Honestly the less said about my July outside of the books I read, the better. Sometimes I don’t read a lot because I’m doing things worth doing with my one wild and precious life. Other times I don’t read a lot because I love to scam myself into using up too much brainpower at work. I must love it, otherwise why do I do it so much!!
Me this month.
What I read in July:
Gwendoline Riley, The Palm House (2026)—The mind is such a mysterious thing! How can it be explained that I, in the midst of my ferocious attachment to the narrative of live sport, coexisting with my strong inclination toward reading “books written before the internet was invented,” could read the below from The Guardian’s summer book recommendations, pick up a copy at Greenlight Books, and then only a mere 2.5 weeks later decide to actually read a novel published this year by a writer who I didn’t really know anything about?
Riley excels at dysfunctional family relationships, but is on gentler form here with the story of a long friendship between two prickly souls: Putnam, ageing out of relevance, and Laura, making her precarious way through midlife. It’s a wry take on the comforts of comradeship and the frustrations of other people, with the prose – as ever – sharp as a knife.
It’s not all that mysterious—we know by now that if a book is written by a woman, dwells almost exclusively on everyday life, and conveys its quiet insights in compelling, unpretentious prose, then I’m going to read that book! It’s catnip, plain and simple!!
Just a good book, inside and out!
I loved The Palm House. Not as bleak as I expected it to be, but horrifying and haunting in certain parts (heads up—there’s a dread-inducing chapter where the narrator recounts being groomed and sexually assaulted 😔).
What did I love about the book, specifically?
How loosely yet carefully Riley moves between the present and the past, through one of the least distracting first-person narrators I’ve ever encountered in contemporary fiction—it’s a shame I don’t have the words to precisely describe how masterful Riley is in giving the fluidity of her narrative juuuuuuuuust enough structure at the exact right moments for the reader to orient themselves in time (ie, to recognize whether narrator/protagonist Laura is recounting something that happened very recently or less recently, and to recognize when Laura has transitioned from recounting an event that happened years earlier back to the present moment of her narrative)
That there’s zero context for Laura’s narration—Is she talking or writing? Assuming “writing,” what is she writing, a diary or a book? Who is she writing for? Why is she writing?—and because of the nature of this novel, no context is needed1
Oh wow . . . this is me realizing in real time that Gwendoline Riley might have written the kind of book I hoped Sally Rooney would continue writing after her debut?? I was sitting here, thumbing through The Palm House’s pages thinking, “What IS it about this novel that had me so enchanted? I didn’t even underline anything?” and saw that it must in large part have been the dialogue, the conversations Laura has with her friends, which dominate the narrative and which reveal so much without ever once feeling didactic or engineered.2 Damn, this is so crazy
I’m lowkey reeling from this epiphany. I already wanted to read more Riley after my experience of reading The Palm House, but now I feel it even more strongly!
Leonie Swann, tr., Anthea Bell, Three Bags Full (2005/2006)3—”My sheep book,” as I exclusively referred to it over the 4 or so days it took me to read, is a delight. Wholesome, engaging, charming, thoughtful, funny.
Especially after Wimbledon and the World Cup ended, I needed something to pull me out of the sick and often unsuccessful daily battle I was waging to Stay Out of It™4—“it” being “my job.” And by “stay out of it” I mean “resist the siren song of thinking that if I put in enough extra hours, I’ll get ahead of things.” Anyway, I’m already bored thinking/writing about the intellectual/spiritual/physical Ls I took by working as much as I did this month. The point is that I was backsliding into hyperfocusing on the wrong things, so I needed something powerful to pull me away from my desk. For a few sweet days, Three Bags Full did the trick, and there’s really not much more to say about it!
What I’m looking forward to reading in August:
Tove Jansson, tr., Thomas Teal, The Summer Book (1972/1974)5
Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (2021)
Rachel Cusk, Life of M (2026)
Lily King, The Pleasing Hour (1999)
1 Compare to my beloved The Wall (1963/2022), which structurally (heh) requires its narrator to at least gesture at why she is telling the story she tells and for whom she is telling it.
2 They are of course engineered—this is a novel!!—and that’s what makes them so impressive, how “authentic” they read.
3 Book Club selection for July.
4 Trademarked phrase and concept of Friend of the Report, Katrina.
5 Book Club selection for August.
