July 2023 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the July 2023 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I've read and rank them from worst to best.
July was a phenomenal month for reading great books. In fact, if an exceptional reading month is measured by the amount of 10/10 books finished, this might be my best month ever. I read four 10/10 books over the course of the month - Ann Patchett’s wonderful, cherry-filled latest, a heart-wrenching novel about forbidden love in World War I, a sister’s search for justice for her murdered brother in a refugee enclave in Australia, and a story of friendship and youth in Cork, Ireland. I also read two great non-fiction books, six debuts, and an epistolatory novel that made me continuously laugh out loud. As summer winds down, I encourage you to soak in free time with a good book. Happy reading!
July 2023 Reading Statistics
Number of Books Read: 13
Genre Breakdown: 85% fiction (11 books), 15% non-fiction (2 books)
Average Rating: 8.7/10
Pulitzer Winners Read: 0
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13. Bad Summer People - Emma Rosenblum
Fiction/Mystery, 257 pages
Salcombe, Long Island is a summer town. As soon as school lets out in June it fills to the brim with affluent families escaping Manhattan and Westchester to play tennis and day drink all summer long. This includes the Parkers and Weinsteins, two couples with pre-problems that continue on the island. Bad Summer People begins at the end of the summer with the discovery of a body. It then rewinds to June with the arrival of all the families, counting down the time until someone winds up dead. Given the general bad behavior of all the summer vacationers, truly anyone could be the suspect and anyone the victim. Bad Summer People had the foundations to be a good beach read, but had some major flaws. My biggest critique was the dialogue, which did not mirror how real people talk. Sometimes I’d read a line two or three times waiting for the normalcy to click, but it never did. It was stilted, robotic and distracted from the story. There were also too many characters to keep track of, some of whom had shockingly similar names (you cannot have a Jen and Jeanette). On the plus side, it made me interested in going to Saltaire, Fire Island, the town that this one was based on. Seems gorgeous.
Rating: 7/10
12. Women Talking - Miriam Toews
Fiction, 240 pages
In a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, eight women convene to conduct a secret meeting to determine their fates. Sheltered from the trappings of the modern world, these women speak in German and are illiterate. For the past two years, more than a hundred girls and women in this colony have been drugged and raped by the men in their community during the night. For the past two years they have been gaslit into thinking that the pain they wake with is the result of demons that visit them in their dreams to punish them for bad behavior. Now that they know what has really taken place, they must confront a life-altering decision. Should they stay in the world that they know, in which they speak the language and know the customs, while remaining amongst their abusers? Or should they leave and strike out on their own?
Women Talking is narrated by a male outsider who comes back to teach in the colony and is recruited to record the meeting minutes. Maybe the choice of narrator was intentional and meant to convey a specific message, but I was distracted by the fact that a book called Women Talking, about the empowerment of previously undervalued and oppressed women, was transcribed and dictated by a man. I would be curious to see if this critique holds in its recently adapted movie-form, and how a book centered mostly around dialogue (albeit, dialogue about dramatic and horrific events), translates to the screen.
Rating: 7.5/10
11. Out of Love - Hazel Hayes
Fiction, 404 pages
The traditional structure of a romance novel goes as follows: two people meet, fall madly in love despite extraordinary circumstances, have a conflict that tests the relationship, and ultimately, get back together and live happily ever after. Out of Love flips the genre on its head, starting at the end of a doomed relationship and moving backwards in time to explore where and why it went wrong. In the first chapter the unnamed protagonist is handing over the final boxes to her ex-boyfriend Theo, who has recently moved out. She is devastated but healing, and while it might initially appear that she is struggling to figure out the cause of their demise, the reasons become clearer as the story moves back in time. Formative moments mentioned in passing in an early chapter are explored in depth later on, as the book covers the five years that they spent together and the challenges that they each faced inside and outside of the relationship. I found this to be a compelling debut that utilized an innovative structure. The plot moved quickly and I was invested in the characters, not because I needed to find the exact moment that things went sour, but because I was generally interested in the lives that Hazel Hayes had built.
