July Reading, 2025

We’re in the middle of a muddle here. After busy days with family, both locals and come-from-aways have now gone off to points east and west, but left us with a dog. A very amenable dog, easy to care for although he needs a walk earlier than our preferred out-of-pyjamas time and another walk later than our preferred into-pyjamas time. But at least he hasn’t fussed at the two, three, and sometimes four tradespeople moving through every room of our not terribly commodious condo as they install a heat pump system. We’re on the third full day of disruption, with an end promised at this working day’s finished — IF all goes well. Cross your fingers, please.

The upheaval is all in a very good cause, as has been the process of getting permissions and approvals from various licensing bodies. Even before all the drywall cut-outs have been repaired and the walls repainted, we will have a much greener way to stay comfortable (and safe, for that matter) next heat wave. With the bonus of greener heating through the colder months. Meanwhile, though, I’m hanging out on the terrace with a book whenever possible. . .

Photos accompanying this post are from the bookstore/coffee lounge in the Tirana (Albania) airport, as seen this past April. By now, you know that I can’t resist capturing photos of bookshelves and book window displays when I’m travelling. . .

I say this every book post now, for those who are new here and as a reminder to regular readers: As usual, the numbering comes from my annual handwritten reading journal, and the italicized text below is directly transcribed from that journal’s pages (once upon a time, I simply included photographs of those pages, but too many of you found my handwriting tough to decipher, especially in the photographed format). Notes to myself, that is, so that I can remember a book and remember my response to it, rather than any attempt at a more polished, edited review.

I’ve used regular font for any additions to my journal notes and included references to any posts from my Instagram Reading account. 

First, because I left an important book out of my May Reading post, I’ve edited that post to add the entry for 2025’s Book 29. To save you clicking to that link, and then back here again, I’m including the entry in today’s post.

A bit of May

29. The Safekeep. Yael Van Der Wouden. Literary Fiction; Mystery/Thriller; Historical fiction; Domestic fiction; Psychological fiction; Netherlands, mid-20th century.

A gripping, beautiful novel, an unlikely romance, a thriller of sorts, and, most literally yet most uncannily,a work of “domestic fiction.” That is, it’s about a house and its history, about the family that lived in it, as remembered by its sole occupant –a sad, reclusive woman in her late 20s, who has stayed on after her brothers left, caring for her mother, and who, now that her mother is dead, considers it her own.

She enforces borders strictly with both her brothers, disapproving and envious at once of their lifestyles. So she is very resentful when the older brother foists his most recent girlfriend on her when he has a prolonged period of travel for work.

Isabel is fiercely defensive of her home, suspicious of items being stolen, items that recall her mother, her childhood. But Eva, her brother’s girlfriend, insists on testing Isabel’s rules and expectations. She takes Isabel’s mother’s bedroom for her own; she picks up treasured china, old worn toys, and asks questions about them, questions that suggest there might be more to the artifacts than Isabel knows, or is saying. There might be more to the house’s history than Isabel’s family’s occupation of it.

And bit by bit, she shifts Isabel’s perception of her.

Pausing here to register some gorgeous writing of sex scenes (really chuckled at this line in the author’s acknowledgements, expressing love and gratitude to her family: “thank you all for not talking to me about chapter 10, you’re very respectful people.”)

So much to think about in terms of memory, complicity, the personal and the communal, the lingering, contaminating effects of war. Poweful and, again, beautiful. Recommended.

and now onward to July ‘s reading. . .

38. A Great Marriage. Frances Mayes. Romance; Domestic fiction; Marriage; Family life; Set in North Carolina, New York City, London.

Another temptation from the Fast Reads shelf on a day when I popped into the Central Branch of Vancouver Public Library system. Yes, the diversity of peripheral characters is a bit formulaic and the central characters notably comfortable “American bourgeois” (with a hop over to “cozy-genteel intellectuals” in England). Nonetheless, I enjoyed the temporary immersion in the gracious, sprawling, book-filled, art-studded home in North Carolina where, as the book opens, Dora and her parents are preparing for her wedding to Austin.

