Book Shelf: Summer Reading Round-Up

Everything I read over the break: 17 books, 27 articles, recommendations galore!

My summer break from this newsletter stretched on a little longer than anticipated - but I’m finally back! I hope your January felt like a slow (good slow) and warm transition into 2024. I spent the month freelancing, watching RHOSLC (iykyk), and reading. A lot.

Here’s everything I’ve read so far this year. I hope it serves as a helpful guide to cherry-pick from, and come back to any time you’re looking for a compelling novel or article.

17 Books

In chronological order. 5 star reads bolded.

1. Say it Again in a Nice Voice, Meg Mason
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️
   Mason’s first book - written long before Sorrow and Bliss catapulted her to international renown - is a memoir about motherhood. It’s sharp and unforgiving of those around her at times, but most importantly, it’s frank and easy to read.
   

2. Careering, Daisy Buchanan
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️
   I listened to the radio series of this novel, developed by the BBC, and it was a really interesting way to consume a book. I loved the production and pace, but the story itself fell a teensy bit flat.
   

3. Cat Brushing, Jane Campbell
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

   This is a debut short story collection about the desire and sexuality of older women. Its author, Jane Campbell, was 80-years-old when the book was published.
   
   It felt revelatory, daring, whip smart. I can’t stop thinking about the story called ‘Lockdown Fantasm’, in which older people who live alone (you don’t qualify if you live with a partner or family) get a weekly visit from a government-authorised ‘fantasm’, an amalgam of the person’s memories who can offer touch and companionship.
   

4. Acts of Service, Lillian Fishman
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️
   After posting naked photos of herself online, Eve meets Olivia, who introduces her to Nathan. The three enter a relationship filled with confusing power dynamics. It started strong, but the momentum stalled and the story sagged in the second half for me - I just wasn’t invested.
   

5. Thirst for Salt, Madelaine Lucas
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   A woman heads to a small Australian coastal town for a holiday with her mother. There, she meets Jude, a magnetic local man 20 years older than her. Their relationship deepens quickly, and she spends those blurry weeks splitting her time between the ocean and his bed.
   
   I loved it. It’s told from the woman’s perspective, from the future, so there’s some hindsight with that distance (similar to the narration of Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident). Lucas’ writing sparkles, and builds such a strong sense of place through her descriptions of weather and landscape. It’s a novel set in Australia that should receive international attention.
   
   After I finished reading, I looked up Lucas and found this great piece she wrote for The Guardian: My parents’ divorce reshaped our family – but it wasn’t the end of their story.
   

6. Mrs. S, K. Patrick
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   An Australian is working in an English boarding school, and begins an affair with the headmaster’s wife. Patrick deftly builds anticipation, conveys the way a heatwave dials up the stickiness and desire, and spins a story that feels tight and tense.
   
   My one criticism relates to the lack of quotation marks and line breaks for dialogue, making it very difficult to follow who’s saying what at times. It didn’t take me out of the story, and I understood the intended effect: to blur boundaries, to emphasise intimacy, to reinforce the melty quality of the heat and want.
   
   “The sun moves through the final steps of its choreography, striding into the remaining space between us. In the sudden turn I can't see. Her hand finds my wrist and I am pulled towards her. One knee against hers, my hip bone buttoned to her hip bone. … Only a pebble of sun remains in the window's corner. Her face is suddenly clear, free from the bright burn behind her head. A trail of saliva runs her chin. Momentarily gold. A piece of jewellery.”
   

7. Heatwave, Victor Jestin
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   This taut, slim debut (~100 pages) - translated from its native French - largely takes place over a day. The day after a teenager watches a boy die, doesn’t intervene, and then ensures his body won’t be found. The dreamlike quality of that night is only exacerbated by the heat, and the next day, his guilt and paranoia shimmers like the sun.
   

