I read so many good books in July! If you’ve been following along with my hundred-book challenge this year, you know I’m trying to read ~8 books per month to keep pace. These are the standouts from July (in no particular order). And as always, these are purely good books, not only recent releases.
When You Listen to This Song by Lola Lafon
Lola Lafon is a French writer and philosopher who was given the rare opportunity to spend one night, alone, in the museum of her choice. She chose the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
The entire book takes place over one single night. What emerges is a thoughtful, poignant meditation on identity, on Judaism, and on the strange way a person can symbolize something so much larger than themselves. She reflects the process of how Anne Frank stopped being ‘just’ a thirteen-year-old girl and became a vessel for collective memory, for history, and for grief, collective and specific. This is a work of nonfiction, but it ties deeply into Lafon’s own life.
This is for readers who grew up reading the Diary of Anne Frank, or for people who spent a lot of deep in researching the Holocaust the way I did as a kid. I won’t pretend this is a light read, so take your time with it.
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
It’s fitting that a book that critiques academia gives itself an unpronounceable title.
Katabasis is a dark, grisly novel about two academics, one step away from finishing their degrees and finding jobs in a terrible market. Their advisor dies under mysterious circumstances, and it’s quickly revealed that both of our protagonists think they might be responsible. What follows is their descent, quite literally, into hell itself, in an attempt to secure the letters of recommendation they need to graduate.
If you’ve read The Poppy War trilogy or Kuang’s standalone novel Babel, this one sits closer to Babel in tone: dark academia, Oxbridge-adjacent, visceral. I wouldn’t call it the best-written book I’ve read this year, but the characters pulled me in and I found myself rooting for them anyway, even in the moments the pacing got a little lost in one of the ‘circles’ of hell. A quick, fun, dark read that doesn’t take as long to get through as its lengthy page count suggests.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
This was my first time reading anything by Joan Didion, which I feel guilty about, given how celebrated she was as a 20th-century journalist, author, and screenwriter. Didion wrote this memoir in the year following her husband’s sudden death, and the book focuses on her persistent, magical thinking: that if she just waits long enough, her husband will come back.
Didion’s voice feels distinctly of its era: direct and unflinching, in the spirit of Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. You can feel that she came from wealth and influence, and she writes like someone who has never needed to soften her words for anyone. I found her authorial voice compelling. I’ll pick up Blue Nights (also by Didion) next.
A Perfect Vintage by Chelsea Fagan
After The Year of Magical Thinking, I needed what I’ve started calling a chaser book, a light read to follow a heavy-deep-and-real read. Chelsea Fagan, who also wrote a wonderful hosting guide, wrote this romance novel set in a French chateau that our heroine is helping renovate into a boutique hotel. Of course our heroine falls hopelessly in love with the son of her employer, and within about two conversations, they are madly, deeply in love. It’s sun-soaked, poolside, the kind of summery imagery that makes for a perfect beach read.
How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang
In this romance novel, two screenwriters are brought onto the same TV project: a Euphoria-style boarding school mystery show being adapted from a book one of them wrote. Our main character’s old high school crush, who has become a writer in the years since, is on the other side of the writers’ table.
The obstacle in the way of their happily ever after? This crush/coworker was the one driving the car that hit and killed her sister years earlier.
Honestly, I had a hard time fully believing our heroine would fall for the man so connected to her sister’s death, even if it was an accident. There are heavier themes here too, including discussions of suicide. I did enjoy this read, in that romance novels aren’t meant to be entirely realistic. (If they were, they’d just be fiction.) You have to suspend your disbelief a little and let the story unfold.
Wild Seed by Octavia Butler
I’m on a mission to read all of Octavia Butler’s work, and this month I finally got to Wild Seed, the first novel in her Patternist series. Her two central characters are immortal beings who clash and conflict with each other over the centuries.
True to what I’ve come to expect from Butler after reading Kindred and Parable of the Sower, this story is deeply rooted in the Antebellum South, and slavery features prominently. Since her characters largely inhabit Black bodies, they must navigate persecution and racism even while immortal. There’s a strong through line of violence in Butler’s work, similar to what I notice in Kuang’s writing too. I’m glad I read it, because Butler has so much to say and I want to keep receiving her message, but, if you’re looking for something light, this isn’t it.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
July is apparently the month I like cry over books (I made a whole video about that last year, linked below), so I’ll close with this one. Claire Keegan is an Irish author, and this short novel ultimately a hopeful message of human kindness.
Set at Christmastime in a small Irish village, it follows one man who stumbles across what we’d now recognize as a Magdalene Laundry, one of the mother-and-baby homes where women and girls sent there were neglected by the Catholic Church, with many mothers and babies dying in their care. Over the course of this short book, we watch our protagonist wrestle with a decision that will define the rest of his life: Does he keep his head down and follow the expected path, or actually do something for one of the girls trapped there? A beautiful slice of life that lets you fully inhabit someone else’s impossible choice.
Those are all the books I loved reading this July. I’ve got a stack waiting on my shelf, and at the top of the list is Girls’ Girl by Sonia Feldman. I met her at an author event recently and walked away floored by her and her presence, so I can’t wait to dig in.
Tell me in the comments or reply to this post: what have you read recently that I need to add to my list?
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