Until he shares with her some weighty news he has just received, and the wedding is off. Austin returns to his native England to deal with the potential consequences of this news, and Dara throws herself into her work, keeping the reason for the wedding cancellation to herself.

Her parents — aware of their own good fortune in the joy and solidity of their own marriage — can only support her and wait until she’s ready to tell them what’s happened. And her grandmother, Charlotte — a psychologist and writer whose bestselling books set out the possibilities for “good” or “great marriages — also offers respite, support, and some ideas about what Dora might use to make her decision when she’s ready.

A very privileged context and perspective from which to consider what “a great marriage” might be across three generations. And yes, I did enjoy it — the way I enjoy Nancy Meyers’ films. Meyers did, after all, direct the movie version of Frances Mayes’ runaway bestseller of a memoir Under the Tuscan Sun.

Recommended as a well-written, light-ish novel that offers some substance and insight about romance, marriage, and family life, sacrifice and responsibility — with some welcome representation of characters beyond 50. (But lingering cavil about the role of chance and likelihood–i.e. sheer improbability — that results in groom’s responsibility, the disruption of the wedding, marriage plans.)

39. The Mystery of Yew Tree House. Lesley Thomson. Mystery; detective fiction; The Detective’s Daughter series; historical fiction; small-village English setting.

Stella and Jack — and Jack’s 7-year-old twins! — are testing out the possibility of living together by renting a once-elegant, now-rundown house in a small village. The same small village, coincidentally, in whose cemetery Jack’s mother, murdered while he was too young to have retained much memory of her, was buried.

Stella wonders if this might be too macabre an introduction to family history for the twins, but then the 7-year-olds make a shocking discovery that re-calibrates Stella’s sense of “macabre.” And Stella and Jack have a new mystery to solve — one that’s somehow linked to an unsolved mystery from 1941.

As in the preceding volumes of the series, the narrative moves from present to past. I found the 1940s sections particularly interesting, with their exploration of the role of Churchill’s “secret homeguard army.”

40. Hourglass. Dani Shapiro. Memoir; literary non-fiction; marriage; time; memory.

I skimmed this memoir after a friend suggested it, and I have to admit that I didn’t find it as engaging or resonant on the topic of time, memory, and marriage as she did. Not sure why — it’s beautifully written but felt distanced to me, somehow. And not particularly resonant — our marriages and lives are so different.

41. No Two Persons. Erica Baumeister. Contemporary fiction; psychological fiction; linked short stories; biblio-fiction.

A young woman who has always taken refuge in books and writing is devastated by her brother’s death – and the book that she writes out of that trauma then finds its way into the lives of readers (and the occasional non-reader!) for whom it provides inspiration, solace, or validation. Some might find the individual stories / chapters too neat or too superficial, but for the most part the structure works because Baumeister leaves room for nuance, mostly eschews sentimentality and creates complex characters deftly, sketching lives and settings effectively in the limited space of a chapter.

Perfect comfort reading for bibliophiles.

42. Lessico Famigliare. Natalia Ginzburg. Novel/Auto-fiction; Literary fiction; Literary memoir-ish; Italian history; Italy, fascist years/WWII; family life; coming-of-age; marriage. Read in Italian, but this is readily available in English, variously titled Family Lexicon, Family Sayings, and Things We Used to Say, depending on translation.

Ginzburg called this book a novel — una romanza — but she also said that it was all autobiographical.

Read it for its particular history of one family — Jewish father, mother Catholic but not observant. Ginzburg (her “maiden name” was Natalia Levi) was raised atheist, her father a scientist, her mother interested in the arts, literature, languages, music. Read also for the rich cultural history of Italy during the fascist years leading up to the war, the way that fascism imposed horrors, split families, broke communities, exiled citizens.

Then there’s the father’s bizarre expressions, temperament, intolerance, denigration of wife and family regularly, as asinine. But then also the way he wakes in the night, regularly, to worry about his grown children, the choices they’re making, the likely consequences.

