Books I Read in July 2023

Tuesday was Ferragosto in Italy, and once I’ve published this post I will follow the Italian example and use that date to declare myself on holiday. My plan is to be back here shortly after Labour Day (switching languages / countries to observe La Rentrée).

July was a splendid month for reading, and August is delivering more of the same, but I’m getting quite possessive of my time reading out on the terrace. We’re having a long spell of warm, sunny weather (too much so for the birds and beasts and forests and crops) . . . but the last few nights, taking my post-prandial, before-bedtime stroll around the neighbourhood, I’ve noticed that it’s dark by 9. . . My outdoor reading happens on borrowed time now, so I’m hoarding it — I know you understand. Without further ado, then, bring on the books!

I say this every book post now, for those who are new here and as a reminder to regular readers: As usual, the numbering comes from my annual handwritten reading journal, and the italicized text below is directly transcribed from that journal’s pages (once upon a time, I simply included photographs of those pages, but too many of you found my handwriting tough to decipher, especially in the photographed format). Notes to myself, that is, so that I can remember a book and remember my response to it, rather than any attempt at a more polished, edited review.

I’ve used regular font for any additions to my journal notes and included references to any posts from my Instagram Reading account.

41. Open Water. Caleb Azumah Nelson. Literary Fiction; Debut Novel; Black writer; British writer; Love; Black Lives; Art; Music; Writing; Set in Contemporary London (England).

Because I’ve fallen behind in this journal, I’m just going to copy what I wrote on Instagram:

“A friend recommended Nelson’s debut novel, Open Water, and I’m very grateful. A slim book, but it’s taking me some time to read because I keep putting it down to sit with a passage. Normally, I might describe a slim novel that delivers so substantively as “dense,” but that doesn’t work for me here. The prose is limpid, elegant, compelling, lyrical. Where it might be dense — rich, rather — is in the plethora of allusions to music, literature, film, and visual art.”

I didn’t say in my IG entry, but adding now that all these allusions indicate a web of cultural literacy that builds community among Black folk, and there are beautiful examples of this — as in summer parties, dancing to DJ, but also in a barbershop and then again in the letters between the two lovers, the un-naed “you” and “she / her” where the reference to a song or a film acts as something of an “objective correlative” to signal an emotion.

Back to my IG entry: “These [allusions] work to reinforce the possibilities of a narrative of love for a Black hetero couple in Britain (London is the primary setting) where falling in love, especially for the young male narrator, is troubled by the challenges (the impossibility?) of freedom or autonomy in a place where the dominant culture and the authority of the State regularly challenge his very existence.”

Despite this serious exploration, the delicacies and intricacies of falling in love, tentatively, are beautifully and sensuously observed, poetically written. Very different and yet put me in mind of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous.

I’ll likely post a few more photos of favourite passages on my Instagram reading account. I’m always tempted to post more right here, but the post then becomes unwieldy, I know!

Highly recommended to the right readers — you’ll know who you are. Gorgeous and significant literary fiction.

42. The Parisien. Isabella Hammad. Literary fiction; Historical fiction; Debut novel; Palestinian 20th century; Imperialism / colonialism; Middle East history; British-Palestinian Writer.

Again, my entry here follows that of my Instagram post very closely: Rich, illuminating, and gripping. A young Palestinian man is sent to France to study medicine, early in WWI. Realizing, near the end of his 1st year of studies, the way he’s being racialized and observed and Othered, he quits school, leaves the family he’s been living with (and the woman he’s been falling in love with) and spends the rest of his allotted time in Paris. Hence his nickname “The Parisien,” when he finally returns to Palestine on his father’s command. The novel — a remarkable debut by Isabelle Hammond — centres around Midhat Kamal (the Parisien) but offers an array of strong and interesting characters while setting out a narrative of British and French colonialism and — the word that kept coming to my mind even before I came across it on one of Haddad’s pages — perfidy.

Echoes of Edward Said’s Orientalism illustrated throughout the novel, particularly in the strange and persistent note-taking several of the European characters engage in while in conversation with the Arabs they meet. Information-gathering for, eventually, perfidious purposes.

The best kind of historical fiction, beautifully trenchant, nuanced. bold.

A big book, I should let you know, and not a light read, but worth the commitment.

43. Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Gillian McAllister. Thriller; Mystery; Fantasy (Time Travel); Marriage; Parent-Child relationship.

A best-selling page-turner recommended by my daughter — engaging and a bit of a mind-twist!

A woman and her husband see their 17-year-old son murder someone . . . and the next day she wakes u to find it’s the day before (I know!). She gradually realizes she’s travelling back through the days in her life that will hel her understand and, she hopes, prevent the eventual murder and subsequent destruction of her son’s life. Buat as she does so, she gets a fuller sense of her husband’s past than she’d ever wanted.

The science (quantum physics-ish?) is sketchy, and there are some problematic aspects to her meetings with her earlier self, but this plot device is entertaining and compelling. Will probably make a fun movie some day.

44. Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You. Lucinda Williams. Memoir; Musician’s Life; Women’s Lives; Septuagenarian Icon; American 20th century cultural history.

I loved this for its honesty, for good story-telling, for generosity. Especially painful to read about her childhood and about her mother’s (which was much worse). Her determination, focus, and discipline as a teen teaching herself and finding teachers, finding a music community, making a career for herself while working a range of bill-paying jobs — bookstore clerk, cleaner, restaurant server, etc.

