We are halfway through July and I’ve finally gotten my shit together enough to tell you about the 7 books that I read in June! We’re on a big contemporary litfic kick over here and I’ve been enjoying every second.
Last week I renewed my library card, and I did so at the same library branch where my childhood self spent countless afternoons sitting on the floor for story hour and bringing in Josefina for American Girl Doll Day. So much feels precarious and weird and different these days, but for my whole entire life the Ridglea Branch of the Fort Worth Public Library has never been anything besides exactly what I needed it to be. So grateful and excited to have ensured another 3 years of its companionship and exploration. God bless books. Everyone should have a library card!
The List by Yomi Adegoke:
In 2019 London, Ola is 3 weeks away from marrying her fiancé Michael when she’s sent the link to a list of abusive men in the London media world, with Michael’s name on it. Chaos ensues. The List asks us to take buzzwords like “accountability” and “complicity” and actually sit with the messy reality of what applying those concepts in our real-life relationships might ask of us. It also wonders whether we want the most pivotal moments of our life - let alone our cultural idea of justice - to be left in the hands of anonymous twitter mobs.
Unfortunately, this was a miss for me. Maybe I’m just a bit burnt out on cancel culture/Me Too discourse, as the questions and themes explored felt a little dated and forced. But mostly, the narrative structure made reading this a slog. The bomb drop of Ola receiving the list happens like 5 pages in, at which point the main characters immediately launch into a string of frenzied, dishonest behaviors. I would probably also make questionable choices in their shoes! But I hadn’t yet been given any reason to root for or sympathize with these people, so witnessing their mess was just annoying. Adegoke attempts to provide more exposition and better introductions as we move through the story, but the only thing that does is throw the pacing off entirely. Single conversations get dragged out over pages and pages because, between one line of dialogue and the next, we keep pausing for long meandering chunks of backstory. At no point was anything revealed about either of the two main characters that made them feel more real to me, in fact most of the details shared just confused me and further muddied the characterization waters.
In its more poignant moments, The List made me think about the way women often get put on trial for the crimes of the men they’re attached to. It’s being turned into a TV show now and I could see it really working in that format!!
Y/N by Esther Yi:
Another novel about the sticky implications of parasocial relationships! Y/N follows a Berlin woman as she develops an obsession with a member of a K-pop boyband and then moves to Seoul to try and find him.
That is the full extent of what I knew about this book going into it, and it in no way prepared me for what I was about to read.
Y/N is dreamlike and pretentious and weird as hell. It takes place in this universe where every single character is a philosopher and where real-world constraints and concerns barely seem to exist. Everybody is allowed to fully get lost in their quest to define themselves, and we get to watch the way an obsession with identity leads people everywhere except closer to their own truth. The craving to feel like we matter so rarely helps create the rooted sense of self that would truly sate that desire.
I enjoyed and appreciated this. And probably only understood 30% of it. It’s begging to be unpacked in a video essay by some lit student with a very intellectual YouTube channel, and I look forward to watching that.
Her Night with the Duke by Diana Quincy:
I saw someone on TikTok recommend Diana Quincy as a Palestinian author who writes regency romance with Arab representation, and I was sold. Historical romance and summer weekends are forever the perfect pairing, especially when I need a literary palette cleanser. This specific book didn’t really grab me, mostly because for the absolute life of me I can never suspend enough disbelief to be at all interested in love at first sight. Call me jaded, I like for love to feel earned. So I did roll my eyes a bit through Elliot and Delilah’s tortured speeches about their passion for the person they’ve spoken to three whole times, but I do plan to pick up more of Quincy’s books in the future. Just might read the blurb next time to make sure the tropes are more my speed.
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri:
A nameless woman wanders around a nameless town and interacts with her nameless friends and yet everything feels so vivid and memorable. Whereabouts is a love letter to the places that make us up, the way our surroundings reflect, constrain, and motivate us, depending on what we are open to and ready for. I read this in one afternoon and left more present with my own life, more inspired to lovingly observe the world around me. Which is one of the best things a book can do.
Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura:
I promise I had no intention of reading on a theme in June, but Like Happiness is also doing a bit of the parasocial relationship inspecting thing. And a LOT of the discussing the nuances of the Me Too era thing! Tatum Vega is a senior in college when she sends a fan letter to her favorite author, M. Dominguez, unknowingly sparking the relationship that controls and contorts the next decade of her life. Even years after their last conversation, Tatum is still struggling to define and process exactly what it was that happened between them, and to reclaim her story from its entanglement with his.
One thing about me, I love a book where nothing really happens. And this novel delivers on that, slowly, tenderly wandering through years of confusion and coming of age, patiently waiting for the moment that Tatum is ready to name the truth. Villarreal-Moura’s writing style is incredibly engaging and fluid. I read reviews of Like Happiness that criticized it for not having much to say, for the events not feeling noteworthy enough to deserve a whole book’s worth of exploration, but it’s exactly that mundanity that made it resonate most with me.
So many of the most painful and transformative experiences of our lives will be events that don’t amount to anything the world knows how to validate or listen to. People will hurt us in ways that don’t have clear-cut or damning labels. We will be processing experiences long after most people would have expected us to move on. Like Happiness encourages us to see those stories as worth telling, too.
Good Material by Dolly Alderton:
If you tell me a book is about a comedian, I’m immediately in. I think comedians are wizards and gods, being a funny person is my dearest dream and aspiration in life, so getting to spend 300-whatever pages in the mind of a genuinely funny person is something I always always always want to do. You know how earlier I said that one of the best things a book can do is inspire you to be more present and observant? The other best thing a book can do is make you laugh out loud, for long enough that your partner turns over in bed next to you to ask to be let in on the joke, after which they laugh out loud too. And that’s what Good Material did!!
But beyond being funny, it was also sweet and relatable and aching. 35 year old comedian Andy just got dumped by the love of his life and he’s figuring it out. Alderton absolutely nails every piece of the transition from being a seriously coupled person to an unmoored single again, literally every aspect was like yes that’s what it’s like I remember that thANK YOu. Except the main character is a man who is trying to process emotions amid the patriarchy, which adds another layer of complication. I don’t read many books about men. I think I would like to read more books about men as long as they are written by women. Women understand men better than men do and they’re able to write much more interesting stories about them because they’re not trying to protect their character’s masculinity the whole time.
Not Too Late by Rebecca Solnit:
Reread this alongside paid subscribers in our monthly book club this month and felt the same way about it that I did the first time, which I documented in my Sunshine Hunters 101 reading list last month!
And that’s all for me. Can’t wait to see what reading we get up to in July…I’m feeling a genre shift in the air for me. Litfic summer has been great but we’ve got to switch things up regularly or else I’ll burn out and it could take months to climb out of the reading slump. Would love to hear about what you’re reading! Tell me the last book you read and loved but also tell me the last book you read and hated. I love a good, ranty 2-star review.
No, I’m not on Goodreads but I am on Storygraph, and if interested you can find that here!
gonna pick up Y/N asap! love all of this!
Excited to add Good Material to my TBR. I read The Priory of the Orange Tree and the prequel, The Day of Fallen Night, in June and I loved them both!! I got burnt out a couple years ago on bad fantasy, but this was so good and the queer representation feels important but also not tropey or tokeny. Highly recommend. :)