Rating: 8/10
10. The Shell Collector - Anthony Doerr
Fiction/Short Stories, 218 pages
Readers will best know Anthony Doerr for his 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See or his most recent Cloud Cuckoo Land. Lesser known is The Shell Collector, a 2002 debut short story collection. Each story stands alone, but all are deeply rooted in the natural world. Stretching from Tanzania to Montana, Liberia to Oregon, each story centers around humanity’s relationship with the world around it and the eternal conflict between man and the wild. In one of my favorites, a hunting guide in Montana struggles through a harsh and frozen winter with his new bride. In another, a woman runs off with a circus-act metal eater to travel the world, leaving her younger sister behind in their Idaho town to care for their mother. Each story is written immaculately and in intense detail (although it would probably be less acceptable today for a white author to write from all of the perspectives that he does). I gave the collection an 8/10 not because it wasn’t excellently constructed - Anthony Doerr’s talent is abundantly apparent over a decade before he became internationally known, but because stories with lots of detailed descriptions of nature just don’t seem to be my thing. If that does interest you, however, I can imagine that this might be one of the best collections around.
Rating: 8/10
9. Call and Response - Gothataone Moeng
Fiction/Short Stories, 288 pages
Call and Response is another debut short story collection, this one by a young Botswanan author, set in the village of Serowe and Gaborone, the capital city of the country. Each story focuses on a different young person struggling with questions of expectation, tradition, and generational conflict. In one story, a young widow wears traditional mourning clothes for a year to protect herself from the speed at which everyone else seems to have moved on from her husband’s death. In another, a boy raised by his grandmother and uncle comes of age in conjunction with the growth of a new, independent Botswana, charting a new life as a professor while also taking on the responsibility of maintaining the family’s cattle herd. Although not every story grabbed me in the same way, I really enjoyed getting a glimpse into the communities, cities, and expectations of ordinary Botswanan people, many living on the cusp of their country’s political change.
Rating: 8/10
8. Poverty, By America - Matthew Desmond
Non-Fiction/Sociology/Current Events, 189 pages
In his second book since winning the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 2017 for Evicted, sociologist Matthew Desmond explores how and why immense, debilitating poverty exists within the United States, one of the richest countries in the world. Instead of using individual stories to highlight the toll of poverty like he did in Evicted, Desmond takes a more abstract tact, pointing to larger social trends, the impact of individual choices, and the role of government programs that contribute to this major problem. Desmond points his finger at the ordinary middle and upper class consumer for being complicit in systems that perpetuate poverty. This complicity exists in exclusionary zoning, tax breaks for the rich, and our reliance on convenience and low prices through non-unionized platforms like Amazon or food delivery drivers. In response, Desmond calls not just for an expansion of the social safety net, but also for a way to make the system less complicated, citing numerous studies that show that when programs are made easier to sign up for, more people are able to receive help. Ultimately, this book reads like a well-written and engaging academic article. Indeed, his citations take up nearly as many pages as the body. It is engaging, well-researched, and deftly argued. Desmond’s goal, it seems, is to not just convince those who might not agree with him, but to also raise awareness about our collective role in what he argues are under appreciated issues.
Rating: 8.5/10
7. Yellowface - R.F. Kuang
Fiction, 318 pages
June Hayward is a white writer with a measly debut to her name. In contrast, Athena Liu, her friend from college (Yale), is an Asian American author with books so successful, she recently signed a deal with Netflix to adapt one for TV. After Athena dies in a freak accident with June as a witness, June swipes her nearly finished typewritten manuscript off her desk to pass as her own. With a few changes, June sends her agent what she thinks should be her magnum opus - the story and tragedy of the Chinese Labour Corps during World War I. The book is an instant success, but as it becomes more popular, June must confront questions not only of its authorship, but also of cultural appropriation. June, whose first person narration guides Yellowface, fundamentally does not understand what she has done wrong. Believing herself to be the victim of a society that doesn’t value her work as a white woman, June keeps digging herself deeper into a hole and inching closer to exposure.
Yellowface is a satirical commentary on race, appropriation, and authorship. It is also an unsubtle critique on the publishing industry and society’s consumption of media. While I enjoyed reading it and was interested in the points that Kuang made, I can’t say that the book represented the height of literary craft. Additionally, Yellowface felt like a combination of Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot and Elaine Hseih Chou’s Disorientation; the first a story about a stolen novel and the second a satire about cultural appropriation and racial masquerading in an academic setting. Unfortunately for Kuang, I thought that those two books were better on sentence, structure, and plot levels. That’s not to say that Yellowface was bad - it was extremely propulsive and contained important cultural and industry critiques - it just didn’t feel as innovative as it was trying to be.
