2024 Summer Book Report 📚

Hello class, here's a round-up of all nine (9) books I read during July and August

We spend the ages of 6-22¹ having “summer break” and then we spend the rest of our lives held hostage to this memory. As someone with a corporate job, summer should be defined by the weather, meaning it starts weeks earlier in June and can last weeks later into September. But the memory of the school year has an iron grip on us all, so “summer” remains July and August. Here are all the books I read during those two glowing months of humidity. 

The Extinction of Irena Rey - Jennifer Croft 

I wrote about this for my very first Substack post after finishing it smack-dab on July 1st. Looking back on it from farther afield, I continue to think this book was quite remarkable but I think it’s a better cold-weather read. The weather turns cold throughout the events of the book and much of the plot is driven by being indoors even though the world outside is beautiful and full of possibility.

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodr Dostoevsky 

My summer long-read, read throughout June and finished in July. Most of what I have to say about this book I already did. My final reflection is that reading long classics is in the top 10 ways to spend a little bit of time outside of yourself. There’s all the analysis, interpretation, and feelings, miles outside your own, shared over a hundred or more years, to indulge in alongside the book itself.

Ex-Wife - Ursula Parrot

Goodreads reviews agree: 1920s Sex and the City! It’s full of bon-mots like: “An ex-wife is a woman with a crick in her neck from looking back over her shoulder at her matrimony.” Originally published anonymously in 1929 and re-published last year by McNally Editions, Ex-Wife was a perfect summer book. 

The novel is almost 100 years old and she doesn’t look a day over 30! It felt surprisingly fresh, both in terms of subject matter and form. The plot is relatively straightforward: a woman and her husband divorce young. She is left to pick up the pieces, given the limited opportunities available to women in 1920s New York City. Within the confines of those strictures, she has sex, dates, drinks, goes to parties, buys clothing, describes her outfits in luxurious detail, and considers what to do next with her life. 

It was published anonymously to underscore the “salaciousness” of the material, and at least one of the former covers makes it look like a pulp novel. But it doesn’t read like pulp. It fits in with other modernist 1920s writers' experimentations and the unraveling of formal conventions. There are several vignettes within the novel that break out of conventional novel storytelling to underscore the emotions the character is withholding. There’s a long section about her abortion, told in short present-tense observations as if she is holding her breath and describing only what she can see. Another chapter punctuates a description of office life with the phrase “The telephone rang” about 20 times, emphasizing the repetitiveness of corporate life. These stylistic choices, fresh for the time, bring this book out of “historical” fiction and into the modern day, even when she’s talking about her rent on Park Avenue for $175 a month. 

Like Sex and the City, it depicts the friendship between women as a saving force in a world built for men. And much like the show, the men are often background plot devices for the personal development of the female lead. It’s relatively short (just over 200 pages). I did find that the first quarter or so, depicting the specific fallout of the marriage, dragged a bit. The relationship with her husband is not fleshed out or dealt with satisfyingly. The novel picks up once the main character is on her own. 

Recommended if you’re looking for something short and engaging but not empty. A little gossipy, a little strange, and a perfectly preserved artifact of 1920s American upper-class, white life.

The narrator, reflecting on her father:

It was unreasonable to expect him to have interest or understanding left for a daughter who had grown up in a generation which discarded the ideal of “service to humanity” for the working philosophy of “let us enjoy ourselves by the way for the end may prove disappointing.” 

Plus ça change, am I right? 

The Night Will Be Long - Santiago Gamboa (trans. Andrea Rosenberg) 

There are two essential stops at every airport: the gate, to make sure you know where it is and then the airport bookstore. There’s enough commentary out there about airport books in the world, but I like seeing the types of covers thrillers have at the moment, and what “literary” fiction has made it to the airport.² Big yellow and neon-green titles are still reigning supreme. 