Ginzburg’s style, minimalist but so telling within those constraints, in her mention of, for example, the death of her first husband, tortured in prison. Her repetition of the expression in the eyes of the man who helps her and her children to escape, as he had done a few years earlier, when he’d helped a friend of her parents evade capture by the fascist authorities.

This is one I will get my own copy of, so that I can read it again. I highly recommend you read it as well, and I hope and suspect that Georgia will join me, in the comments below, in singing its praises. She’s the one who convinced me to read it, after all. For which I’m very grateful. (I’m also hoping she might say something here about a poem she recommended to me — if she doesn’t, I’ll get to it later.)

43. The Mercy Chair. M.W Craven. Crime/Mystery; Police Procedural; Poe & Tilly series.

Once again, thanks to those readers who recommended this series (Dottoressa, Sue Burpee, maybe Wendy in York?). So good, but I’ll admit that after reading seven earlier volumes, I’d begun noticing the pattern in which they all began: the scene of a grisly crime described graphically before the narrator moved to bring in Poe and Tilly.

This book begins very differently. Poe has evidently suffered such a disturbing trauma that he needs psychiatric help, and we learn about his recent case by hearing him tell his therapist about it and answering her questions in response. This makes for a markedly different pace, rhythm, and perspective; I found it a compelling technique, and it leads to some exciting revelations at surprising turns of the narrative.

I hesitate to say this, but I wonder if we might be nearing the end of this series. At least, there are some significant changes in the works. I’d place this book as one of, if not the best, in the series, so I hope that Craven has only introduced the changes to keep the series as fresh and entertaining as it’s been from the start.

44. Gliff. Ali Smith. Literary fiction; Dystopian fiction; near future, somewhere in England.

As I indicated in my IG post, early in my reading of this dystopian novel — set in a near future, — there are many passages that amuse, that make us think, that charm, even, with the depiction of the relation between the young narrator and their younger sister. In that IG post, I mistakenly referred to “two sisters”; the narrator’s gender is, rather, evasive, fluid. In this dystopia, in fact, both siblings work to keep their identities fluid, fearing capture, erasure. They are not — as this future society requires, clearly inspired by several of our contemporary social media platforms — “verifiable.”

The siblings are abandoned by their “acting stepfather” who first helps them escape, settles them in a temporarily safe home, after their mother has been detained, their old home red-circled. They discover supportive small communities who shelter them, and help them evade the captors (captors eerily similar to what we see of ICE in the contemporary USA). And there’s a horse — the eponymous Gliff — and philosophical ruminations about what it means to name a horse, but also what naming means more generally. Much playful and erudite rumination about words, names, language, as we expect from Ali Smith, along with references to literature and art.

And there is separation, capture, adaptation/ re-“education” . . . because despite the charm and the humour and the erudition, this is a dytopia in an all-too-imaginable near-future. Nonetheless, I read redemption in it, and hope.

I found it on the Fast Reads shelf at the local branch of our library, and I wish I’d had time to linger over it, perhaps reread a few sections.

That’s it for this post. As I wrote it, the workers have finished, packed up, and gone home. Thursday morning, now, and once I click “Publish” on this, I’m going to spend some time restoring my office to some semblance of order. And it’s bread-making day, always good for pointing me back toward steadiness.

I’ll leave the mic with you. I’d love to know what you’re reading or have read lately. Have you read any of the books I mention in this post? (and if so, do you concur or disagree with my responses to them?). I look forward, always, to our monthly book conversations, and I know that other readers appreciate any recommendations you care to make. Thank you!

xo,

f

p.s. I’ve been getting a warning about something I need to update for the blog, and trying to get up the nerve to attempt that update. Giving my (lack of) tech skills, and dearth of any professional support, in case the whole thing somehow disappears (!!!!), remember that you can always find me at Substack (where I’ve begun including some references to my reading, and find that some readers there are making a few recommendations as well) or on Instagram.