Books from June / 2025

Out of the sea a strange presence, into a mansion the start of a catastrophe, onto an island of raccoons... a confusion of fiction & reality this month...

Of June (besides watching raccoons eat fruit from a person’s hands) I can recall beautiful blue ocean and the cooling shade, dappled light of trees, the scent of banana bread and the reaching out to friends. All the while a good batch of books kept me company - ones that opened my eyes through teaching, ones imbued with loneliness or disaster. Here’s all I read this month!

Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro (trans. by Eve Hill-Agnus)

I have a feeling this was one I just “didn’t get,” but I’d put it in the category of short books that feel a bit underwhelming, ones that will fade in my memory. At the atmospheric start a cargo ship crew of twenty men goes out for a swim, our protagonist, their female captain watching over them. This is a secret between all of them, and the euphoria as the men slip into the dark water is also a shared secret - an experience that’s described like a second birth. Then, they return to the ship. And they count twenty-one men. From here an inexplicable fog ends up encasing the ship, and the captain begins to unravel from these mysterious events in a place that could be seen as somewhere between life and death. Though I found the start promising and really atmospheric, by the end the atmosphere had all but died and everything read as if on the same register, despite the eeriness of the situation. There was something too understated in the writing that made it hard for me to discern the things the book was trying to say. I guess I wanted more impact from the mysterious twenty-first crew mate’s role; in other words it might’ve worked better had the stranger elements been utilized to a fuller extent.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

For the reader going through the myriad obstacles of life and lacking energy or motivation to read but would still like to try, this is the kind of book I’d recommend. I found this one playful, light on its feet, and hopeful in its vision of our future. Set in a world that has long said goodbye to the robots the humans had made and has been able to move on into a more reusable, recyclable way of life, a monk named Dex gets a sudden but deep desire to hear the sound of cricket song. They first become a tea monk, traveling across the land to provide a resting place for anyone in need of some good tea and a place to breathe. But the cricket song is nowhere to be heard, and so they leave their good life behind to venture into the true wilderness up to an abandoned sanctuary where the species might be living still. On the first day in this uncharted territory, they meet Mosscap, a robot.

As robot and human make their way through the wild, they have philosophical conversations that give the story a kind of glowing depth I think a lot of readers have found comfort in. Dex as stand-in for the human viewpoint vs. Mosscap, an “other” being that happens to understand much more how all beings live: what are the differences between all things, what makes us the same, what are we made up of and how much does that matter? While I enjoyed reading them, I can’t say I felt these parts truly altered anything inside me or that they provoked thought. The story felt like a gentle pat on the shoulder, and judging by the dedication I’d say that was part of Chambers’s goal. In which case, the book was a success! But overall, maybe because my expectations were a bit too high, it did fall a little flat. Perhaps though, you could view this one like Dex’s tea wagon: a spot for a little rest.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig (trans. by Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt)

There is something horribly exhilarating when you read a book that mimics a huge, gangly insect sprawling and tripping towards an unavoidable catastrophe. Melodramatic as this book was, it would be tough for a reader to not be drawn into the story of the young Austro-Hungarian military officer, Hofmiller, and probably it is because of the dramatic style that makes it such a captivating read.

