What I read: June 2025

I have begun keeping track of the books I read here, rather than all the other various ways I have tried to keep track of these things in the past. I am especially trying to divest from some overly large tech companies (which, yes, I know, Substack will turn out to be no better when it is in their interests to), such as the owner of Goodreads.

Here are the books I read in June 2025:

Six books, four fiction and two nonfiction. Five of them fit categories for the Missoula Public Library Reading Challenge (mental health, academic thriller, “everyone is reading it,” element in the title, mythical creatures) so long as your circle of “everyone” includes a lot of people who were excited about this new reissue of Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women as mine does.

Grendel by John Gardner: Many people told me how good this was, and I put off reading it for ages, and I’m not sure why exactly. I guess I thought a book based on one of Beowulf’s monsters (not even the final boss, at that) was going to be too esoteric or difficult in some way. But all the people who told me how good this was were right. I did review the first part of Beowulf (up to the killing of Grendel) in order to remember how that goes and who the names refer to, because this novel does assume you remember who Hrothgar and the others are, basically. It does tell you a little, but I do think it was much more approachable once I had that part of Beowulf kind of fresh in my mind. Now I’m not so sure there isn’t a Grendel out there watching us, some rough beast, seeing all our misdeeds, knowing that those without the mark of Cain upon them are not as different from those with as they would like to believe.

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins: Wow this was a frustrating book. The book is set in an apocalyptic southern California; the apocalypse here is that it no longer rains, at all. So we have here a sort of Grapes of Wrath, which is funny to me since the family and I are also reading The Grapes of Wrath right now: most people flee this major, life-altering drought, but some stay behind; the numbers of people fleeing are so high that other states want them to stop coming, people start calling them “Mojavs” (as in, “we don’t want no more Mojavs coming our way”). Our main characters are people who have decided to stay, until something happens that makes them want to leave, and so the second half of the book is them trying to flee. There are many, many interesting things where you think, ok, this is going to turn into an important plot point, and it does not. Many such things. Very frustrating. There is a cult in the desert, which, yes, it’s the American West, there are going to be cults, but also Watkins’s father was a member of the Manson family in the Spahn Ranch days, I believe. Anyway, we read this for my petite book club, and we found we didn’t have much to say about it. And I still feel that way. The writing, especially in the descriptions of landscapes you can tell the author loves, is really great in places, but in the end, there just isn’t much there there.¹

Obedience by Will Lavender: A very different kind of murder mystery. I like a murder mystery; they are my chicken soup² when I am ill, and I have been ill, so I read this quickly. I did not like the writing style, I admit, but the unusual plot — I really haven’t ever read anything quite like it — kept me hooked.

Right-Wing Women by Andrea Dworkin: So, I’ve never made much secret about not really identifying as a feminist, and I’ve not really read much of what you would call feminist theory or literature. I’ve read some Simone de Beauvoir, for example, but never The Second Sex. Weird, right? Anyway, I had certainly heard of Dworkin, heard all the things one hears about Dworkin, so I was frankly prepared to hate this. But, and I say this as a person who has grown up around a lot of right-wing women: she’s right. She is simply correct in this book. She, unlike nearly everyone else, was apparently able to marshal the enormous empathy for other women to see that the fundamental difference between her and them was only the question of whether or not you believed the world could change. Dworkin and Phyllis Schlafly have the same understanding of how men are and what the patriarchy is and does; the difference is Dworkin wants to, believes she can, change it, and Schlafly and her ilk see that as futile and thus try to accommodate it in the ways that they believe will keep more women safer, albeit while sacrificing some and sacrificing the liberation of all of us. But it isn’t so easy to believe such a liberation is possible; I go back and forth on that question myself. If it were possible, I’m sure I would have many points of disagreement with Dworkin about what it ultimately looks like; for one thing, she seems to regard motherhood as an inherently oppressive, best-avoided circumstance (I’m not positive of this, given that this is the only book of hers that I have read) and I think the opposite. Anyway, I think I might have more to say about this book in the future, especially since I am now reading a book about domestic violence and I have Is Rape a Crime? on deck as well. Whee.

