Hello June | 2026

Good morning and happy June to you. Can we consider June 1st summer? I think so – Memorial Day has passed and there are schools letting out for vacation. But New Hampshire schools still have about 2.5 weeks left and it certainly hasn’t felt like summer. Not consistently, at least. This weekend was chilly and rainy, with moments of sunshine. We are starting to get the gardens in order and summer tomatoes and flowers are calling my name. So although it feels like the we are still in the midst of surprising spring weather, I shall start claiming summer. How is it where you live?

I have the tiniest bit of home happenings and a heap of books to share:

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Home:

One of the most exciting developments is that a house finch has built a nest in the honeysuckle outside my bedroom window. She has laid four eggs in that little nest I’ve shared up top and mama finch has become a part of our family. We walk by the honeysuckle many times every day and there she sits, on top of her eggs. I will try to get a picture of her in her nest if I can find a way to not disturb her. No promises.

And other than the beginnings of garden putterings, playing with the kids and Dawsey, school with B+B, and the constant companion of cleaning, there’s not too much to share about our week at home. I’m trying to get the house ready for the craziness of summer by purging some clutter and cleaning hidden corners. That job is never done!

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Reading:

I enjoyed my reading time last week! It was varied and interesting, just how I like it:

I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“…thought of a friend in LA who’d said recently, of her own daughter, ‘It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming. Seventh grade’s gonna hit like a wall. It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter’.”

I finally read I Have Some Questions For You and loved it! A podcaster returns to her New Hampshire boarding school to teach a mini course on podcasting. She supplies the students a list of ideas for topics, including the murder of her old roommate at Granby, Thalia, in 1995. Bodie believes that the wrong person was convicted for her murder and throughout the novel, she plays out different scenarios about who it could have been.

This book tackled a lot of issues and might have overdone it a little bit. The part that sticks with me is how early the violence against girls begins and the pushback we received when we tried to stop it – and how that contributes to the normalization of it all. This would be a fantastic book club choice because there’s a LOT to talk about!

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Gliff by Ali Smith
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“If only people paid more attention, she said, to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it.”

This book is set somewhere into a future that doesn’t feel too far off, to be honest. It’s about two siblings, Briar and Rose, and a horse they rescue from the glue factory. Their mother took special care to make sure their identities weren’t wrapped up in the algorithm that seems to control daily life and this makes them “unverifiables” – people not in the system – which causes all kinds of trouble for them as they try to reunite with their mother and her boyfriend, Lief.

It’s a startling look at how our identities are wrapped up in things we don’t quite understand. It was un-put-downable!

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Forgotten on Sunday by Valérie Perrin
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“Us nursing assistants, we’re the guardians of the temples of past loves. But that doesn’t show on our pay slips.”

Perrin is one of my favorite authors and I loved the story she told in Forgotten on Sunday. Justine is a caretaker at a nursing home in a small French village and she collects stories from the residents. She has her own tragic past: her parents died in a car accident with her aunt and uncle leaving her an orphan, along with her cousin. The two grew up as siblings in the care of their somewhat cold and distant grandparents. While meeting with a police officer about prank calls originating in the retirement home, Justine learns that her parents’ accident was under suspicion at the time, which sends her reeling for answers.

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The Palace on the Higher Hill by Karim Kattan
(Amazon | Bookshop – not yet available)

“We want peace! Not this tyrannical peace that they’ve forced on us, not this peace that has us on our knees. We want peace with us holding our guns and our liberation in our hands. Our land will flourish, and flourish by our hands. Jerusalem, which is Granada a thousand ties over, will regain its radiance, and Palestine, which is the world a thousand times over, will regain its splendour and yes, that is peace and that is what we’re fighting for.”

This was such an interesting little book. Faysal is summoned back to his abandoned family home in Palestine as settler groups creep towards the village her grew up in. His home is haunted by memories and we relive them alongside him as his desperation to save his home and Palestine grows.

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Persuasion by Jane Austen
(Amazon | Bookshop)

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.”

Could this be the origin of the second chance romance trope? Probably not the origin, but definitely one of the earliest versions. Anne Elliott is reunited with Wentworth, the man she spurned eight years earlier when she took bad advice from a family friend to dump him. It was a lot of fun to watch Anne slowly realize that Wentworth still had feelings for her despite his earlier humiliation. I think I want to read this one again!

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Last Wednesday I shared my Oxford Project progress. It wasn’t much, but it was something! 🐌 I’d love it if you’d join me over there — it is free!

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And that, my friends, is all I have time for this morning. We have another week full of appointments and such, so I will hold on tight and carry a book with me everywhere I go.

I hope you find time for the things that make you happy! Take good care.