8. Italian Lessons, Isabetta Andolini
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️
   I liked the story - Margherita moves to Italy for work, and enjoys being wined and dined by older Italian men, before she is pulled home to New York - but god this book needed a good edit. There are multiple typos, but other inconsistencies too.
   
   One example: One chapter is headed 2018, the next 2019, the one after 2019 too. In the latter, an invite from the 2018 chapter is mentioned like it just happened. Another: A friend’s new baby, Vittoria, is introduced. Two pages later, she’s Violetta.
   

9. American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld
   ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
   This was a recommendation from

   Josephine Parsons
   , who called it the perfect novel. She was right. Firstly: I kind of can’t believe this book and Rodham are written by the same author. They’re so similar in so many ways.
   
   The cast of characters in American Wife (loosely based on the story of Laura Bush - as she falls in love with her husband, builds a life with him, and finds herself First Lady when he becomes President) feels so real, distinct, and shaded in. Sittenfeld is a genius of character, nuance, and complexity.
   
   I took photos of these paras:
   

   “It wasn't Reverend Randy as a person so much the prayer as an experience, the fervor I would never share. Charlie had traveled outside my reach to a place I couldn’t follow.
   
   But I should note, for all my resistance to organized religion, that I don't believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it. It provided him with a way to structure his behavior, and a way to explain that behavior, both past and present, to himself. Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose-what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?-and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.”
   
   And:
   
   “In my twenties, when I was a teacher and a librarian working with children from poor families, I thought it was the beginning, that my contributions to society would increase and continue, but in fact that was my deepest involvement; in the years since, I have only extended myself from higher and higher perches, in increasingly perfunctory ways, with more cameras to chronicle my virtue. I could have lived a different life, but I lived this one.”

   
   That last sentence got me.
   

10. Open Throat, Henry Hoke
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    I’ve never read a book like this. Told from the perspective of a queer mountain lion living underneath the Hollywood sign, Open Throat uses no punctuation because, well, mountain lions don’t know much about grammar, do they?
    
    The voice is crystal clear, and the lion feels fleshed out (pun intended) in the space of ~150 pages. Set aside an hour or two, get swept away in the flow, and enjoy your time in the lion’s mind. It’s razor sharp and says a lot about humanity without ever being heavy-handed (eg people being so absorbed in their phones they don’t notice there’s a lion just there! A gross man setting fire to a homeless camp. A well meaning young girl trying to domesticate the lion for her own pleasure).
    
    So original, so quick.
    

11. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    This is a divorce memoir told in poetic snippets (Smith is the poet behind the viral poem Good Bones). I agree with Jaclyn Crupi’s assessment that the only snag was a sandpaper-y “tendency to admonish the reader for ‘wanting’ details Smith did not wish to reveal. Sweetheart, this is your memoir and you’re setting the boundaries, not me. Tell me whatever you want to tell me.”
    
    My favourite passage was this one, which I won’t italicise since italics are an important part of it:
    
    ”I flip to the next page and find notes I jotted down about Violet's preschool feld trip to the Ohio Historical Society. The large brown bat, taxidermied. A glass case full of dissected owl pellets, the tiny skulls inside as delicate as sea shells.

    
    We saw a great horned owl, she says. It was dead.

    Guess what the great horned owl that was dead said?

    
    What?

    
    Nothing.

    
    When I flip the page again, I spring forward seven years notes I scrawled during a call from my lawyer, that first pandemic summer. I must have grabbed the nearest pad of paper I could find and flipped to the first blank page. I see the word interrogatories. The question What do they want? is circled once, twice, my pen containing the question. My pen was penning the question, it occurs to me now. Fencing it in.

    
    And this is life, page after page. One life. Zippers and owls and dolls with magnetic dresses. Lawyers and bills and colder words for questions.”
    

