June and July 2025 Books

Hello fellow readers! I had a couple of great reading months and ended up finishing seven books, with four five star reads. Here is everything I finished reading in June and July:

The Best (Five Stars)

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside

A woman visits some friends in the countryside and wakes up one day to discover a "wall" has completed isolated her from the rest of the world. She is left to survive on her own, with the company of a dog, a cat, and a cow. The story unfolds from her perspective as she recounts the initial period of time after the wall appears.

I absolutely loved this book. There is an ever-present level of stress and tension throughout the book as the woman struggles to survive, overcoming one challenge only to be faced with another. It is also a very introspective and contemplative book with some of the most incredibly beautiful and haunting scenes that reflect deeply on what it means to be human, what it means to human alongside other animals, and our overall relationship to nature. I will be thinking about many moments and passages from this one for a very long time.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

This is an essay Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929 to explore the topic of women and fiction and the historical lack of women writers. In this essay Woolf illustrates how systemic social and economic barriers to entry have impacted not only women's writing, but literature as a whole.

This was fascinating. The way Woolf seamlessly interweaves and leverages the tools of fiction throughout just makes it magical. I had very wrongfully assumed for a very long time that I wasn't going to like this, I think because I studied Mrs Dalloway in school and did not enjoy it (maybe in retrospect this had more to do with not liking the class more than anything). I had believed it would be boring, tedious, inaccessible, and dated. Instead it was the complete opposite and I was completely enthralled. I now (embarrassingly) understand why this was such a pivotal work during its time, and why it also continues to resonate today.

The themes of this essay are not new to me, but it helped me to see these things from a much deeper perspective, and gave words and connections to things I had felt but had not been able to articulate. I think I tabbed almost every other page. There were countless passages that I went back to reread again and again to marvel at how elegantly, succinctly, and powerfully Woolf shows the reader and really makes you see how systemic gender inequality has impacted women's writing ("women's" "writing"), how really very recent some of the major strides to close the gap are, and how far we still have to go. I am reading Elena Ferrante's Troubling Love right now, and feel I have a better foundation from which to understand and think about Ferrante's choice to be anonymous and the continued speculations that she is a man through the lens of persistent gender inequality.

I think this is one of those books I will probably re-read every few years. I want to give Mrs Dalloway another try as well.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda

This was so good. Other than Shirley Jackson and Ted Chiang, I don't think I've read another short story collection in full where I really liked the majority of stories from it and found so many unique and memorable. My favorite one was "The Exotic Marriage", which begins with a woman who realizes she is starting to look more like her husband and has the absolute best ending of any short story I have ever read.

L'étranger de Albert Camus (read in French)

According to Goodreads I read this one in English in 2013 and gave it 3 stars. I really have no memory of reading it at all. I then attempted to read it again two years ago, this time in French, but the level was still too high for me and I put it down. I'm glad me 12 years ago was not ready for this book, and that me two years ago also put it down to wait a bit more, because I think now I could finally appreciate both the story and the prose itself (in the language it was written in!!). This book will always have a special place in my heart now for being my first major classic that I read in French. I also thought it was a very, very good book.

I loved Camus' writing. So simple yet so deep in a kind of indescribable way. I didn't know every single word in French, and even for words I did know I'm sure some nuance was going over my head, and yet somehow I could really feel this book, could feel the depth and the layers of the prose, of the story. There is a weightiness to this book that is immediately felt and envelopes you. I forgot I was reading in French at times. I don't even know what I'm really trying to say now. This is how this book makes you feel.

This book probably has one of the most famous first lines, and I think for good reason - not only do the first two lines pretty much brilliantly sum up the whole story, but also show the beauty of Camus' prose that I am doing such a bad job at describing right now. So I'll just end this with those first two lines themselves:

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.

The Very Good (four stars)

The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

Our narrator Eszter is waiting for an unnamed "you", and while she waits for her/him she recounts both her childhood and her relationship with "you." Eszter's recounting of her childhood primarily focuses on her (rather disturbing) hatred for her rich classmate named Angéla, who she appears to still have a connection with in adulthood.

I was really excited heading into this book, as this is my first Magda Szabó and I have a feeling she is going to become one of my favorite writers. I went back and forth on which of her books I should read first, and ending up going with publication order. I think that was still the right choice as I thought this was very good, and am now really excited for her more famous works (The Door, Abigail).

I think if this book had been about 50 pages shorter it would have been a near five star read for me. I loved the first half and flew through it, compelled to understand more of Eszter's character, but around the three quarter mark it was becoming clear that perhaps we weren't really going to get further into the layers of Eszter and she started to feel a bit more one-dimensional. I think one could argue this is the critique of Eszter's character and her faults, but it made for a bit of tedious reading towards the end and I felt the book lost a bit of the momentum and excitement it had at the beginning. Still a solid read though.

The Good (three stars)

Run River by Joan Didion

A very dramatic tale of a 1950s marriage falling apart. This book was so cinematic I feel like I remember it more as if I had watched a movie rather than read a book. It did feel like one giant 1950s cliché (but I can't fault Didion for the fact she wrote this in 1960 - maybe it's the origin of all of these clichés). The book gave me this peculiar feeling while reading it that the characters themselves were aware they were caricatures and were playing their roles accordingly. Maybe this is Didion's intended commentary. In any event, I liked it and I liked Didion's writing and will pick up more by her in the future. Three stars because I promptly forget the ending shortly after finishing it.

Bonjour Tristesse de Françoise Sagan (read in French)

A young teenage girl named Cécile spends the summer on the French Riveria with her father, his girlfriend, and another female friend, a more "serious" woman named Anne who Cécile's father ends up announcing he plans to marry. Drama and teenage angst ensue as Cécile clashes with the intelligent and elegant Anne, who suddenly represents for Cécile an end to the indulgent and irresponsible life she has become accustomed to with her father. Nothing earth shattering, but I thought it was a good summer read.

DNFed

The Stone Mattress: Nine Dark Tales, by Margaret Atwood

Not pictured because I got fed up with this book and left it in a Free Little Library in my cousin's neighborhood in Toronto. This was not good. I'm sorry to say, especially as a Canadian, but I don't think Margaret Atwood and I get along and this is probably the end for me. I liked The Handmaid's Tale, but everything else I've tried since (The Testaments, Alias Grace, Oryx & Crake, and this) has just felt....poorly written. I am a little shocked at the quality of the first story in this collection - not only was the prose strangely awkward and cringey at times, there were also numerous plot holes, weird perpetuation of stereotypes (and not in like a self-aware/self-reflective kind of way), and the "dark" aspect wasn't really dark, which just made it confusing as to why Atwood and/or her publisher went out of their way to market the book as a collection of "dark" tales. I tried reading a couple more stories after the first one, including the title story, and gave up because it wasn't getting any better.