Rating: 8.5/10
6. A Fever in the Heartland - Timothy Egan
Non-Fiction/History, 404 pages
The rise of the second wave of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1900s centered heavily in the American midwest. Amongst the men and their sons who fought for the Union in the Civil War, D.C. Stephenson and his fellow brethren grew a massive, tentacled organization based on their worst prejudices and hatreds. Within two years of arriving in Indiana, Stephenson had situated himself as the Indiana KKK’s Grand Dragon, preaching the necessity of white, Christian dominance. His members included farmers, ministers, police officers, and politicians. Away from the public eye, however, this seemingly untouchable man had a reputation for being a violent womanizer. Stephenson’s power only faltered after brutally raping a woman and leaving her for dead, setting into motion a concurrent effort to discredit Stephenson while maintaining the legitimacy of the national Klan movement.
The jacket description of this book argues that a “powerless woman,” the victim of his brutal rape, brought the “Klan to their knees.” While she certainly dethroned Stephenson and weakened the Indiana branch, it might be an overstatement to say that she dismantled the Klan from her deathbed. Indeed, Egan himself writes about the screening of the Birth of a Nation at the White House and the massive 1926 Klan march on Washington; all while Stephenson awaited justice. Despite this seeming contradiction, the book was well-researched and the story well-told, focusing on personal narratives to make larger points.
Rating: 8.5/10
5. Dear Committee Members - Julie Schumacher
Fiction, 180 pages
Professor Jason Fitger is a middle-aged novelist and English professor at a mid-tier college in the midwest in 2009. As the budget for the English department gets slashed in favor of more profitable subjects (see: the economics department renovation that leaves the English department encased in a layer of toxic construction dust), Professor Fitger is forced to teach more classes to more mediocre students. As a result, he is also asked to write an alarming amount of letters of recommendation, which Professor Fitger takes on as his solemn duty to academia. Dear Committee Members is told through a series of letters of recommendation for everyone from graduate thesis advisees, to departmental administrators, to students who have not even taken his class. Unable to confine himself to the typical standards of such a letter, Professor Fitger uses the opportunity to expound upon the sorry state of the university, the job market, his personal life, his career as a novelist, and his opinions of the institutions that he is writing to.
On the surface, the premise of this book sounds a bit bland. In reality, it is uproariously funny. Laugh out loud funny. I went back to re-read certain letters that made me guffaw in public. Schumacher has created something incredibly smart and well-crafted; somehow fitting a much larger story about the state of academia in a recession era economy into a series of unimportant yet hilarious letters of recommendation.
Rating: 9/10
4. In Memoriam - Alice Winn
Historical Fiction, 383 pages
In Memoriam is in equal parts a war and love story centered around two young men who fall in love while in British boarding school before being sent to fight in the trenches of World War I. Sidney Ellwood and Henry Gaunt (both referred to by their last names throughout the book) come from privileged, aristocratic backgrounds. They have different opinions on the legitimacy of the war, but in 1914 one’s honor is tied to one’s commitment to his country. Their enlistment guarantees an officer rank due more to their social status than to any experience or training, and they are almost immediately sent to the trenches in Belgium where any remaining idealism about the heroics of war are quickly shattered by brutality all around them. The men they are tasked with leading die in droves and boys with whom they grew up are constantly added to their school’s in memoriam list. The two rely on one another throughout it all, until an ill-fated scouting trip ends in Gaunt with a bullet hole in his chest, leaving Ellwood without a friend and partner to continue fighting for.
In Memoriam is a remarkable debut novel with gravitas befitting a much more experienced writer. I felt completely immersed in the world that Alice Winn built, from the schoolboy idealism, to the horrors of the trenches, to the escapades in a POW camp. While In Memoriam is fast-paced and driven by the current of the war, it is also an intimate character study on boys forced to grow into men too quickly. It is a statement on boys who loved each other without the words to always define what they were feeling within a society that criminalized anything even remotely resembling their relationship. It is also a commentary on class and privilege, on patriotism and duty, and the fragility of hundreds of thousands of lives fighting a long and incomprehensible battle. I was moved and elated by this beautiful story, drawn in from the very first page and committed until the last.
