Hello hello! I hope you had a good month. This month was filled with lots of lovely moments, as well as some good books! 

July in General

This month I did a bit of traveling around both Virginia and Maryland, with some time spent in D.C., to spend time with some of my favorite people. Together, we got to go to bookshops and record stores, visit the botanical gardens, try lots of new amazing food, and also roast a bit in the sun. It was a really nice time and I hope I’ll be able to visit more often.

Whenever I have the opportunity to go somewhere for a bit I always come back and have a bit of a reset where I consider what’s actually essential. In one sense of it, I lasted a week with a minimal amount of toiletries, makeup, and clothing – so do I need it all? And in the same breath, I think about what’s essential in terms of my routines – am I giving energy to things I shouldn’t be? What have I learned from the last week from the friends and loved ones I visited that I can apply going forward? Something I really love about friendships and relationships is how we can bounce ideas off of each other and learn new ideas and perspectives from each other – and I look forward to applying these in August onward.

July In Stats

BOOKS BREAKDOWN

July In Books

An American Marriage
Tayari Jones
⭐⭐⭐.75

Goodreads | Bookshop

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

This was my first audiobook read for the month and I enjoyed it overall. I thought the characters were incredibly well-written and the book puts you in a perspective to not think about what you would do in their situation, but understand their own perspectives.

How Maya Got Fierce
Sona Charaipotra
⭐⭐⭐⭐

Goodreads | Bookshop

The Bold Type meets Younger in How Maya Got Fierce by Sona Charaipotra, a YA fish-out-of-water contemporary novel!

Ever since she was little, farmer’s daughter Maya Gera has known what her future holds.

The heiress to a mini garlic empire in the heart of Gilroy, California, she’s meant to be a good Indian girl — which means agriculture school, an MBA, and settling down with a suitable Sikh boy.

So spending her 17th summer at cow camp in New Jersey is a really big deal. Farm kids nationwide convene to learn to milk cows, shuck corn, and, uh, form ‘strategic alliances.’ But when Maya gets kicked out of camp after an expensive accident — yes, it involves a boy — she scrambles to save face and keep her parents from finding out. Hard to do when she owes the school thousands of dollars.

Desperate to earn enough to pay off her mistake, Maya interviews for an internship at Fierce, a fashion magazine she’s been obsessed with forever. When she lands a gig as assistant features editor, it’s a New York City dream come true. Especially because she rocks at it.

But it might soon become her worst nightmare — because the Fierce folks think she’s 26.

And just wait until her parents find out.

This ended up being a really fun contemporary read. While I didn’t find the entire premise to be 100% plausible, I liked what messages this book shared along with its story.

The Haunted Mansion: Frights of Fancy
Sina Grace
⭐⭐⭐

Goodreads

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of Disneyland’s most beloved rides with this original graphic novel featuring all of your favorite grim grinning ghosts!

Welcome, foolish mortals… to the Haunted Mansion, where the crypt doors creak and the tombstones quake. The happy haunts are getting ready to throw a swinging wake, and all the goblins and ghoulies are invited, so be sure to bring your death certificate!

I absolutely adored the art style of this book, but I didn’t enjoy the story as much. I thought the concept was cool, but the main character’s management background and restructuring of the mansion’s processes felt a little disjointed. It was a bit like Disney’s classic meets hospitality textbook.

What Moves the Dead
T. Kingfisher
⭐⭐⭐⭐

Goodreads | Bookshop

From the award-winning author of The Twisted Ones comes a gripping and atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania.

What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves.

Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.

I love the idea of a Poe retelling, and this was executed really well! I loved hearing that this book was partly inspired by Mexican Gothic and the use of mushrooms as part of the story. I also really liked the way suspense was built throughout this book, and it was a great example of how much can be done in such few pages.

Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden
⭐⭐⭐.25

Goodreads | Bookshop

A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel presents with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan’s most celebrated geisha.

In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl’s virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction – at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful – and completely unforgettable.

I overall liked the subject of this book and would like to take the time to learn more about geisha in a more accurate context, but I couldn’t help but feel like much of the conflict of this book was centered on girl hate. I know there’s been a response to this book by one of the geisha that the author consulted while writing this, so I’m curious to know what she had to say.

Lavender House
Lev AC Rosen
⭐⭐⭐.25

Goodreads | Bookshop

A delicious story from a new voice in suspense, Lev AC Rosen’s Lavender House is Knives Out with a queer historical twist.

Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it’s not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they’ve needed to keep others out. And now they’re worried they’re keeping a murderer in.

Irene’s widow hires Evander Mills to uncover the truth behind her mysterious death. Andy, recently fired from the San Francisco police after being caught in a raid on a gay bar, is happy to accept—his calendar is wide open. And his secret is the kind of secret the Lamontaines understand.

Andy had never imagined a world like Lavender House. He’s seduced by the safety and freedom found behind its gates, where a queer family lives honestly and openly. But that honesty doesn’t extend to everything, and he quickly finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy—and Irene’s death is only the beginning.

When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever. Running a soap empire can be a dirty business. 

I really liked the setup of this book and the historical explanation behind the way the LGBT+ community had to live to avoid persecution in the 1950’s. Sadly, some aspects of this book fell a bit flat to me towards the middle, but still good as a procedural recommendation nonetheless.

Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel
⭐⭐⭐.75

Goodreads | Bookshop

A novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

This is actually my first book by this author and I do intend to read her other books as well. I’ve always been interested in the simulation theory so I loved seeing the way that this was integrated with the story. It took me quite a bit of time to understand where this story was going but was able to appreciate it much more by the end.

August Hopefuls

Fingers crossed I *finally* get to Portrait of a Thief!

That’s all for my August 2022 Wrapup. How did your month go this August? What were your favorite reads? Let me know! I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these as well and what your thoughts were!

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