12. Cold Enough for Snow, Jessica Au
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    This is a short, quiet, and contemplative book about a woman who takes her mum on a trip to Japan. It is like a moving river with very few places to pause and rest as it carries you along (it has no chapters, and rare paragraph breaks). Despite being just 98 pages, it felt like a longer and more immersive reading experience because of this, impossible to read quickly because of its gentleness and considered word choices.
    
    In that way, it felt like a similar reading experience to that of Charlotte Wood’s Stoneyard Devotional, one to settle in to, not to rush through, the act of reading contributing to the words’ message of pause. Cold, cosy, comforting.
    

13. Baumgartner, Paul Auster
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    
    Auster’s latest is about grief, memory, love, and the smallness and significance of the day-to-day. 71-year-old Baumgartner’s wife died nine years ago, and he’s still struggling to find a shape and rhythm to his life without her:
    
    “I'd been living alone for eight years without feeling too lonely, muddling along in what I'd call a bearable sort of anguished isolation, but the moment you walked into my life, my life turned into a different life, and now I've come to hate living alone. After we spend a night together at my house, you leave in the morning and I'm stranded in the emptiness of all those rooms, wishing you were still there with me, and when we spend a night together here, I'm the one who has to leave in the morning and go back to that empty, haunted house. Loneliness kills, Judith, and chunk by chunk it eats up every part of you until your whole body is devoured. A person has no life without being connected to others, and if you're lucky enough to be deeply connected to another person, so connected that the other person is as important to you as you are to yourself, then life becomes more than possible, it becomes good.”
    

14. Send Nudes, Saba Sams
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    
    An original, and at times uncomfortable, short story collection about young women navigating the world. In one story that still haunts me, a school girl is in a relationship with a much older man. She’s the daughter of a butcher, experienced in butchery herself, and in love with the man’s dog, the aggressive Petal. Reading it, I clenched my toes and squeezed my shoulders up towards my ears. I’m still thinking about it.
    

15. Brother of the More Famous Jack, Barbara Trapido
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    I first heard of Barbara Trapido through

    Hattie Crisell
    ’s In Writing podcast. That conversation led me to this distinctly-titled book published more than 40 years ago, whose cover and first pages were filled with endorsements from the likes of Meg Mason, Ann Patchett, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Nick Hornby.

    
    It’s a coming-of-age novel starring Katherine, who becomes entangled in the Goldman family: taught at university by patriarch Jacob, friends with his wife Jane, spending time in their home as an extra character in their large and eccentric family, compelled by the two oldest boys, Roger and Jonathan. Likely due to it being published in 1982 (I’m typically a contemporary fiction reader), I found it a bit slow to get going, but once it gathered speed, I was hooked.

16. Boy Friends, Michael Pedersen

    ⭐️⭐️⭐️

    Here, poet Pedersen writes to - not just about, to - his dear friend, the musician Scott Hutchison who died just after they’d enjoyed a road trip through the Scottish Highlands. The memoir spins out into reflections on other boy friends, and Pedersen’s own life, but keeps circling, orbiting, pulling back to Scott.
    
    I can’t put my finger on what didn’t resonate. The act of writing to, and in honour of, your friend resonates. Some of the passages, like this one, resonated:
    
    ”Alongside any loss is a web of further losses - all the ripples beyond the immediate; it's never easy to gauge death's impact. The loss of one precious human can cause every member of that family to have to recalibrate who they are within the nexus and how they relate to each other now. Some people are pivotal to the way we interact with others.”
    
    But, overall, I couldn’t sink into the words, found myself skimming their surface. And I didn’t cry. Me - the person who tears up in ads, sobs over books, and weeps in even vaguely sad movies. I never felt close to crying, which was how I knew it just didn’t connect. I battled to the end, and I can recognise it as a beautifully written book (of course it is, he’s a poet). But it just wasn’t for me.
    

17. Just Friends, Gyan Yankovich
    ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    I read this non-fictional exploration of friendship in two sittings. Yankovich argues - through research and anecdotes of her own and from others - that our friends are the loves of our lives, our most important relationships. Yet we don’t view them as sacred as our romantic and familial connections, we don’t have the same language to describe their variations and stages, and we aren’t adequately supported if a friend dies - in Australia, our compassionate leave policies only extend to immediate family and household members.
    
