My June round-up is unusually short, but for good reason. Two good reasons, actually. Let’s just say that it’s hard to read while your child is in the hospital unexpectedly. Thankfully, she’s doing fine now. The other reason is that before life got in the way, I started reading Ulysses! I’ve always wanted to read it, and after stumbling upon a shop that Leopold Bloom visits in the book while I was on a work trip to Dublin, I decided to finally go for it. I’m about halfway through, though the intellectual challenge of the 300-ish pages I’ve read is probably the mental equivalent of two books. I’m still plowing through, and hope to have an update on my reading experience in the next few weeks. And my July reading is back on pace, so I will have much more to recommend next month.

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June’s Reads

Glyph

Ali Smith

I was eager to read Ali Smith’s new book Glyph after reading its companion book Gliff last year. Smith, an award-winning Scottish author, is known for her playful exploration of language and sharp political observations. Glyph features two sisters who are estranged as adults but spent their childhood coping with their mother’s death by inventing a ghost named Glyph. Smith uses war as a backdrop to explore trauma and memory. Glyph is an intellectually stimulating book with layers of meaning, a strong anti-war message, and lots of entertaining wordplay. Come back later this month for my full review and reflections on both Glyph and Gliff.

Vigil

George Saunders

In Vigil, a spirit guide named Jill ushers a dying oil tycoon into the afterlife. She’s done this hundreds of times and found that people typically reflect and repent, but not KJ Boone. He’s proud of the oil empire he built and doesn’t care at all about his abhorrent treatment of people and the environment – until of course, he does. This is my first George Saunders book and I can’t say I loved it. Some of the interactions between Jill and “people of her ilk” were funny, but overall it all felt a bit too obvious for my liking. I still want to read Lincoln in the Bardo though.

Take What You Can

Naima Costa

Two motherless Black girls meet on a study abroad program in France and quickly become best friends and each other’s found family. While in France, they develop a relationship with a motherlike figure named Helene, whose influence looms over Val and Milly’s friendship. Years later, Val moves to New York to join Milly, now a successful and wealthy lifestyle influencer, and raise their daughters together. Take What You Can explores friendship, motherhood, privilege, and found family. The novel is filled with richly detailed, evocative sentences and glittery lifestyle scenes that are fun to read, but together they didn’t build enough emotional depth for the story to land. I struggled to connect with Val and Milly, and never really understood how they developed such a close relationship with Helene or what inspired such a fierce, codependent bond between the two of them. Take What You Can will be published in August. Thanks to NetGalley and Pamela Dorman Books for the ARC. All opinions are my own.