I had a work trip in August and did not need to buy an airport book: I brought along my own thriller (of a kind): The Night Will Be Long. The novel is set across rural Colombia and Bogota, and opens with a dramatic and memorable description of a gunfight between two unnamed groups outside a small town. The rest of the novel unravels the mystery of what happened, who died, who was involved, and why. 

The investigation leads to the world of Pentecostal churches and their influence on the lives of people in the margins of post-conflict Colombia. Forgive me a long quote: 

Julieta and Johana got out of the taxi and found that even at that time of day, eleven thirty in the morning, there was an impressive crowd lined up [outside the church]. Ordinary people from the lower and middle classes. With a few exceptions, the church staff came from the populations hardest hit by economic crisis, unemployment, and violence: single mothers, internal refugees, parents of drug addicts, recovering alcoholics, domestic workers, battered women, and also regular people, of course, people who lead repetitive, arid lives, but who are there, smiling and eager, full of aspirations, seeing the future not as a protracted sentence of forced labor, even if in practice that's precisely what it is, but as a blank page on which, with a bit of luck, great things could still be achieved. The old dream of being seen by someone up on high, and receiving their mercy; of having a hand appear and pluck us from the mud. Being discovered, being saved. The obstinate human hope that insists on believing that the best is yet to come, and allows us to bear our heavy burdens.

The storytelling style and characterization often veer closer to a classic hard-boiled detective novel. The dialogue is hamfistedly clunky, spoken by characters that are types more than people. The main character, Julieta spends much of the novel drinking and sleeping around, in a way that neither adds to the story nor her character. At least twice someone bangs on the table and says something like, “Now listen here damn it!” Once per chapter, someone ascribes something to “this country.” Once I accepted that I was reading a gender-flipped Sam Spade type, I enjoyed the book much more.

Those criticisms aside, the novel’s story is complex and vast, a network of moving parts. To me, the mark of a good thriller is that it keeps the pace going by unfolding and adding to the story, rather than over-relying on needless red herrings and cliffhangers to create false stakes. This novel does the former, carefully laying out the people at play, the events, and the stakes. I’d also describe this book as a ‘literary thriller’ because the question of what happened and why is secondary to its view of the world and its political and social commentary. The novel is mostly told in the third person, with many long ‘interview’ sections, from the mouths of people at the margins who help underline the novel’s social commentary and sense of place. 

I read the first 100 pages in a single sitting on the plane. If you’re looking for a straight “whodunit,” you’d probably be better off at the airport bookstore than with this one. If you want something structured and paced like a detective novel but rich with anger and philosophy, this might be for you. 

Consent - Jill Ciment

I picked this up because Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question is one of the books I recommend the most. That book is part affair story, part drama of middle age, wrapped up in an unrelated courtroom murder trial the narrator is on the jury for. It’s a uniquely good book, and an element of that story is the relationship between the middle-aged lead and her considerably older, sick husband.

This is drawn from Jill Ciment’s own life. She also wrote about it in a previous memoir, Half a Life. In Consent, she confronts that relationship head-on, as best she can. When Ciment was 17 years old, she began a relationship with her married 47-year-old art teacher. They eventually married and remained together until his death over 40 years later. Now, following her husband’s death and larger discourse around the #MeToo movement, Ciment reexamines her memories, and — compellingly — the way she documented those memories in her previous memoir. 

It’s a short book. Much of it is devoted to those early years and the specifics of how they got together, what it meant and how it was perceived in the 1970s. It then largely fast-forwards through the decades following, as her husband’s art career has a resurgence and they emerge as adults on equal playing fields. The central question of the book is effectively: does a relationship’s beginning define it? 

The memoir poses a lot of questions, quite literally. Almost every chapter is punctuated by unanswered questions. The use and sheer number of these hanging questions underscores how unanswerable they are. There’s too much, the questions are too big. Unfortunately, all of these questions one after the other begin to create an unsatisfying reading experience. If it’s hard for Ciment to answer those questions, we certainly can’t. 

