Bookish Chatter | A Big Finish for the Month

Happy Wednesday! I didn’t manage to post anything last Friday or on Monday – please forgive me. I haven’t been in the mood for writing lately but I’ve definitely been reading! And I didn’t want to miss today’s blog post because it’s a big update and I want to stay caught up. Today I’m sharing two new releases, three backlist titles, and two readalouds that I finished this week. And I’m writing this all as quickly as I can because I don’t know when I’ll run out of time this morning, so here we go!

Finished in the Last Week:

Birnam Wood was such a page turner and a nice change of pace for me. Birnam Wood is a gardening group in Australia, focused on environmentally sound practices with radical approaches. Its founder, Mira, stakes out a large patch of land that she thinks is abandoned and gets the whole group caught up in something much bigger and much more dangerous than she anticipated.

Catton played with several tropes and stereotypes to draw her characters and it was enjoyable to watch this all unfold. The ending is totally bonkers – not what I expected at all! Highly recommend!

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Love was my June Toni Morrison selection and it was such a good one. This book focuses on the women in Bill Cosey’s life: Christine and Heed. They were best friends in childhood but Bill’s choices in life turned them against each other. Love was difficult to read in many places but it was hard to put down thanks to Morrison’s genius writing. It was incredible to watch this narrative play out. And as usual, there are so many disturbing details to unpack. I’m planning to read A Mercy in July if you’d like to join me!

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I was thrilled to get my hands on Claire Fuller’s latest, The Memory of Animals. Set in London during a pandemic that is much worse than Covid, Neffy signs up to be a test subject for the newly developed vaccine. Things quickly go wrong and the volunteers are left to fend for themselves in an empty hospital/lab while the outside world collapses. Fuller brilliantly weaves in Neffy’s memories from before the virus and reminds us how precious our lives are, no matter how oddly shaped or broken. She also explores the sacrifices we make for the greater good and our resistance to those choices. This was yet another book that I couldn’t put down this week and I greedily read as much as possible to see how it was going to end. And now I can claim to be a Claire Fuller completist again!

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I finished my buddy read of When I Was a Child I Read Books with Mary! And I might not have finished without our nearly daily check-ins. Robinson’s nonfiction can be difficult to penetrate and there was so much within these pages that I didn’t understand. Despite that, I enjoyed the challenge of many of these essays and loved seeing Robinson’s mind at work. In this collection, she was alternately stoic and spicy, humble and full of hubris. My thinking on religion doesn’t align with hers but there’s so much else to chew on that I was able to move past some of her more outlandish (in my opinion) assertions. So glad to have read this AND to be finished with it, if you know what I mean.

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The Garden of the Evening Mists was a summer reading recommendation from Sara at Fiction Matters and I knew it was for me based on her description. It took me a bit to settle into the story because I had to do a ton of googling to understand the political landscape and the map at the time because I was so confused! This is about Yun Ling, who was a Chinese woman who grew up in Malaya in the middle of the 20th century. She spent most of her adult life in Kuala Lumpur as a judge but retired with an urgent need to write down her memories of surviving a Japanese internment camp in WWII and the solace she found in a Japanese garden deep in the Malayan jungle after the war.

The Garden of the Evening Mists was full of beautiful thoughts about memory and our need to preserve it, as well as vivid descriptions of the Malayan jungle and this mysterious Japanese garden within it. And you better believe that I spent some extra time in my flower garden while reading this and now I want to get my hands on books about Japanese gardens!!

Bonus: The Kindle edition is only $2.99 right now.

Bookish coincidence: this week we’re studying British Imperialism in Asia in our history lessons and this book was a wonderful pairing for me. There’s so much to learn in this world!! (Do I say that every week? It’s why I love reading.)

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Did you know that there are Fancy Nancy chapter books??! Well there are and Bronwyn and I read Nancy Clancy: Secret Admirer together while Bryce did his independent reading for school. Nancy and Bree are in the third grade and decide to play matchmaker for Valentine’s Day. They try to set up their baby-sitter, Annie, with Nancy’s guitar teacher, Andy. Nancy and Bree are the most over the top girls and I am totally here for it. Ooh-la-la! And also: these books are full of french words but the Nancy teaches us how to speak them phonetically. Thank goodness!

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Bronwyn and I also finished Ivy and Bean: One Big Happy Family as her bedtime readaloud. A girl at school tells Ivy that she’s spoiled because she’s an only child and Ivy and Bean set out on a mission to prove her wrong. They have all sorts of ideas about how to convince her otherwise but in the end, they realize that it doesn’t matter. Ivy isn’t spoiled and they don’t have to prove anything!

Currently Reading:

I haven’t listened to The Covenant of Water at all since my last update! I think I might choose to give up on the audiobook (through no fault of its own) and get on the waitlist for the hard copy. I simply cannot figure out how to fit in a massive audiobook right now and have preferred reading with my eyes lately anyway. It is good and I’m enjoying it tremendously but audiobooks aren’t working for me at the moment.

I stayed up late finishing The Evening of the Garden Mists last night and now I don’t have anything else in the works! I think it’s going to be The Luminaries but I could be easily persuaded to try something else on my summer reading list!

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Whew! Thanks for hanging with me this far! I’m pretty sure I won’t finish any other books in June so I hope to share my monthly reading review with you all next week. And I’m planning to be back on Friday with an update on my word of the year. I hope the rest of this week treats you kindly! Take good care.