What I Read in June and July

I skipped May because between packing up my entire life in Seattle, spending two weeks gallivanting around Spain and France, and then moving across the country to Florida, I didn’t read a single book. I don’t think I even opened a book in May.

Perhaps on my flight, I tried and failed yet again to complete The Covenant of Water (I swear I really love this book, but it is never-ending, and I keep running out of time on Libby and then have to wait for my turn to read it all over again!).

But I have more than made up for it in the last two months. The first thing I did when I got my Florida driver’s license was go straight to the local library and sign up for a library card, and I have put approximately 30 books on hold since.

The Seattle library system is a book lover’s paradise. They have every new release, often hundreds of copies. But in a city of nearly a million people, there are also a lot of readers. So I often waited months for the most popular reads.

In comparison, I barely wait a week to get popular books out of the library in my small Florida city (I almost called it a town because it feels more like a town than a city).

The only problem is that they are slow to purchase new books. Only one of the books on the recently announced Booker Prize longlist is available in the entire library network.

Somehow, I’ll manage.

Over the last two months, I’ve read eight books, and I liked almost all of them.

1. Heart the Lover by Lily King

What a stunning star-crossed-lovers story. I laughed, I cried, I felt the heartache. Any story of long-distance love always brings me back to my own experience of it, and even after all of these years, that ache still feels so familiar.

It’s a short, quick read, but somehow King manages to make you fall for these characters, to learn about them so deeply with so few words. What an art.

Writers and Lovers is already on the bookshelf behind my desk waiting to be read.

2. The Sons of El Rey by Alex Espinoza

The tale of fathers and sons and grandsons, this multi-generational novel follows the famous lucha libre fighter, El Rey de Coyote (Ernesto Vega) from a small town in Mexico to the big lights of Mexico City all the way to Los Angeles.

Each chapter is told from someone else’s perspective, mostly Ernesto Vega, his son Freddy Vega, and his grandson Julian. But intermittently we hear from Ernesto’s wife and El Rey de Coyote himself.

If you read this for the fun of it, then it’s mostly enjoyable. But I found the jumping back and forth timeline a little bit confusing. The ending was not really that much of a surprise, and I found the characters lacking in depth, and I can’t forgive his mixed-up geography of Mexico City - the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is not in the zocalo; it’s not anywhere near the zocalo! Who edited this book?

3. Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

When four sisters become three, the ones left behind have to figure out how to keep living. This is a story of family, the good and the bad of it all, sibling relationships, and surviving through crippling grief.

These characters are so perfectly flawed, so believable in their internal struggles. I thought the dialogue was fantastic - real conversations between siblings and the ridiculous things we say to each other.

I loved this book despite how often I was crying while reading it. I would definitely pick up another Mellors book; her writing is wonderful, and her characters had me from page one.

4. A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar

I didn’t know much about this book before I picked it up, but it was available in the “new release” section at the library, so I thought I would check it out.

I was unprepared for how tragic this would be from start to finish. A woman in the not-so-distant future is living in India with her daughter and her father. Her husband has moved to the United States to set up a life for them, and in a week’s time, they will be joining him now that they have their visas.

As the book unfolds, we learn that climate change has ravaged the city. Crops are no longer growing, food is scarce, and temperatures make it impossible to be outside during the day. People are desperate.

I don’t want to give too much away, but this book had me hooked, so thankfully it was short because I read it in about two days and then just sat in shock at that ending.

5. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

One of my favorite authors, Reid knows how to write strong female characters and books that are just so perfectly readable. I had to check a few times that Daisy Jones and the Six were not, in fact, a real band because the interview style of this book kept making me think they must be real!

I love how she always brings in a random character from one of her other books, a little nod to her loyal readers. But most of all, I just love her female lead characters, and Daisy Jones was such a likeably imperfect young woman.

6. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

This 600+ page tome was one of the most beautifully written books that I’ve read in a while.

Could it have been a hundred or so pages shorter? Perhaps, but I forgive Desai because we were living amongst her characters for long enough that I felt I knew them. I didn’t mind spending a little more time with them.

A young Indian woman finishing college in Vermont falls in love with a much older painter. He woos her with luxurious experiences, love-bombs her with affection, and then ultimately controls her so much that she loses herself.

In the meantime, her family back in India is trying to arrange a marriage for her with a friend’s grandson, around her age, who is living in New York with an American girlfriend that his family doesn’t know anything about.

For the next 500 pages, they try and fail to come together in different parts of the world. Sonia moves back to India when her visa in the United States ends. Her relationship with her parents and their relationship with each other becomes a central part of the book for a while, as does Sunny’s relationship with his widowed mother.

Sometimes I wasn’t rooting for them. I wanted better for Sonia, wanted Sunny to just stay away and for her to figure out her life on her own terms, but other times I was hoping it would work out for them. It was an emotional rollercoaster that I wish I could ride again for the first time.

7. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh

I have mixed feelings about this book. There were parts of it that I loved and parts of it that made me roll my eyes. But I was still rooting for the main character and often understood a lot of her internal battles despite having a very different life in my early 20s.

Overall, the writing was fantastic, and the societal observations about how we treat people, especially young women, based on how they look were so well done.

8. The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

I went back and forth between loving and only sort of liking this book while I was reading it. I loved how it ended, and so my lasting impression is that this was well worth the read.

Based on a real person, G.W. Pabst was a very successful film director and screenwriter. This book is a work of fiction and supposes what his life may have been like during World War II when he went back to German-occupied Austria to see his ailing mother and was then stuck in the country until the war ended.

The writing is chaotic, like the minds of the people that they are narrating. This meant that I sometimes had to reread a few paragraphs to understand what was going on fully, but the further into the book I got, the more I became used to the writing style and actually came to enjoy it.

It’s some of the best historical fiction that I’ve read in a long time.

What have you been reading this summer?

Simply subscribing and giving this a like or leaving a comment about what you enjoyed about this week’s essay makes a huge difference! If you are a regular Substack user, sharing the post is also a huge help.

If you would like to support this newsletter further, you can check out my blog for more stories and helpful travel guides from around the world.

If you’re traveling to Mexico soon, consider picking up one of my digital travel guides to help you make the most of your trip!

If you really enjoy these stories, consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to a travel-lover in your life.

Give a gift subscription

Until next time,

Laura