What I Read in June, 2024

Okay, this is SUCH a late post, and I’m finishing it off in between final packing and trying to organize the condo so that whoever comes in while we’re away finds it relatively neat and clean. A day’s worth of fiddly tasks — refilling paint pans in my mini watercolour kit; stuffing and stitching up a knit raccoon to give someone special in Rome; getting yarn, needles, pattern, and notions together to start another knit raccoon on the plane; returning books to the library . . . And every time I cross something off the list, I immediately think of something to add (bring the recycling downstairs! Don’t forget!) . . . .

These have been a funny old few weeks — hosting our granddaughter and her dog for the last week of June while getting ready for her and her Granddad to leave for Rome, then working through the consequences of an airline strike, his leaving on another airline, while she and I hunkered down with the dog right here for another 10 days. So that when I look back to the first books on June’s reading list, I feel as if it was much longer ago that I’d read them. Good old Time, stretching out as it rarely seems to do for me anymore. . .

Strange month that it was, somehow I seem to have read more books than usual in it. And some really good ones that I’m happy to recommend, although there’s at least one that many of you will have already read. But let’s get to the list and you can see for yourself.

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. Meditation on Murder: A Novel. Susan Juby. Mystery; Set in British Columbia (Vancouver and southern interior); Helen Thorpe series; Butler; Buddhism.

I was delighted to find that Susan Juby has written a second in this series featuring Buddhist nun-turned-butler, Helen Thorpe, as amateur detective. And there’s a promised third book in the works. Good news, because everyone could benefit from more Helen in their lives. The combination of meditative calm and pragmatic problem-solving efficiency is perhaps especially appealing given the state of our world.

Great character development, abundant humour . . . and my province as setting again — this time, Vancouver’s wealthy neighbourhoods for the first few chapters and then we’re whisked off to a ranch in the dry interior of BC, where Helen can effect a Social Media cleansing for her wealthy young charge.

Because — oh yes! — the world of constant visibility, staged selfies, wealth and over-consumption and over-sharing bumps up against one too many accidents and Helen investigates whether these might be, shall we say, “curated.”

Highly recommended — so much fun! and very well-written. But if you haven’t already read Mindful of Murder, I’d start the series there. Both are excellent hammock books!

My Instagram post here, includes a brief amusing excerpt.

42. How to Say Babylon. Safiya Sinclair. Memoir; literary memoir; coming-of-age; Jamaica; Rastafarianism; Colonialism; Education; Development of a writer; Poverty.

Read this because R. posted that it was the best memoir she’d ever read. Not sure I’d put it at the very top of my list (I have 26 years more reading than she does) — but yes, it’s powerful, moving, beautifully written — and I’d say important as well.

A young girl, oldest of four siblings growing up in Jamaica in a Rastafarian family, increasingly isolated from any wider community. Poverty is a factor in her childhood and adolescence (her father, a musician, can only find very limited work that doesn’t compromise his principles — too much offends him as contaminated by Western consumerism, capitalism, exploitation) but gradually the poverty comes to be almost overshadowed by the greater hardship of the stringent restrictions imposed by her father.

The saving grace is her mother’s warmth, creativity, resourcefulness, love of literature, and determination that her children be schooled.

But this isn’t a memoir that assures the reader throughout of a happy ending — although the observant, thoughtful, generous, and lyrical prose throughout suggests at least some redemption. Harrowing and hopeful — and also so much to think about in terms of racism, class, colonialism, sexism, and education. Safiya’s father is not to be held accountable for all the wrongs that these systems allowed and supported.

I wrote a bit more about this memoir in my Instagram post.

43. Bloom: On Becoming an Artist Later in Life. Janice Mason Steeves. Memoir/Self-Help/Case Study Survey; Art and Ageing; Mid-Life/Senior Life Change.

The author is a former psychologist who went back to school mid-life and developed an art career teaching and exhibiting her work. She surveys 138 artists over 60 and weaves their responses together with observations from her own experience, and much of what she offers is encouraging and inspiring: that the “time lost” by coming late to art (such that skills haven’t been developed earlier) is made up for by the confidence and wisdom we have gained about life.

