July Reading List (plus a June Fiction Review)
what I'm reading for fun, learning, and inspiration this month
May and June whizzed by in a flurry of gardening, gatherings, and harvesting herbs. Lots of sunlight, blue skies, bird song, rain, and green growth everywhere. July and August will have still more gatherings, more harvesting, and a few music gigs that we are currently rehearsing for.
But I still read! I still find a few minutes a day to read with my eyes, and even more time to read audiobooks. Yes, audiobooks count! For the past several years, about a third of the books I read each year are in audio format and this year is looking like it will be the same.
What I Read In June
Last night I finished The Sicilian Inheritance, a novel by Jo Piazza. It tells the story of Sara, a modern woman whose life is in an upheaval. She travels to Sicily at the posthumous request of her aunt Rosie to discover what she can about a piece of land that’s in the family, to see if she can sell it.
It also goes back in time to the story of Sara’s grandmother, Serafina, a woman of strength ahead of her time, a scholar and healer, as well as a wife, mother, and friend. The novel weaves both the stories, with a bit of suspense in each one. I enjoyed the Sicilian history and culture, the language, the mannerisms, and there is a twist at the end. Hooray for that! I love twists at the end.
I recently finished Lucy Foley’s The Midnight Feast. Meh is my take on it. Better than One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware (more on that next) but not great. I’m finding locked-room mysteries about spoiled, cruel, young, rich people to be samey and boring. Something terrible happened in the past. Someone or a few people seek revenge. They return to their hometown or to a destination and the mayhem and murder commences.
Ok so now I can bellyache about One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware. It was AWFUL!! I felt really angry listening to the whole thing. I don’t know why I put myself through it except I wanted to believe Ruth could write another book as good as The Turn of the Key. Apparently she can’t.
One Perfect Couple was another locked-room mystery. Several annoying, selfish, stupid young/youngish people head to a tropical island for what they are told is to film a reality tv show where they will be sent home from the show one by one during the ten weeks of filming till only one couple remains. Except things go wrong and people start dying.
If the author had given readers someone to root for, an actual hero/heroine, a likeable person, and made it suspenseful instead of completely obvious, then maybe it would have had the effect of Christie’s And Then There Were None. Instead, it’s a no-brainer who the killer is and I honestly didn’t care whether or not anyone made it off the island alive. I gave no f’s.
Oh, which, by the way, that is apparently the main exclamation, adjective, adverb, and verb any of the cast of characters knew. It was f-ing this and f that. Boring! Also Ruth Ware’s favorite filler sentence was: “There was a long silence.” or “There was a long, long silence.” If Imogen Church’s whiny baby voice didn’t drive me bananas (I listened to the audiobook) I would listen to the whole thing again just to count how many time she used those two filler sentences. Because there were many. Actually, Chat GPT could probably do that for me…
So, yeah, June wasn’t a great novel-reading month for me. May July knock my socks off with fantastic fiction.
What I think I’m reading in July (and let’s be honest, probably into August too):
Fiction:
The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes is a new novel about Thomas Gainsborough’s daughters, Peggy and Molly. Historical fiction about the two sisters, one with mental illness, and one who tries to protect her and keep her from an asylum.
Bear by Julia Phillips is another new novel about sisters Sam and Elena living with their mother off the coast of Washington. And clearly, a bear changes everything. I can’t wait to tell you more!!!
All The Colors Of The Dark by Chris Whitaker is toted as a crime novel, a serial killer thriller, a missing persons mystery, a epic love story that spans decades and more. In 1975, in a small town in Missouri, girls are going missing. With all the high praise it’s received, I am definitely looking forward to reading it.
Non-Fiction
Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day by Kaitlin B. Curtice. In Chapter 1, she says “for the purposes of this book to understand resistance as the way we use our everyday lives to exert energy against the dangerous status quo of our time. But resistance cannot only be about what we are against. When we choose to resist something or someone, we are also choosing something else on the other side.” She says that resistance begins with curiosity and with asking questions of ourselves, doing our inner work. I will be referencing this book again as I read more.
The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein is one I’ve been wanting to read for several years. Like John O’Donohue, Rob Hopkins, Vicki Robin and other out-of-the-box thinkers and writers, Charles Eisenstein is unlike anyone else I’ve ever read or listened to. I am thrilled to read this book!
Speaking of John O’Donohue, I am starting his book Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong.
Since everything I’ve ever read from John O’Donohue is so deep, rich, and beautiful, I am going to share notes/quotes /questions each week as I read. I plan to take my time with this one, so I might still be reading it in six months and that’s fine with me. Would you like to read this one together?
If you’ve never read a book by John O’Donohue, I encourage you to make time. He was an Irish poet, writer, priest, philosopher, and mystic who passed away in 2008 and left us a rich legacy of writing and interviews. To get a feel for the exquisite way he thought and communicated, I highly recommend his soul-inspiring interview with Krista Tippett from On Being podcast titled “The Inner Landscape of Beauty”.
Obviously, I have more titles on my overly-ambitious reading list, but that’s where I’ll stop for today.
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I would love to know:
What are you reading right now or planning to start soon?
Have you heard of/read/plan to read any of the titles I mentioned above?
Would you like to read John O Donohue’s Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong with me?
Your bad book reviews crack me up! Lol