    It made me think, it made me grateful, and it made me text my friends. It’s testament to how much rich material there is in friendship that I finished it thinking about how many facets were still unexplored, and how much I’d love Yankovich’s tender, thoughtful views on them.
    
    For a taste, here’s a good excerpt: A friendship can mean just as much as a marriage, so why don’t we celebrate them too?

I’ve never read 17 books in a single month before. I flowed from one book into the next, managing not to fall into a chasm between reads or finding the transition from one book to the next jagged.

Things that helped: I had more time on my hands during the days, I read more at night (usually night time = TV watching time), and I let myself start a book and put it aside in favour of one that gripped me immediately, if it felt like a slog early on (with the exception of Boy Friends). I’ve never done this before, and it did wonders for my reading rhythm.

I also gravitated towards books that felt connected in some way, building a reading roster centred around a theme. For example, a big run of books - Cat Brushing, Acts of Service, Thirst for Salt, Mrs. S, Heatwave, and Italian Lessons - all focused on heat and/or sex, and they strung together to create reading weeks that felt summery and cohesive.

27 articles:

Looking for an A+ online read? Here’s the best 27 I’ve read recently. Bookmark them, save them for a lunch break or a slow Sunday:

• The Birth of my Daughter, The Death of my Marriage

• Why 75 no longer feels like 75

• ‘Why would you come here?’: The question every English taxi driver asked - Stephanie Bishop’s memorable moments 2023

• A Tuscan Retreat Where ‘Literature is the Primary Value’

• The Personal, Political Art of Board-Game Design

• Bad Waitress: Dying on Your Feet

• How I Survived a Wedding in a Jungle That Tried to Eat Me Alive

• How millennials learned to dread motherhood

• My parents’ divorce reshaped our family – but it wasn’t the end of their story

• How to Feel a Little Better in 2024

• The People Who Brought You Travis Kelce

• I Went on a Package Trip for Millennials Who Travel Alone. Help Me.

• At home with the Aesop aesthete

• Jenny Jackson on Writing Pineapple Street During Bathtime

• Marriage, Monogamy, and Desire

• A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point!

• Do Age-Gap Relationships Work? What Couples Say to Critics

• The Vinted phenomenon: how one woman sold her clothes – and created a billion-dollar company

• ‘We’re very lucky’: He’s 104, she’s 100, and they’ve been married for 82 years

• The year Jeremy Strong brought me out of my motherhood slumber and back to life

• ‘A shop can be your castle’: the surprising rewards of retail work

• The Meet Cute: Julia Roberts Opens Up To Richard Curtis About Her Rom-Com-Perfect Marriage, The Secret To Ageing Gracefully & Why She Almost Turned Down Notting Hill

• RHOSLC’s Monica Garcia Set the Bravoverse on Fire: She sparked some of Real Housewives’ most-hyped drama. Did her star burn too bright, too fast?

• Why it’s time to get a new notebook: ‘To grab at life, tug at the details and hold on’

• How to Write a Book Right Now

• "People are signed up because they want everything from you in one place." How Jessica DeFino built The Unpublishable into a 6-figure newsletter

• ‘I felt rage. I had traded my sanity for milk’: what happened when I breastfed despite the pain

And I’m currently reading Lottie Hazell’s debut Piglet, in which a groom-to-be confesses to a betrayal two weeks before the wedding is due to take place. I sped through 100 pages before bed last night.

What have you read and loved over the summer? Have you read any of the above - what did you think? Any books or links from my lists caught your eye? Would love to hear from you!

Until next time,

Britt

In case you missed it:

Book Shelf: Every book I read in 2023

23 Jewels of 2023

On the power of rest, and a 2023 round-up