Bunny by Mona Awad: I don’t know, man, I just hated this. It’s got a blurb from Margaret Atwood saying it’s so genius, and for maybe the first half I was hooked and then it seemed to me like everything was becoming stupid and I started to hate it, and now I barely remember it. I think it is probably more funny to people who have spent a lot of time in and around creative writing departments, a symptom of the disease of a certain type of modern fiction. Anyway, big thumbs down from me, despite my reverence for Ms Atwood’s opinion.

Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters: This turned out not to be exactly what I thought it was going to be. I assumed ahead of time it was going to be about some of the social contagion issues we’ve been seeing in the age of the internet, an internet often (though, obviously, not solely) dominated by American topics and interests. But it’s more about the direct spread via the American Psychiatric Association and its tools (especially the DSM) and missionary therapists and then, in the last chapter, advertising. He tackles four separate mental health issues — anorexia, PTSD, schizophrenia, and depression — and details how the understandings of what those diseases are, how they manifest, what part of your identity they might form, and how they should be treated, have changed in four different cultures via direct contact with American therapists and American therapy culture. So, for example, he never makes the claim that residents of Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the civil war and tsunami of 2004 don’t have some kind of reactions to traumatic stress; what he does claim is that the ways they thought of it and talked about it changed a great deal after the onslaught of American missionary therapists in the wake of the tsunami. They had some indigenous ideas about how one should cope with these kinds of events, and we came and told them they should cope differently, and then because we seemed all scientific and they seemed, well, quaint and folksy, some people started to change in response to that intervention. It may be that the change will be for the better, or it may not be, but he’s documenting a cultural shift, a homogenization, a colonialism of the soul, if you will. The American hegemony respects no boundaries.

Reading and memory

My husband is a guy who easily memorizes verbatim quotes from TV shows and movies. I don’t know how he does it. I drive him crazy because I often cannot remember anything — literally anything! — about a movie, often going so far as to argue with him about whether or not we have seen it. I think I had to see Babylon AD three times before I finally remembered I had seen it; I had to see it four times before I finally remembered Michelle Yeoh is in it — Michelle Yeoh!! How could you forget? I don’t know, other than that I don’t think I engage with movies very deeply a lot of the time. If a movie does stick with me after one watching, I know it was a good movie, so I know I want to rewatch it. For instance, I saw La Haine once, when it first came out, in a theater, and there were some shots from that movie that stayed with me forever, until I finally rewatched it. Great movie.

Anyway, I kind of also do this with books. I read quickly, and I read a lot. Many people say you should read slowly, to really absorb everything the book has to say. You can read fewer books this way, but you’ll make sure to only read ones that you feel certain will have something to say to you, that you will then deeply absorb.

But you can’t really know this up front. I mean, you can play the odds: if many people have said this book has a timeless message of universal appeal, then maybe it does. If those guys are all of a certain type, then maybe less so, because some people are really bad at understanding what might speak to people unlike themselves.

But some books no one ever talks about as “classics” are books that have meant a lot to me: The Borribles, A Soldier of the Great War, Fisher’s Hornpipe, The Woman Destroyed. I wouldn’t have known how powerfully these books would speak to me without just giving them a go. That’s one reason that I read a lot, to find those unusual voices saying things I’ve never heard before, speaking in ways that maybe don’t have universal appeal but still have value to those of us who hear them. And without readers who could make time to read some of the classics as well as new books (or even older ones that seem forgotten or lesser known), literature would simply stagnate. The pool of human knowledge and imagination would just grow a scum of algae on top, and it would look like influencers telling you to read more slowly and only the important books you already know to be of value until your brain has gone absolutely sluggish.

I solve this problem by reading a lot of books very quickly and then going back and re-reading books that are worth it. I know a book is worth it if, after reading it quickly one time, I still think about some scene from it, the way La Haine had some shots that I can’t ever forget.

vinz from la haine, in the unforgettable mirror scene

This isn’t always true: Sandra Newman’s The Men I mostly did not like, but there are a couple of scenes in it that stand out very vividly in my mind still. I won’t re-read it, due to the things I didn’t like about it, but I can’t forget it either. And if a book is nonfiction, I may simply refer back to it (I underline very heavily, if I’m interested, and I also sometimes leave margin notes and/or use Book Darts) to refresh my memory of some parts rather than re-read the whole thing.

Anyway, this should have been its own post, but I have got to get out to the garden and pick the fava beans and process them and maybe make some kimchi, so I can’t be bothered with that today. Perhaps I’ll turn it into its own thing later.