I didn’t find much that was relevant to me, though, because the book focused on those who wanted to build a professional practice out of their art. This isn’t my aspiration at all, so that while there were some encouraging observations about what an art practice can bring to our lives, I found myself skimming the many summaries of, and direct quotations from, the survey responses Steeves has collated.

44. Her Side of the Story. Alba de Céspedes. Trans. Jill Foulston. Afterword Elena Ferrante. Literary fiction; Literature in Translation (from Italian); Feminist Fiction; Historical Fiction; Domestic Fiction; 1930s-40s Italy.

Recommended by someone on the blog, I believe. Was it you? Thank you!

Mid-century (1949) Italian novel set in Rome, before, during, and after WWII.

The first-person narrator- protagonist Alessandra is determined to tell “her side of the story” and begins by describing her life as a young girl (given the feminine version of the name of the brother who died before she was born — whose gendered presence she always senses within herself). She loves her mother, despises her father. Her mother’s mother had enjoyed a grand theatrical career and her mother could perhaps have been a concert pianist, but in marriage she is reduced to housekeeping and child care — except that she helps augment the family’s income by going to private homes to give piano lessons, with little appreciation from her husband.

The daughter realizes that whatever romance there might ever have been between her parents has disappeared in a contractual marriage that advantages her father. She is thus thrilled to learn that her mother is falling in love with a student’s mysterious, refined, wealthy brother — but when the girl’s father refuses to let her mother take Alessandra with her in leaving the marriage, her mother throws herself in the river rather than continue to live without love.

And on this example, the daughter tries to model her life. She puzzles out the unfairness of marriage for women in a patriarchy — but assumes, mistakenly, that if only she marries for “true love” born in romance, she and her chosen husband can balance domestic and romantic life with independent careers.

Finding “the right man,” then, is her answer to a patriarchal society’s male hegemony . . . predictably, especially during wartime — which tends to feature masculine solidarity, sacrifice, heroism — her assumptions lead to disappointment, frustration, and eventually to . . .

anguish, despair . . . and a dramatic ending I cannot disclose to possible future readers.

Recommended. This Cuban-Italian feminist mid-century writings are still very pertinent.

I shared some excerpts from the novel in this Instagram post and in this one.

45. Mexican Gothic. Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Gothic Horror; Feminist fiction; Historical fiction; Mexico; Colonialism.

This jumped into my list when it appeared on the Kobo website for something like $2.99. I don’t generally read horror but remembered reading positive reviews, and I was looking for a page-turner.

And yes, well-written and fun (!) that packs a punch! If Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” were a novel — on steroids! Mexican Gothic‘s plucky Mexican heiresss-socialite protagonist not only contends with sexism as she works to save her cousin from a mysterious illness and a bad marriage. The deformed, exaggerated, toxic iteration of patriarchy manifest in the crumbling mansion of the Doyle family is also racist, classist, and imperialist.

Again, let me stress that this is fun, somewhat campy (as in, the scary stuff amused rather than left me with nightmares).

A quick read but thought-provoking as well. And I’m delighted to discover that NYT best-selling author Moreno-Garcia lives her in Vancouver. Bragging rights!

46. Western Lane. Chetna Maroo. Literary fiction; Domestic fiction; Immigrant life; Scotland; Squash (the game, not the vegetable); Grief.

I’m copying from my IG entry (which I then transcribed into my handwritten Reading Journal, my own amanuensis. . . .Sorry. . .

Three daughters of Pakistani immigrants, growing up in Scotland, have lost their mother, and the extended family have concerns about how well their father can guide them through their bereavement and beyond. In response, he rouses himself from his own grief to attend to theirs . . . by introducing them to squash. The game, not the vegetable.

Slow, gentle, curiously detailed about topics somewhat arcane (unless you’re a squash player — or, arguably, of Pakistani descent, given that Pakistani players dominated the sport for so long) . . . an elliptical but observant anatomy of the grief of a barely adolescent girl who has just lost her mother. A girl who is sensitive to her environment but doesn’t have the life experience to understand the data she’s absorbing.