All her relationships — so much of what fuelled her songs, provided the basis for lyrics. Her exposure to literati, academics, intellectuals, artists, growing up as the daughter of poet and literature professor Miller Williams.

She’s my age, and our lives could scarcely have been more different, and/but I found her memoir fascinating, thoughtful, and smart. I’m amazed that she’s written it and pulled off a big tour since her stroke in 2020 — We saw her perform last year and she’s still a powerhouse! although she gratefully accepted a stool to sit on when she tired — kept right on singing and playing from it though!

45. The Moth Catcher. Ann Cleeves. Mystery/Crime fiction; police procedural; Vera Stanhope series; female detective.

Another in the Vera Stanhope series — very good, with Vera increasingly self-reflective about the life choices she’s made, about the way she treats her colleagues. And one of those colleagues has something of a crisis about policing. Theme of parents and adult children, of choices we make, the repercussions they can have. . . . And those moths . . .

Passed this on to Paul before it had to go back to the library, and he liked it as well.

46. The Dictionary of Lost Words. Pip Williams. Historical fiction; literary fiction; domestic fiction; Words; Class and Language; Patriarchy and Language; Feminist fiction; Women’s Lives; Suffragette movement; 20th century Oxford.

I loved this book and thought it would read well together with Fayne, although it’s set in early 20th century and Fayne in the late 29th. Fayne is now available in the UK, for anyone who’s been waiting — I highly recommended this in an earlier post.

Pip and her father, their relationship after her mother died so early . . . her being nurtured in this workplace (the Oxford garden shed where her father is one of the men helping compile the 1st Oxford English Dictionary) where words are central . . . but so is editing, curating, collating, and where she gradually realizes the significance of this: that there’s a hegemony at work excluding words on the basis of class and gender.

Her innocence and naïveté, the pain she will suffer because of those but also the way she pushes past many social constraints.

Suffragettes, her friendship with Lizzie, her childhood surrounded by older educated men, her aunt’s support and encouragement and modelling of possibilities beyond marriage.

Also reads well with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which I’ve been re-reading lately — especially when Pip visits the Ashmolean.

My Instagram post here.

47. The Space Between Us. Thrity Umrigar. Literary fiction; Domestic Fiction; Women’s Lives; Setting: contemporary Mumbai, India; Class; Patriarchy; Indian-American writer.

Set in Mumbai / Bombay, where Bhima lives in the slums after having been deserted by her husband, her son lost to her, her daughter dead. She’s raised her granddaughter, Maya, since her daughter and son-in-law’s death, supporting both of them by house-keeping for Sera, an upper-middle-class Paris widow who lives with her beloved daughter and son-in-law.

Sera and Bhima have built a strong relationship over the decades despite the wide space of class between them. Sera has even helped get Maya into college, has given her part-time work as relief caregiver to her aged, invalid mother-in-law — so that Bhima can see a hopeful future for her granddaughter, one that gives purpose and value to Bhima’s struggle of a life.

But now Maya is pregnant and she’s lied about the father’s identity. And Sera and Bhima’s friendship will never be the same.

Profoundly moving, indelible characters, such strength and sadness and insight. The deep intuitive wisdom of an illiterate and uneducated woman . . . . A fictional woman, yes, but representative of so many, and the redemption in this novel is found, perhaps in giving them a chance to be seen. Bhima so rarely was.

My Instagram post

48. La Carrozza della Santa. Cristina Cassar Scalia. Mystery/Crime Fiction; Giallo; Police procedural; Read in Italian (Series not yet available in English translation); Vanina Guarrasi series; Setting: Catania and Palermo, Sicilia.

I wish I could tell you that some books in this series have been translated into English, but so far I can only find evidence of French and German translations (although I suspect that English-subtitled streaming of the TV series will soon be available on some platform or other!).

My Italian instructor Antonia chose this giallo (name given to crime novels in Italy, because of a publisher who chose this colour for marketing their mysteries decades ago) for us to read for our Italian book club. I bought my copy in Rome at super-cool bookstore Altroquando (the bookstore in which I may or may not have made an embarrassing Italian grammar mistake that very much entertained my granddaughter). I only made it to one of the four book-club evenings, but I did enjoy the giallo.

Vanina Guarrasi is a Vice Questore still fairly new to Catania, transferred from Palermo where she’d been called obsessive for her pursuit of the Mafia members who’d murdered her father. Her mother, stepfather, and sister are still in Palermo, and so is the man with whom she lived, whom she still loves. We meet all of these characters when we drive (too quickly!) to Palermo with Vanina.

In Catania, she works to master the local dialect and some of the book’s interest comes from conversations comparing her Palermitan words with the expressions used by her new colleagues.

I wish I’d started with the first in this series, Sabbia Nera, and will probably go back to read it. Vanina is an engaging protagonist — independent, strong, resilient, a loyal friend — and very appreciative of good food and classic films. I won’t tell you anything more specific about the plot of this volume since you either don’t read Italian or you should start with the earlier volumes or you’ve already read the earlier volumes and don’t need any spoilers from me!

And that’s it for July’s reading. It’s been a good summer for books, and I’m working through another delicious stack in August. What about you? I’ll be reading and (eventually) responding to your comments here — I always love our book chats! See you then!

xo,

f