We’re halfway through the year, which is somehow a surprising thing. Time moves slow-quick these days, I find. The StoryGraph tells me I’ve read 65 books so far this year, which puts me just a little ways behind the pace I need to set in order to reach 135 books, which is my goal for the year. That’s okay! 135 was always aspirational. At the moment, the point is just to keep reading. I still feel like I’m being spurred on by all the books I wasn’t able to read in grad school. I’ve said this before, but it is a strange thing to feel stuck a little in program that asks you to read. I’m kind of gulping books now, whether I should or not? But I love how it feels to be able to read again and I’ll enjoy it while I have the time. Opening a new book feels wonderful, like opening a little world, and I want to absolutely revel in that feeling while I’ve got it.

Reach out if you’d like — the links are in the sidebar — or follow me on The StoryGraph. As always, I’m happy to hear from you.

The Book of the Month:

An Immense World, by Ed Yong

Ed Yong does a fantastic job of making clear the beauty and alien-ness of the sense-worlds of the animals around us. In An Immense World he asks the reader to accept human beings as limited, to acknowledge that our own senses are not able to comprehend the things dogs, cats, octopuses, or starfish are able to manage. For every creature a different sense-world, a different experience of our common universe. It’s an incredible thing Yong does, and one that makes his closing plea for environmental justice all the more effective and heartbreaking.

The Rest:

You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by Maggie Smith

Smith’s memoir of divorce is a strange little book, without the conventional structure of a memoir. It is instead composed of fragments, short observations that often read more like the author’s poetry than as prose. I cried several times while reading You Could Make This Place Beautiful. It was wonderful and I came away from it with a sense of the book as being more about growing something than about the coming apart of a marriage. Some reviewers have criticized the form of the book, all its short essays interspersed with quotes and affirmations, but I wouldn’t change a thing. Every piece feels like a part of what Smith is growing and growing towards.

Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

Who among us doesn’t want to read about the plague right now? Doomsday Book features a time-traveling historian who ends up in England at the end of 1348. She’s just in time to see the Black Death sweep the country! The book is surprisingly funny and Willis’s wonderful writing makes a book that could have been a horrific slog into a gripping and compelling read. I don’t know how I hadn’t read Willis before? That’s a mistake I’m working on rectifying.

To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

The sequel to Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog is much, much, much lighter than its predecessor. Time travel hijinks in a P.G. Wodehouse-inspired setting make for some good fun. I preferred Doomsday Book overall, but To Say Nothing of the Dog was a necessary palliative after the death and despair of the earlier book.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

Creepy and deliciously detailed. Highsmith does a really lovely job making serial killer Tom Ripley personable while declining to shy away from the horrific nature of his crimes. Ripley’s imagination is an incredible thing, able to shy away from what he has done, but also to conjure up in vivid detail murders he hasn’t (yet?) committed. I’ll pass on the rest of the series, but I don’t regret reading this one.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

Creepy and spare. I’ve not read any of Bradbury’s work outside of Fahrenheit 451 before. While I’m not sure that I’ll run to seek out more, I really enjoyed the way Bradbury declines to explain his villains. They have been horrors for a long time. That is all the reader needs to know and the story is much stronger for it.

Fairy Tale, by Stephen King

Stephen King might do too much explaining — Fairy Tale is too long by half and suffers from many, many, many extraneous descriptions of women’s breasts. It is still a page-turner and I enjoyed reading a brick of a fantasy novel, which is exactly what I want to do in the summer, but it is far from perfect.

Nights of Plague, by Orhan Pamuk

Nights of Plague is tough to describe. A novelistic fictional historical account of the island of Mingheria, it is by turns disquieting, horrific, silly, repetitive and digressive. Most of all, it is far, far, far too long. Where Fairy Tale is too long but still fast-paced, Nights of Plague drags because it spends too much time telegraphing exactly what is to come. Viewed as commentary on modern Turkey it makes sense, but the final 300 pages drag because Orhan Pamuk’s fictional meta-novelist (See? Tough to describe.) has already told the reader what will occur. On a sentence-by-sentence level, Pamuk is an incredible writer. I wish, though, for more concision. Not a book I regret reading, but not my favorite of the month by a long shot.