Everything I Read In July (before I left for my vacation)
The conditioning training for the most important reading stretch of the year
Hello from Montenegro! As you read this, I have been living the swim-to-the-island-have-a-cappuccino-swim-somewhere-closer-than-the-island-have-another-cappucino-walk-light-lunch-nap-hour-or-so-of-emailing-aperitivo-hour-solve-a-murder-sleep-and-repeat lifestyle for about a week.
It is not QUITE the summer elegance level of Chloe Sevigny/Kate Moss having a YSL moment, but I’ll take it (also, seriously, how exciting is it going to be to be in our 50s and so so so hot? CANNOT WAIT!)
In what I feel is a rare upper hand in life, I also, (very, very luxuriously) have two whole more weeks to go here before we leave for Italy to face off with all the tourists and also make Jason’s mom’s dreams come true (if you are reading this and have tried-and-true Rome/Florence recs, PLEASE USE COMMENTS OR EMAIL ME)
Because actual vacation reading is going to get its own post (it is a reading season in its own right), the July reading recap only involves thing I read before I boarded that Air Serbia flight at JFK on July 23rd. I still managed to squeeze 8 books in in 3 weeks, and a bunch of them were great, so this isn’t a cop-out newsletter or anything (not that you would care, right?)
ANYWAY! I always think of the final few weeks before the big evacuation vacation we do every year, as conditioning training for that, so the July batch was a noble attempt to get back into murder-y reads, while keeping my literary fiction muscle in check (I like to do “one quality -to- one propulsive” formula for beach read packing).
Shall we dig in?
STRAIGHT UP SUMMER THRILLERS
“Never Flinch” by Stephen King - I love Stephen King and love that he is getting topical. I love Holly Gibney. I love a feministy thriller (see above). But try as I might, I just couldn’t get over the casual unlikability / self-involvement of some of the characters here and barely finished it. Read “Holly” instead.
“Don’t Let Him In” by Lisa Jewell - As a card carrying member of the Lisa Jewell summer thriller fan club, I was very excited about this. And, you know, it was good - very in the vein of what we know and love from her - a classic, domestic, twisted (if not particularly twisty, in my opinion) thriller involving a particularly self-entitled sociopath at the center of it all. But the bar with the last Jewell outing has been set VERY HIGH - so I should note that this is not as great as “None of This Is True” (will anything ever be?) but still a well-above-average devour-in-a-day-by-a-body-of-water read.
- A departure for Lippman - more in the Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club territory than her usual gritty, brainy Baltimore thrillers. It brings back a minor character from her Tess Monaghan series (you can dive in without knowing the backstory, though) - a jaunty, jolly, zaftig retiree called Muriel Blossom (great name) who embarks on a trip to Paris and a mini European cruise and gets caught up in all sorts of murder, international art theft and mayhem. Fun and a perfect summer carry over till the next Osman which comes out this September, thank God.“The Ghostwriter” by Julie Clark - Medium. In fact, I actually kind of forgot about it until I revisited my book notes for this newsletter. “The Last Flight” was great.
MORE ON THE LITERARY SIDE OF THINGS
“Sing Her Down” by Ivy Pochoda - This is a LA novel through and through. Noir-y, glamorous, dangerous, filthy, steeped in its own mythologies - no wonder there is a Michael Connolly quote on the cover, because there is something here for fans of Ballard and Bosch - though, the final result is substantially more literary (though yes, there’s a murder in the mix). A vicious cat and mouse game of female rage and trauma, it is effectively Grecian in the scope of its tragedy (and the chorus of its narrators), which thematically pairs nicely with Pochoda’s new book, which I will be reading too. “Those Women” remains top of the Pochoda cannon for me though.
- I am now at a point where I physically crave reading every Steger Strong book the second it comes out because I know it will change something in me, and whether I like it or not, I will NEED it. “Want” split me in half in terms of considering friendship and wealth/financial safety and motherhood, “Flight” made me reconsider the holiday novel, and now “The Float Test” bulldozes over what a novel about grief and family and agency is about. A story of three siblings (a lawyer, a #financeguy, and most damnably a writer), each at a crossroads themselves, reuniting in Florida after the death of the family matriarch has some of the classic LSS topics: human connection, trauma, sustainability etc, but the writing is maybe the sharpest its ever been (and that’s saying something) and the quality of character development achieved in such a tightly wound novel (it clocks in at under 300 pages) should make the Franzens of the world run for cover.“Woodworking” by Emily St. James - JUST WONDERFUL. A story of an unlikely friendship two trans women (one a teacher barely coming to terms with this realization, and one a teenager and defiantly assured of herself) in small, deeply religious town South Dakota against the backdrop of the 2016 election (and a maybe more important, local one) may sound like one of those books you may not want to pick up because everything in it feels like it would DEFINITELY trigger some sense of recent-ish trauma, but is actually just super funny, deeply human, and incredibly life-affirming in any way. Plus, great cross-generational character development, some genuinely cool plot twists, and dialogue that never feels forced or untrue. Just a delight. I mean, you will get angry, but it will be well balanced by the delight too. Please read this.
That is where I am - for reference, this is where we were LAST JULY (Liz Moore! Rufi Thorpe! All Fours! That Chris Whitaker Book which I remain the the only person in America that didn’t #LOVEit! - all valid paperback choices for this summer, fwiw) - stay cool and safe and somewhat sane until I see you next week (and don’t forget those Rome/Florence recs, please)