Rating: 10/10
3. The Rachel Incident - Caroline O’Donoghue
Fiction, 304 pages
While working at a bookstore in Cork, Ireland, Rachel, a student finishing her final year of university, meets James, a closeted high school graduate. The 2010 Recession is in full swing, Ireland having been hit particularly hard, and Rachel is unsure what she will do with her English degree after she graduates. Rachel and James develop a quick and tight-night friendship, choosing to move in together when James admits that he is need of a roommate. They tell each other everything and are unfailingly loyal to one another, including and until Rachel tells James about a crush on her married professor. Intending to facilitate their relationship, James organizes a scheme for Rachel to seduce him, but instead ends up in a relationship with the professor himself. Their secret romance sets off a cascade of intertwined events between Rachel, James, the professor, and his well-connected wife as Rachel and James try to figure out the next steps for their future.
This is a beautifully written, expertly crafted, character-driven novel filled with humor. It is the story of friendship, hardship, young adulthood, and discovery. It is an exploration of power dynamics and their fragility. It is filled to the brim with dysfunction but also tenderness, and I loved every second of it.
Rating: 10/10
2. All That’s Left Unsaid - Tracey Lien
Fiction, 293 pages
As soon as she’s able, Ky Tran leaves the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta where she grew up to go college and become a journalist. 1990s Cabramatta, home to thousands of Vietnamese refugees like members of her family, is devastated by violent gangs and a heroin epidemic. After Ky receives a call that her beloved younger brother Denny has been brutally assaulted and murdered while celebrating his high school graduation with classmates at a restaurant, she is shocked. Denny was a good kid, was never in trouble, and had excellent grades. The police appear indifferent to Ky’s pleas for answers, overwhelmed by the scourge of violence facing the city and accepting as true the dubious claims that none of the dozen customers at the restaurant saw anything. Home for Denny’s funeral, Ky takes it upon herself to investigate what actually happened, hoping that she, a member of this community, can convince people to talk.
All That’s Left Unsaid is a wondrous, beautiful book. It is incomprehensible that this is a debut, because Lien has created a nearly perfectly crafted story that transcends the thriller genre and places itself squarely within the category of excellent literary fiction. Alternating between Ky’s perspective and the perspectives of the people at the restaurant that night, readers are exposed not just to the story of Denny and Ky, but also to the lingering impacts of war in Vietnam, colonialism, poverty, addiction, and the struggle to survive in an unfamiliar place. I was captivated by the very first sentence of this haunting story and urge everyone to pick it up.
Rating: 10/10
1. Tom Lake - Ann Patchett
Fiction, 309 pages
The cherry harvest season in Northern Michigan is always tenuous and stressful, connected to the calendar, weather, and ability to get the fruit to market. This is especially true in the late spring and early summer of 2020, with the pandemic limiting the Nelson’s labor supply and leaving much of the harvest to the family to complete; Lara, our narrator, her husband Joe, and their three adult daughters who have returned home to quarantine. To pass the time as they pick cherries, Lara tells her daughters the story of one summer in her early twenties when she was acting in a northern Michigan summer stock production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town alongside the soon to be famous actor, Peter Duke. The daughters, who know vaguely of their mother and Duke’s brief romantic relationship, listen raptly as Lara reveals hitherto unknown details about her youth, brief acting career, and path that led her to the orchard. The story unfolds on a parallel track to their own young lives, in which they face similar quandaries of love, youth, and the charting of one’s future.
Tom Lake is an incredible feat of writing. In many ways three stories are happening all at once - the Our Town play, Lara’s youth, and the pandemic present. They are perfectly paced and weaved together, creating a magnificent structural feat. I swear I’m not raving about Tom Lake only because I love Ann Patchett (although it’s true, I do love Ann Patchett and am in constant amazement at the depth of her writing). I felt moved by every character, drawn to every detail of the story, and comforted by Lara’s cadence. Tom Lake is as heartfelt as it is heart-wrenching, written by an author who has honed her craft and deserves every heap of praise she is given. Also, make sure you have cherries nearby while you read. You’re going to crave them.
Rating: 10/10
All of the books written about above are available on my July 2023 Reading Round-Up Bookshop page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. All of the books I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, are also available on the general shop page.
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Want to see last month’s round up? You can find that here.