Surprise! I’m back with my list of July reading, and I’ve done it by the fourth of August. Would have had it posted yesterday, in fact, but Google/Blogger has introduced (read: imposed!) some changes that make uploading photos extremely frustrating. . . .
But I’m here to share recent reading, not to complain about technical problems. Let’s go, then. . . The numbering here is that which appears in my handwritten 2020 reading journal. . .
40 . I began July reading Denise Mina’s stand-alone mystery Conviction. I love Mina’s Alex Morrow series (wrote a bit about two of those here), but honestly, I couldn’t have loved Conviction more and I’d love to see more mysteries featuring this protagonist.
41. Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars. This is so much fun, very well written, well plotted, the setting of Victorian London seems credibly researched — and highly entertaining.
42. Another book by Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak. I wrote a bit about her earlier novel The Bastard of Istanbul here and about her most recent book here. .Three Daughters of Eve is as entertaining and illuminating and thought-provoking as those two but takes us into a different strata of Turkish society, that of its supposedly enlightened, liberal, cosmopolitan elite. Their wealth and conformity and complicit silences and wilful igorance. But also the eager curiosity and poignant vulnerability of the young woman our protagonist once was, attending Oxford, experiencing an exhilarating and worrisome freedom (see my Instagram post for a passage that illustrates that vulnerability). Another Shafak novel I’m happy to recommend.
43. Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different is another that my daughter Megan passed along (she gave me Semple’s earlier book a few years ago — Where’d You Go, Bernadette? #59 in my 2016 reading list). So many laugh-out-loud passages in this one (see my Instagram post for examples).
44. Damn! Now I’m all caught up in Mick Herron’s Slough House series, and I’m going to have to wait for Mr. Herron to write another of these entertaining thrillers and find out what’s going on with the various characters who have made it through this far. Also will be curious to see if the next one will feature a certain government’s clumsy response to a certain pandemic. Herron has fun placing each volume within a particular political context, so that the reader can play at identifying figures in these roman-à-clef settings. Not at all heavy-handed, and easy enough to miss if you don’t follow British news closely, but particularly with Brexit and party politics the last few years, chuckles of recognition may be elicited. 😉
45. Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew. As I wrote in my journal (photo above) I have longstanding reservations about fiction set during WWII, the Holocaust especially. This book overcame those. Rich, provocative, imaginative, satisfying, disturbing. Sad, redemptive. . . . Recommended. (I haven’t read anything by Hoffman before — have you?)
46. And, as you can see, I closed the month of July with Donna Leon’s The Temptation of Forgiveness. . . .
And I’ve almost finished August’s first title, In the Dream House, by Carmen Machado. Brilliant, compelling, trenchant. More later. . .
Your turn. . . Comments below, please. . . .
Hello Frances. You've been a productive reader during the pandemic. I've had a difficult time concentrating to read. It's an absence I mourn as a former multiple-books-a-week reader. It was my main comfort. I'm keeping up with the books, but not reading them through. I'll keep trying.
Of those you mention here I've read both of Semple's books twice and loved them. She does have laugh-out-loud moments, and I appreciate her loving description of an outsider soul, with a touch of contrarian rebellion complicating things, trying to make her way through the world. I identify with that.
I've also read Practical Magic, The Rules of Magic, and Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman.
Carmen Machado's In the Dream House is in my TBR stack, but is so far unread.
Katherine: I can imagine how much you miss that ease of getting caught up in a book — I have only experienced the loss of that once, and only for a week or so (immediately after defending my doctoral dissertation — such a relief when the will and facility returned). It does seem that you have many other ways to engage with words and stories and ideas, though. . . Poetry especially. . . .
Yes to your characterization of Semple's books. I can easily imagine reading them again and enjoying them. . . .