The past month has included yellow (June) and green (July) books. This included finally having multiple 5-star reads after several months without!
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen by Jose Antonio Vargas: This was surprising, informational, and heartfelt. Vargas was sent to the United States when he was 12; he didn't know until he was 16 that his green card and passport were fake. Following this have been decades of trying to survive in the United States. I thought this was excellent and a great book for any American to read.
Laundry Love: Finding Joy in a Common Chore by Patric Richardson with Karin B. Miller: This was, indeed, a joyful book about laundry! This was my Best of the Bunch for June. While it may be challenging for me to adopt Richardson's methods wholesale, I found the practical tidbits throughout to be invaluable. This is definitely a book I wouldn't mind having a hard copy of for reference in the future!
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby: As with most "humor" books, this was fine, but it wasn't really for me. There were lines here and there that made me laugh, but mostly I just wanted her to have some self-compassion, set boundaries, embrace her uniqueness, and stop doing things that made her miserable while trying to fit some mold of what she thinks a likeable person is supposed to be like.
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang: I think I'm a bit too literal-minded for a book like this. To be clear, I think it's a great depiction of how discrimination and stereotyping can affect someone, as well as just being a spot-on representation of the angst of adolescence. I wish the way it all tied up worked better in my brain.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl: This was a lovely little book of poetic essays. Renkl alternates between stories of the natural world in her backyard and stories from her family. I'm not sure there's anything in particular that will stick with me from this volume, but perhaps if I'd read it over months, reading a chapter (which is only a page or two) each night, I would have absorbed it more deeply.
Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley: This was a memoir told through illustrations of Knisley's experiences growing up in a family that valued good food and having memorable food experiences on various international trips. On the whole, while there wasn't anything that really jumped out at me to make this a memorable read, it was a cute journey through Knisley's food experiences and worth the couple of hours it took to read.
Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly: Perhaps it is being a woman of a certain age, but I loved this collection of micro-memoirs. Fennelly's life may not have a single, unusual, captivating narrative to it, but it has certainly contained unusual and captivating moments, and they are no less worth sharing. And, she seems to imply, neither are ours.
Well Met by Jen DeLuca: This was cute! I flew through it in less than two days. I still don't entirely understand declaring your love for someone solely because you've flirted / made out with them, but if I accept the usual rhythms of this genre, this was a pretty good one. I wouldn't mind reading another one in this series.
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong: This was fascinating from start to finish. I adore Ed Yong's writing as well as his audiobook narration. It would never have even occurred to me to compile in one place a survey of the ways that animals perceive the world, and I haven't seen anything like this before. I was enthralled. I highly recommend this one, especially on audio!
Heartstopper: Volume Six by Alice Oseman: Every installment of Nick and Charlie's story has been pitch perfect, and this final volume is no exception. I highly recommend the entire series.
The Postscript Murders by Elly Griffiths: The character exposition here was so clunky I almost put the book down, but I'm glad I persevered because I ended up really enjoying the mystery! This was one that kept me up late several nights in a row, which is something that hasn't happened for a while. I wouldn't have thought it when I started, but I'd definitely be down for reading another mystery by Griffiths!
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward: I keep trying and failing to enjoy literary fiction. It's not that I don't get it, or that I don't have empathy for the characters, but the characters make questionable choices, the sentences are packed full to bursting with similes, and the ending offers only small scraps of consolation for the bleakness you've just endured. I think this would be great for a book club and great for an English class, but it wasn't great for me personally.
Looking back:
One year ago I was reading: You Know, Sex, Dracula, The Name of the Wind, More Than Two, Catfish and Mandala, and Marble Hall Murders
Five years ago I was reading: Lovecraft Country, Womanist Midrash, and A Promised Land
Ten years ago I was reading: Never Let Me Go and Philippine Duchesne: A Woman with the Poor
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