What I Read in June

It’s been a June full of light and fluffy reading fun.

Here we go! As always, I’m saving most of my middle grades and YA reads for Instagram, and we’re still moseying through The Ancestor’s Tale and The Canterbury Tales for our family readalouds.

A Princess in Theory by Alyssa Cole

I mean, I love a fluffy romance novel, and this one is SO GOOD: Like everybody else, grad student Naledi gets the occasional spam email from an African prince, but unlike everybody else, the African prince in question is her real-life betrothed. She just doesn’t know. There are two parts to this book: In the first, Thabiso comes to New York to find Naledi and ends up falling for her because she’s cool and smart and independent — and he doesn’t tell her he’s a prince (much less her betrothed). In the second part, Naledi agrees to come to Thesolo and pretend to be the princess bride so that she can participate in a big epidemiological case that’s happening there. OF COURSE they fall for each other — it’s a romance novel, so you know where it’s headed, but it’s smart and funny and charming. I dug it. 

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Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

I grabbed this to read with the kids as part of our evolutionary biology unit, but I’d forgotten how WEIRD it is. Basically, humanity is wiped out in a global apocalypse — except for a hardy group of good swimmers, who manage to escape to the Galapagos Islands, where they evolve into a new species over the next million years, overseen by a reluctant spirit. Is it about the way that human intelligence and happiness are inversely related? Or about the link between evolution and theism? Or just an excuse to revisit Kilgore Trout? Who knows. I crossed it off our readaloud list, but I am glad I reread it myself.

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The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

If you listen to the Library Chicken podcast (on Patreon), you know I fell hard for the first book in this series, and I’m only allowing myself one new book a month because I don’t want to just race through it. I don’t know how this is possible, but The Queen of Attolia is even better than The Thief. I know! But it’s true. The Thief was mostly about a particular quest, but The Queen of Attolia brings us into the broader world of the tension between the three kingdoms — two of which are actually queendoms, y’all! — of Eddis, Attolia, and Sounis. It’s darker and more complicated than The Thief, with layers of relationships and implications, and I loved it, and you should go read it because if I try to say anything else about it, I might spoil it for you. I can’t believe I have to wait for August (according to my own arbitrary rules) to read the next one!

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The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

This one was a low-key charmer: Linus Baker finds himself completely out of his corporate comfort zone when he’s sent to investigate an island orphanage for magical children — partly because the children there are particularly peculiar, partly because the children’s caretaker is totally crush-worthy, and partly because — for the first time in his life — Linus feels weirdly at home. It’s a love story and a family story and a story about finding yourself and a story about being brave enough to change your life, and it’ s just really lovely.

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The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Ugh, I want so much to love Neil Gaiman, but every time I read something that pulls me in (Stardust! Neverwhere!), I seem to follow it up with something that’s painfully meh. This is clearly a me-problem — lots of people loved this fairy tale for grown-ups, but I did not. I think for me the problem was the narrator — the books was peopled with fascinating characters, but the narrator wasn’t one of them, and ultimately he wasn’t even shaped by anything that happened to him in the story because he didn’t remember any of it. Maybe that would be fine if the magical world he visits for a little while were better established, but we only see it through his eyes, so it remains shadowy and elusive. Maybe that’s part of the point, that all these big mysteries are out there, and we just don’t understand enough to even see them? I don’t know — I wanted to love it, but it just fell flat for me.

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Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella

I love a fluffy romance novel (see above) and Kinsella usually does it for me, but this one was a big miss. Most of the characters were kind of terrible, and when they weren’t being terrible, they were kind of stupid. I don’t mind a predictable ending when it’s fun getting there, but this one was hard work.

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Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

What fun! In this alternate history, the Civil War ends because the dead start rising, and the Confederacy has to surrender to get some help putting down the zombie hordes that are overtaking the country. Happily for racists (and there are a lot of them in the post-Civil War world), recently freed Black people make a great army against the undead. Kids like Jane are snatched up and sent to special military training schools where they learn how to protect white families from the zombie threat — but Jane is a born maker of good trouble, and she finds herself offloaded to a faux utopian community on the western frontier, where the mess really hits the fan. I’m totally adding this to my U.S. history reading list — it’s smart, funny, and does a great job playing with the already fascinating “what if?” that’s its premise.

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Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey

Two westerns in one month! And I really liked them both. Suzanne recommended this one to me because it was about bad-ass librarians, and I’m recommending it to you for the same reason. Runaway Esther stows away in the librarians’ wagon after her best friend is hanged in the town square, thinking anything’s better than the arranged marriage her family has planned for her. Turns out, she’s found something even better than an escape: The Library gives her a family, a mission, and the chance to accept who she really is.

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Stuff I’m Reading for Work

(And again, I’m lumping all of my work-related reading here because it feels different from my fun reading. I don’t know — I am weird.)

I’ve managed to pin down my Japanese literature reading list to a reasonable number, but it took a lot of reading to get there: My Brother’s Husband, Kafka on the Shore, The Tale of Gengi, Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s short stories, Kokoro, and Snow Country all made it to the short list, so I had to reread them to get to the Shorter List. (My life is so hard.) On to Africa! I just started rereading Purple Hibiscus, which my daughter will probably never forgive me if I leave off the syllabus.

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