Bonus: Some sports writing (verging on the philosophical) that held the attention and tickled the imagination of at least one reader (me!) who has minimal — very minimal — interest in playing or spectating. But who adores process writing that transcends its engaging precision.

Definitely recommending this one.

47. Yield: The Journal of an Artist. Anne Truitt. Literary Memoir; Artist Memoir; 20th-century US history; female artist; female sculptor; women’s lives; lifewriting.

The last diary of artist Anne Truitt — she’d hoped she might eventually edit and publish it, as she had with earlier volumes. I’ve not yet read those, but now am very keen to do so . . . yet pleased I began with this one as it is so pertinent to my current curiosity about our later years. In her case, Truitt was still very active as an artist, a sculptor, while also experiencing and thinking about old age — the physical challenges as she tired more easily, was in pain more often. She also writes about the deaths of friends, loved ones, and acquaintances of longstanding — what that loss is like in all the memories it triggers, which are now shared with fewer and fewer.

I could say so much more about this — have bought the book, in hardcover (it’s quite elegant, the cover) . . .but somehow I only left enough space on the page for this paragraph. But I love the book, have post-it notes stuck throughout, and will return to its pages regularly.

48. After Annie. Anna Quindlen. Domestic fiction; Grief; Lives of Girls and Women . . .

Having enjoyed earlier novels by Quindlen, I happily grabbed this from the New Fiction shelf at the library last month. It’s an engaging and enjoyable novel– observant, thoughtful, generous in its assessment of a family going through their first year after the loss of its wife and mother. The eldest child, a teen-aged daughter, carries too much responsibility for her two younger brothers as the father is overwhelmed by his loss and seeks solace outside the home.

No worries — all is worked through by the time Winter — the year’s end — rolls around again to the anniversary of Annie’s death. Loss has been transcended by love; everyone has learned through adversity.

If you like your emotional catharsis neat, this structure will satisfy you, and there’s much to enjoy here, even much to recognize and to think about. But as for getting a bit more deeply into grief’s complexity — particularly for a young girl (in a patriarchal society, obviously) who’s lost her mother, I’d instead recommend Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane. And Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (I wrote about it in this post— scroll down to #62) also grapples more profoundly and more experimentally, stylstically, with a family’s loss of a mother, albeit a family with sons, no daughter.

49. Rules of Civility. Amor Towles.Literary fiction; historical fiction; period fiction; 1930s-50s New York; female protagonist.

My brother suggested this for family book club, and I was delighted to find it so well written, such an absorbing story told by an engaging 1st-person narrator. Katy tells her tale retrospectively, decades after the events take place. Her narrative is triggered when she recognizes a face in a photograph at a gallery exhibition she attends with her husband in 1966.

We’re immediately plunged back to 1937, jazz-age New York. Two young women, best friends — Eve with parental money which she refuses in favour of independence; Katey who must make her own way by her wits (and to a certain extent by her looks, if not by design or, at least, miuch deliberation. The young women bump into a wealthy, well-connected group of young people and relationships and complications follow. Not all is as it seems. Power resides elsewhere than where Katey assumes. There is love, friendship, deception, hearbreak, the satisfactions of work, of a woman building a successful career against considerable odds.

The prose is elegant, effective — and Katey’s narration! The voice is superb — her turns of phrase, her metaphors, the wonderfully rich, elegant, and unexpected analogies she makes — the trick will be to see how much of this voice Towles transfers to the narrator of his subsequent novels.

Oh, and period detail, should that appeal — a delicious book, really!

50. The Heron’s Cry. Ann Cleeves; Mystery/Detective novel; police procedural; Two Rivers series; Matthew Venn.

Another in the Two Rivers series featuring detective Matthew Venn. Satisfying — Cleaves continues to develop the central characters so that we understand and know them better with eaach volume. And she draws ever more clearly the geographic and social setting, the small village with its several sub-groups, its traditions, prejudices, enmities, and friendships. Perfect escape reading.

I know that my rush is showing now, but this will have to do. Time to try for a good night’s sleep before I fly out tomorrow. But you know that when I get a moment, I’ll be checking in on our book conversation here — so if you have books to recommend, titles to warn us away from, reports on the state of your summer reading, have at it in the comments below.

xo,

f