Right up front, I’d call this boy a mess. For his whole life he’s brought up in the world of the military where his days are structured, everything is taken care of for him, and a man’s will disappears at the sound of a command. Everything changes however when he’s invited to a millionaire’s home and accidentally offends the disabled daughter when he asks her for a dance. As he tells the narrator, from this point the tragedy begins. The more his life becomes entangled with this family’s, the harder it is to extricate himself and leave this world that’s so different from his own: he is appreciated here, he realizes that someone like himself could bring so much joy to others, and it becomes difficult to walk away from that golden feeling. But as the title states, all of his actions and thoughts are rooted in pity - pity for Edith, the girl whom he offended and then befriends, pity for her father who suffers from the suffering of his daughter. Out of his pity reassurance and acceptance of grave responsibilities are unspooled, and keep unspooling to the very limits of his psyche. Undoubtedly problematic, condescending & an ableist, Hofmiller frustrates in his inability to truly take charge of the responsibilities entrusted to him, but Zweig is too good of a writer to portray him as a bad person. The book shows the many forms pity can take, how complex and conflicting it can be.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Robinson is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers for her insightful, thought-provoking storytelling that always manages to strike the heart. Her writing is so thoughtful, which is a word I’d use to also describe this 3rd book in her Gilead series. Lila’s presence is a flicker here and there in Gilead & Home, but of course here we get the full picture of the life she had before she wandered into Gilead, which begins on a front porch of a house and the sensation of being swept up in someone’s arms: a wandering woman, Doll picks up a neglected Lila and walks off with her into the life of a transit where until the immediate present a core part of her lingers and misses. As they wander with a humble, hard-working group, walking through towns, sleeping under stars and ultimately running into the hardest of times in the Great Depression, Lila discovers the beauty of the sky and land, the love in an old shawl’s fabric or in the man on his knees tying his partner’s shoes. All these memories she thinks of in hindsight as she awaits the birth of her son in the safe, comfortable home she has somehow ended up in against all odds. In her new life as the wife of a Christian preacher, she starts reading & copying out of the Bible and begins mulling over the sort of people the religion would and wouldn’t accept and the sort of life expected of her now. Questions of existence and eternity - the point of it all - circulate in her mind, her thoughts seeming to see-saw at times or to cut themselves off short at others. Though her memories are colored as if by the soft, wavering firelight she grew up with, they are also full of hardship and loss, things stolen and things abandoned. But in Gilead where no one knows where she came from, it is only her who knows the goodness in the people she was surrounded by; that they would not deserve a beautiful afterlife becomes harder to believe.

Loneliness undertows the story, for Lila has always been filled with it, accompanying her after she has left her life of wandering, even after she has met her husband. The beautiful thing though is that it isn’t bleak. Instead, reading about Lila & seeing her view of things felt like walking on an endlessly cloudy day and then seeing the emerging of sun rays, weak and pale as they are, but there nonetheless lighting up the path in front of us.

Recognizing the Stranger by Isabella Hammad

Made up of a 2023 lecture on the facets of narrative in literature and Palestine’s struggle for independence and a 2024 afterword on the first months of the genocide in Gaza, this book, which takes barely two hours to read, has an impact that will last in the reader for as long as they are aware of storytelling. We’re fed narratives our whole life - stories of our heritage and family, stories of ourselves, stories of the country we live in - so that we can walk along soil that will act as reliable, familiar ground. I wonder if an identity isn’t composed of anything else but narratives - individual and collective. Solidarity and connection grow from such ground, but in Hammad’s lecture she shows us that the source is really only one perspective from the one storyteller who historically has had the power to enforce theirs over all the others. Recognition in a literary character traditionally promises a hurtling toward a closure where everything will come to make sense. But as Hammad points out, what if recognition means recognizing that our knowledge of reality has always been limited & that the world does not fit into the narratives we were fed? What if one’s recognition makes them turn away, not from their home or inheritance, but from the side of the oppressor?

Becoming Kin by Patty Krawec

It just so happens that this book by Krawec, an Anishinaabe Ukrainian writer, was one I’d just finished before reading Recognizing the Stranger, and the two work so well together in conversation, reiterating the necessity in the act of re/de-centering our colonial narratives. With chapters that educate and propose concrete ways to understand better the history of the places we occupy, this book presents the Canadian and American settler history from the perspective of the Indigenous peoples to reconstruct how the reasons, actions and consequences were told by the colonizer. Step by step she teaches the reader how to form a different kind of relationship with the land one lives on and the people who once could call it their home by reevaluating the “roots” of the current relationship. How they were planted was through the removal of the people already living there through constant displacement and murder, though the legacy given by countries borne from such actions has always framed it differently, carefully so that the portrayal could become the truth. I hope for every reader this gives a sobering but crucial and required education on both the history between the settler and displaced peoples and how Indigenous people like the Anishinaabe view our relationship to the Earth and each other.

My 2nd try at Han Kang’s latest, We Do Not Part is proving more successful, and I’m disappointed in myself that I ever doubted one of my favorite writers. It’s one that does take a bit of focus, but the immersion has been all-encompassing.

I just started on Eve, which has been gracing the shelves of so many bookshops lately, and already I’ve learned a lot about the female body. So much to highlight, so much to remember!

I need to get a proper start on Little, Big as part of The Unseen Review’s slow read, but hopefully by the time you read this I would’ve made my way into this strange, faerie (?) world.

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Let me know your June reading highlights & your thoughts if you’ve read any of these! Wherever you are I hope you’re well and staying hydrated 𓄼 𓄹