I took two weeks off in July to travel, and it’s the first time in five years or more that a month of mine has looked this thin. I still read and listened some, just nowhere near my normal pace. We were active every single day, hiking and biking and kayaking, up early and out until our heads hit the pillow exhausted. Not the kind of vacation where you read on a beach or in bed with a flashlight, more the kind where a few pages or a stretch of an audiobook happened here and there, squeezed in around everything else. I’m not mad about it. I’d trade reading numbers for a trip like that every time. But it means this month’s table of contents is shorter than usual, so let’s get into it.
By the numbers
Books finished: 6, all free from the library
Google searches: 3 rabbit holes, including one on the My Lai massacre I somehow never learned about in school, and a whole tangle of misspelled Irish mermaid folklore
Emotional essays incoming: 1
Reading trees growing: 1 new branch this month (I, Medusa extends the Stone Blind tree)
Stars: one 5 star, one 4.5 star, one 3.5 star, three 3 star
Format split: 3 audiobooks, 2 ebooks, 1 physical
Narrators: Mara Wilson (Women’s Hotel), Barrie Kreinik (The Sirens), Nicole Lewis (Such a Fun Age)
Listening time: just under 30 hours at normal speed, about 19.7 hours at my usual 1.5x
Days of my life: roughly a day and a half spent with a book this month
Top genre: literary fiction
Currently reading: A Thousand Ships (audiobook, 75%) and Six of Crows (ebook, 20%)
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy
📖 Physical (Library) ⭐⭐⭐
I didn’t know much going in beyond a few social accounts recommending it, and that was probably better. Fast read, heavy topic, a teenage girl and her relationship with her teacher, handled without flinching and without letting you off easy either. I read it as a break from a much heavier WWII audiobook, and it still ended up sitting with me more than a filler read should. Landed at three stars, mostly because the ending did not resolve quite as much as I wanted.
Coming up: no article for this one, just the review. It was a palate cleanser, not a rabbit hole. (Quick note: I actually finished this one in June. June’s recap had already gone out by the time I processed the dump, so it’s living here instead.)
Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐
Picked this up because it was sitting there on Libby and I’d seen it floating around social somewhere. Slow, patient ensemble novel set in a 1960s women’s residential hotel modeled on the real Barbizon. Wasn’t blown away, but the ending caught me more off guard than I expected from a book that spent most of its runtime just introducing people to me.
Coming up: a Things I Googled article about the hygiene rules these hotels actually enforced, and a Who I Became piece about the strange split feeling of reading how limited women’s choices were then versus now.
Buckeye by Patrick Ryan
📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I only picked this up because it was popular a while back, had great reviews, and there was no wait for it at the library, so no excuse not to. It’s told in parts, and I almost bailed early because the start felt slow, but by Part II I was completely hooked, and I finished it bawling on the last night. This might end up being a top tier read for me this year. I still need to sit with it a little longer before I can say that for sure.
Coming up: a Things I Googled article, since a passage about Tom’s teenage years sent me down two different holes, whether there were ever any famous redheads before a certain era, and later the My Lai massacre, which I somehow never learned about in school.
The Sirens by Emilia Hart
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐
Several storylines were running at once with flashbacks woven through, and it kept my attention the whole way, even though I wished the ending had leaned harder into the art thread since I love artists and their whole live your passion existence. What really stuck with me was the thread connecting mermaid folklore to Ireland. I came out of it with a list of googled terms, an Irish word for mermaid, a sea lullaby the characters kept singing, and the name for an underwater world in Irish myth.
Coming up: a Things I Googled article untangling all of that Irish mermaid folklore, since half of what I searched for was spelled wrong and I need to actually get it right.
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.5)
No reading tree connection on this one, just a book that kept showing up with good reviews and was sitting there available on Libby, so I grabbed it. It juggles several storylines at once and never lost me, and the narrator’s voice for Briar, the little girl at the center of it, was one of my favorite parts of the whole listen. It handles race in a way that felt honest without turning into a lecture, and I’m already planning to read more from Kiley Reid because of it.
Coming up: no article this time, it was just a genuinely good read.
I, Medusa by Ayana Gray
📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐ (3.5)
This one grew out of the same tree as Stone Blind, my Natalie Haynes read back in March, with a few Twitter recommendations pointing me toward it too. With a Greek mythology retelling you already know where the story ends, Medusa becomes Medusa, but you never know how or when, and this book kept me anxious to find out, just not in quite the same way Stone Blind did. It read a little young to me, almost YA in tone, though I’m not sure it was actually marketed that way. It moved fast, and overall it was a good read.
Coming up: a Reading Tree update connecting it back to Stone Blind.
What is a reading tree?
A reading tree starts with one root book and the itch it leaves behind, a topic, a place, a feeling you’re not done with yet. From there it grows branches, other books that connect to that same thread, whether it’s a direct mention in the text, the same region, or just chasing the same gut punch. It’s not a genre list and it’s not a same-author backlist. It’s a chain you can actually follow. Trees keep growing over time as I read more into the thread, and paid subscribers get the full tree, root to newest branch, plus a new one every month.
This month’s only branch was small: I, Medusa hanging off Stone Blind, both of them different angles on the same myth. Not much of a thread to pull this month, but that tracks. A slow reading month means a slow tree month too.
The one I can’t quite pick
If you’re asking me to name a favorite, I genuinely can’t. Buckeye earned every one of its five stars and wrecked me in the best way, the kind of book I’m still turning over a week later. But Such a Fun Age was the one I looked forward to picking back up every single day, in a lighter, more purely fun way. One gutted me, one delighted me. I’m not choosing.
Free and paid
This recap is free, always will be. The reading trees are the one thing that lives behind the paywall, one new tree a month plus the full growing vault, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the Google rabbit holes, the Who I Became pieces, the essays, stays right here for everyone.
Tell me in the comments, did you read anything great in July? Anyone else take a real break from books this summer and not feel bad about it?
I also loved Buckeye and gave it five stars. I know you previously recommended Women's Hotel as a novel I might want to write about, but I had no idea Mara Wilson narrated the audiobook!
I would put Siren Says by Jennifer Herrera on your TBR now. It comes out in less than three weeks and I'll be reviewing it soon. So good and so witchy, but Welsh this time!