July 2023 Reading Review + Summer Reading Update

July was a strange month of reading. As the month ended, I was completely burned out and have struggled to find my reading mojo since then. But as I’ve been working on this post, I can see why my reading slowed down: I crammed in some very good books in a very short amount of time and my brain just couldn’t handle it all!

Books Read in July 2023:

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July Highlights:

Favorite Book of July:

This makes two months in a row that Tan Twan Eng has written my favorite book of the month! The House of Doors was very similar to The Garden of Evening Mists: we meet a woman who is looking back on her life in Malaya in the early 20th century. Through this story, we see the effects of British Imperialism on the people who are native to the country, as well as striking racism and sexism. Eng writes beautifully and this thought-provoking story captured my imagination and hasn’t let go of it yet!

It will be published in the US in October, but you can always order from Blackwell’s if you can’t wait until then!

Honorable Mentions:

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Is it cheating to say that I loved basically all of them?! I can’t decide if I’m being lazy by doing this or if this was the reason for my reading burnout last month?! Look at those books – they were all complex and challenging in their own ways and wow — I feel better about last month’s reading after looking at it like this.

Also, I’ve stopped keeping a lot of reading stats in the last few years, but let’s talk about the length of some of these books:

The Covenant of Water: 736 pages
Three: 512 page
Pachinko: 544 pages
The Postcard: 464 pages

That is 2,256 pages from just those four books. That is a significant amount of reading! (can you tell that I’m trying to convince myself that I’m okay?)

Chapter Book Readalouds:

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The Last (Endling #1) was our morning readaloud. It took us a couple of months to get through it but it was such an epic adventure! There are more in this series that I’m looking forward to reading when the time is right. Katherine Applegate is my favorite author to readaloud to my children and I don’t think you can go wrong with anything by her.

Bronwyn and I finished two Ivy and Bean books (the first book in the series and Ivy & Bean Break the Fossil Record) and Kit’s Surprise. We are both still enjoying these series! Her Kindergarten curriculum suggests age appropriate chapter books for reading aloud each day, but I’m substituting these bedtime books for now. Perhaps we can get ideas from her curriulum later, but she is really enjoying these every night. AND — we’ve already read the series that’s “assigned” for the first several weeks of school (The Mercy Watson series). At first I thought we’d just reread them, but have decided to stick with what we’re doing instead.

Put it in your memory books: July 2023 is the month that Bryce said that he was too old for bedtime readalouds. I’m a little sad but not too disappointed; the good thing about homeschooling is that we do a ton of reading aloud together all day long and he still chooses to read on his own at night, so I’m trying to look at this as an opportunity to get to my evening exercise just a little bit earlier each night. We did manage to reread the first Captain Underpants before he made his declaration!

[I also can’t help but wonder if he might just be bored with Captain Underpants and might be interested in something else to read together? I will wrack my brains for a suitable substitution and test it out.]

Summer Reading Plans Update:

I made great progress on my summer reading plans in July! Here’s where I stand right now:

Slow & Steady Books:
✔️ Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak 
✔️ When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
❒ The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson
❒ Taking the Leap by Pema Chödrön (currently reading)

Toni Morrison:
✔️ Love
✔️ A Mercy
❒ Home

Prize Reading:
I have a few books from this year’s International Booker Prize list that I’d like to read this summer:

✔️ Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov 
❒Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan (abandoned; this one wasn’t for me)
❒Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel
❒ The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

And one more from this year’s Women’s Prize longlist:

✔️ The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

New Releases:
✔️Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
✔️ The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
✔️ The Postcard by Anne Berest
✔️ Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
❒ Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
✔️ The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
❒ Enchantment by Katherine May (not right now – will try to read later)
❒ Victory City by Salman Rushdie (abandoned)
✔️ House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Backlist Titles:
✔️ Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
✔️ Fight Night by Miriam Toews
❒ So Big by Edna Ferber (abandoned)
✔️ Telephone by Percival Everett
❒ When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (to read later)
✔️ The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
❒ The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (currently reading)
❒ Horse by Geraldine Brooks
✔️ Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward (free to listen with Audible membership)
❒ Tears of Amber by Sofía Segovia (currently reading)
✔️ Three by Valérie Perrin

And of course – now I have Booker prize reading to add to the mix as those titles become available to me. So I’m hoping my reading mojo returns soon!

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I have been a terrible blogging friend lately – I am so sorry. I’ve alluded to the fact that our summer schedule has been complicated and unsettled; that has taken a lot of wind out of my sails and has left me playing catch up in a lot of areas of my life! I also think that the stress from trying to get things sorted has contributed to my concentration difficulties and has made it hard to read over the last few weeks. But I think everything for the next two weeks is in place for now, so I’m hoping to settle into a routine that includes a little more time at my computer. Everything will be upended again in two weeks so we’ll what happens then!

I hope to be back on Wednesday with an update on what I’ve been trying to read lately. I hope your week gets off to a great start! Take good care.