The beginning of August has flown by, so I’m only now getting around to blogging my July reads. This month was heavy on fiction (I read five novels but only finished one non-fiction book) so we’re going to start there.
Usually, I do this list in the order I finished the books, but this month, I’m going from favorite to least favorite:
God of the Woods by Liz Moore – I was so shocked to walk into my tiny library two days after this book came out to find it just sitting on the shelf. Especially now that it seems that every library in America has a waitlist a million people deep for it. But I totally understand why, because this book is definitely worth the hype. So well written and totally gripping. It seems I’m developing a taste for novels set in 1970s Adirondack summer camps, and I am here for it.
The Cloisters by Katy Hays – Obviously I loved the museum aspect of this book, though I am a little ashamed to admit that in all my trips to the Met (and the fact that I’ve been a met member for a decade) I’ve never made it over to the Cloisters. (It’s been on my list for a year, and this just makes it an even higher priority.) But OMG, the ending of this book is bananas. A big part of the hype around God of the Woods was the ending, but the ending to the Cloisters makes the ending of God of the Woods feel really tame. I don’t want to ruin it, so all I’ll say is that I did not see that coming. (Several times over.)
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang – We read this for my book club, and boy was there a lot to talk about. (I even have a stand-alone blog post in the works, because I have thoughts.) But when one of the other members of book club asked me if I liked the book, I couldn’t answer definitely. That’s because, if I’m being honest, I think I’d have liked the book more if it was by a different author. The thing is, I loved Kuang’s previous book Babel so much (after I was done being mad at it, that is) and this book is just so different than Babel. And now all I really want is a Babel sequel (give us Victoire’s story, please) so it was hard to love this when I just wanted something so different. (Which I in no way blame the author for. This is absolutely a me problem.)
The last two books on my list Remarkably Bright Creatures and The Secret Book of Flora Lee basically come out to a tie. They were both fine, but I can’t say I loved either one of them.
Ok, now onto the non-fiction.
I only finished one non-fiction book in July, but I also read big chunks of two others that I want to mention here.
Silk by Aarathi Prasad – This was the non-fiction book I finished last month, despite finding it a little bit uneven. There were parts that I loved – who knew that you could get silk from massive mollusks that live under the sea? But I also wanted to know more about how silk was used throughout the world, rather than the people doing scientific research on silk moths. This angle makes sense, as Prasad comes from a science background, but the textile nerd in me wanted to know more about actual textiles, rather than the creatures that produced them and the scientists who studied them.
The Museum of Other People by Adam Kuper – I made it about half-way through this book before losing steam. It’s possible I might revisit it at some point, because the premise – about the evolution of anthropological museums – is really interesting. Unfortunately, the book gets bogged down in the details and I just couldn’t motivate myself to push through.
The Practical Book of Tapestries – I recently learned that, as a community member, I can check out books from my local library. But I was even more stunned to discover this book about the history of tapestries from 1925 on the shelf. The author clearly has a lot of biases that aren’t surprising for a book written almost 100 years ago (sometimes he just flat out calls something “stupid”) but there are also moments where he writes such beautiful descriptions of certain tapestries that I had to snap a picture with my phone. I jumped around through some of the more tedious parts and had to return the book before I could finish absorbing it, but I know I’ll end up checking it out again, if only for the old-fashioned entertainment value.
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