my dad, I’m not really a college football person. In fact, I only watch it when I’m with him and my brother at the end of the year for bowl season. Still, I really enjoyed Mississippi Blue 42. Cranor, a former college football player, shows why the game is so important to so many, while imbuing the book with a Carl Hiassen-esque zaniness and humor. I’ll definitely pick up future series installments.

Bingo box this book checks: First in a series

You Were a Theater Kid

Cry for Me, Argentina by Tamara Yajia

Tamara Yajia’s family is what you