I think this book would be most interesting to people already engaged with Jill Ciment. Some of the most interesting elements are her revisiting her published memoirs and Dakota Johnsoning “Actually, no. That’s not the truth, Ellen” her own story. But as a standalone memoir, it doesn’t feel like a completed project.

Bellies - Nicola Dinan

Nicola Dinan’s debut novel, Bellies, is a novel about intimacy, relationships, gender, sexuality, and the unexpected limits of all of the above. The logline is: It begins as your typical boy meets boy … But shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition. It captures the tenderfoot years right out of university when your understanding of yourself and your desires is fresh and untested. 

I do not know Dinan’s age, but I felt like this was very much a young person’s novel, both in subject matter and execution. There’s an event in the novel’s second half that felt too convenient to the character arc of the leads, too early in their lives to deliver the closure the novel was signalling. 

The novel also over-relies on a distracting tic. Characters will be having a fraught, difficult conversation. Then, one of them will stare off into the middle distance and come up with a perfect reference, metaphor, or anecdote that helps resolve whatever emotional complexity they’ve been building. ³

Novels can get away with doing this once, maybe twice. Unfortunately, Bellies does it several times. Two people are sitting together after meeting at a sex club — what they are to each other is undefined, a little tense. After a back-and-forth, the main character in this scene brings up, out of nowhere, the artist Gordon Matta-Clark as an extended metaphor about relationships. In another scene, two characters who once dated are talking about their current dating lives. There’s a moment of silence until one of them randomly invokes water stains on the ceiling of their university dorms, as an extended metaphor about compulsory heterosexuality. 

These are just two examples, but they stand out to me because this trope is such a writerly, unnatural way to resolve tension between characters. And this book is otherwise an extremely natural and emotionally real story. Putting aside these criticisms, I quite liked the book. The characters are given emotional range, and the complexities of their situations — transitioning and discovering who you are as an artist and woman; being in a relationship with someone transitioning out of the gender you are attracted to, and also self-discovery — have space to breathe.

The novel is quite soft and kind to its characters and its subjects. There are a handful of moments of prickliness, mean little observations about people and strangers, that draw attention to how otherwise tender the book is. I enjoyed reading the book; there were several beautifully written moments of personal self-reflection and realization. It’s the kind of debut that is good but makes you believe the writer will do something better later. 

I put a hold on this book from a round-up of LGBTQ+ stories sometime in June, but the mysteries of the library hold system delivered it to me in July, and I’m glad it did, as a soft summer read between several bracing books. Also, the title, Bellies, is perfect. 

A Little Luck - Claudia Pineiro (trans. Frances Riddle) 

I was glad that the Charco Press edition I read of this book kept the jacket copy and plot description very vague. I was shocked to see the Goodreads and other marketing copy spell out the central drama of the novel! Truly baffling. This novel is structured and paced like a thriller, with a central absence that the narrator already knows the source of, and we, as the reader, are slowly putting together. 

This was a short, deceptively simple story. The main character is returning to her hometown after over 20 years away. The reasons why she left and why she’s back are dramatic — we understand that no one wants her there but we do not know why. The novel reveals all this information at a perfect pace to keep you engaged. Where The Night Will Be Long is a mystery that keeps momentum by adding complexity, A Little Luck pares it away. It’s a first-person, 200-page confession. It uses repetition very effectively - we are abruptly given the same paragraph or so, with each version adding a few new sentences. Similarly, the main character repeats phrases as if reassuring herself more than us. 

I find I have less to say about this book than others because it’s very straightforward. I wanted an engaging, quick story to read while doing yet more traveling, and this delivered! 

All Fours - Miranda July 

I’ve documented my thoughts in a full post here. My only updates to that review are that I managed to convince my other housemate to read it as well and we had a long conversation about it in the car on the drive home from a wedding. My housemate, Josie, particularly likes “woman in crisis” novels⁴ and we talked about how this is the rich white woman’s version of that narrative. 

