It feels like it’s been a while since I went off-list for a whole month. With apologies to the authors whom I said I was looking forward to reading in July, work got in the way, then kickball (don’t ask me to explain) did, and then I got in the way of my own intentions. By the time I was able to start Helen Lewis’s The Genius Myth (2024), eg, it was too late to finish before Book Club. And then I looked up and discovered it was almost August, and I had to pack for my trip.

I managed to read at least a little, out of the same deranged sense of respect for you, Friends of the Book Report, that has me composing this edition on my phone, because where I’m going (where I am) I don’t need my computer or iPad! I’m off-list and I’m off-grid!! (I’m somewhat on-grid).

What I read in July:

Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time (2024)—I crept over to McNally Jackson for my ritual pre-vacation browse, my mind open to almost anything not on the long list of things it was closed to. The time had come for me to get into the hot book of Summer 2024 because it’s now in paperback and because I was so desperate for something to hold my attention that I was willing to read something with a little romance in it!

This book held my attention alright. I read it in one day, days before my trip started. What can I say? It turned out to be the exact kind of book my brain was yearning for—riveting, written well enough to not make me think about the writing (lmao!), not silly but not super serious. It was so smart and funny! And thrilling! I mean, it’s a book about time travel—specifically, bringing people from the past into the present—and not a little bit of spy craft! 10/10 summer read that made me forget about the world for a day.

Rachel Cusk, Outline (2014)—It only took eleven years, a seed planted about 3 months ago by Friend of the Report, Caity, and sheer chance for me to be in the mood to finally read “One of [the] Fifteen Remarkable Books by Women That Are Shaping the Way We Read and Write in the Twenty-First Century” (according to a blurb on the book’s inside cover).

It was the right time! Before I read this first book in the trilogy, I’d formed not a few opinions of Cusk based on essays I’d read and assumptions I’d made about people who liked her writing. Now that I’ve read Outline, I can say that some of those opinions were well founded, but I can also say that I’m glad they didn’t keep me from ever trying to read this book. Is Cusk something of a twenty-first century, British cool girl in the style of Joan Didion? Yes. Did that stop me from enjoying the casual yet transparently crafted observations that serve as the real foundation for her narrative of a writer teaching in Athens one summer? No! Did this book transform the way I write (“write”) and read? Definitely not. But did I find it virtually un-put-down-able, an absorbing companion on my train rides throughout London? Absolutely.

What I’m looking forward to reading in August:

Asako Yuzuki, tr. Polly Barton, Butter (2024)¹

Marlen Haushofer, tr., Shaun Whiteside, The Wall (1963/2025)

Natalia Ginzburg, tr. Dick Davis, The City and the House (1984/2025)

Francisco Delgado, On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD (2025)

1  Book Club selection for August.