Will and Testament - Vigdis Hjorth 

After writing about Long Live the Post Horn, I felt that it was time to read Hjorth’s Will and Testament. Interestingly, Post Horn was published several years before Will and Testament but released in English after. This is of particular interest to me because they are strikingly different books in tone and writing style. Post Horn has a coolness that slowly thaws into optimism, its subject matter is (comparably) light and it has an odd sense of humor to it. Will and Testament is a much darker book, intense in its style and subject matter. It is Hjorth’s most successful novel, and was therefore translated into English before 30-odd other books she had already published. I suppose that a funny thing about reading multiple works by an author in translation is you end up reading them in popularity order, rather than publication order. 

I’ll cut to the chase: I thought Will and Testament was a masterpiece. I will be thinking about it for a long time. Somewhat similarly to A Little Luck, it’s told in a first-person confessional style, in which the main character is withholding key information and gradually confronting it over the course of the book. The premise is deceptively simple: four siblings are fighting about their inheritance, specifically about who will own two family cottages. The protagonist, Bergljot has not spoken to her family over two decades. The stakes of their fight are more than the property: the parents are still alive and the debate is about what to do in the future. But the stakes are really about the past, who owns it, who remembers what, and what is owed. 

I love books that put you deeply inside someone’s head. Will and Testament does exactly that. It is Bergljot’s retelling; we are in her mind. Conversations are mostly summarized, and emails are paraphrased. Avoiding quotation marks in a first-person story gives us the sense that everything, even the words of other people, is from Bergljot. 

It’s a novel about the limits of forgiveness and the impossibility of reconciliation without truth. One of the masterful elements of this book is that even the villains (and there are villains) are understood as human beings. The novel is told in long, rambling sentences set in short, varying chapters — some are only a handful of paragraphs long. 

It is hard to recommend this book because it is upsetting: it is a story about struggling to be believed and facing the consequences of decades of pain. It is also incredibly skillfully told, beautifully written, and made all the sharper with its explicit political convictions. Hjorth invokes Norwegian history, Israel and Palestine, all the major 20th-century philosophers (Barthes, Freud, Jung), and more, to talk about the incalculable damage of repression on individuals and societies.

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All in all, I had a pretty good reading summer. No stinkers. A few books I liked but had qualms with, which isn’t the worst ratio. I read more books structured like mysteries than I realized or intended to, maybe drawn in by the allure of discovery and predictable plot structure…  although all of the ‘mystery’-like books I read were different and certainly not conventional. My reading strategy is putting books on hold at the library and reading whichever comes next, so there’s rarely any rhyme, reason, or season to my reading. August was Women in Translation month, and I did read a few but I am not disciplined enough to structure my books by theme! Whatever the universe (the Toronto Public Library) delivers to me is what will be read.

My summer beyond all the books was pretty good as well. It’s tempting to tally what I didn’t do enough of (swimming in lakes, hosting), but it was a pretty abundantly full summer. I got a chance to see almost every single one of my favorite people in the world, I ate lots of good food, and saw some new places. What more could I ask for? 

Despite all the divorce books and unhappy stories above, the highlight of the summer was attending two weddings of very old, very beloved friends. The institution of marriage, the commercialization of our private spaces into Instagram backdrops, the capital W Wedding industry… sure, yes, but I love weddings! I saw people I hadn’t seen in two, five, even ten years and it was a joy to behold them all! I’ll never be twenty years old again, but while my knees are still good enough I can fall to them when Robyn’s Dancing On My Own comes on. 

1. Give or take a four year post-secondary degree, plus a few more if you bought into grad school; eternal if you doubled-down and became a teacher of any kind. 

2. I could have bought Miranda July’s All Fours at the Phoenix International Airport, but I did not. 

3. Aaron Sorkin absolutely loves to do this; basically every episode of The West Wing builds to a dialogue where someone pulls out the perfect reference to explain exactly what they’re really fighting about. 

4.  Cf, Luster; Big Swiss; All This Could Be Different