My July reading was still affected by the World Cup and – towards the end of the month – also by all the walking I’ve been doing, but it was a good reading month regardless. I liked pretty much everything I read and some of it I liked a lot.

1. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Mosfegh. By my estimation, this is the most-hyped book of this summer, at least on bookstagram. This makes perfect sense, as bookstagram is full of intelligent urban 20-something women who are the ideal audience for this book. The protagonist – young, pretty and well off – believes that the only way to address her problems is to sleep for a year. She goes and puts that plan into action with the help or a truly formidable amount of prescription drugs. It is darkly funny, sharply observed and beautifully written. It’s also very zeitgeisty, which can be both good and bad, depending on where you stand.

2. Heartburn by Nora Ephron. If things are going badly for you, it might help to think that at least you aren’t seven months pregnant and your husband hasn’t just told you he loves someone else (if this *is* your situation, Heartburn is of course perfect reading for you). Dealing with this situation is the premise of Ephron’s witty and wonderful novel that is based on her own experiences. It’s a great summer read, turned into something more than a relationship comedy by the underlying sadness and heartache. Plus there are some great recipes.

3. The White Album by Joan Didion. For a certain kind of woman, Didion is the perfect icon: cool, gifted, beautiful, troubled and able to write circles around anyone. Sometimes I feel her persona almost distracts from her writing, but it’s also difficult to separate the two: she was a pioneer in terms of mixing the personal with the political/intellectual/topical. I came late to Didion and reading her now is seeing so clearly the thread that connects many today’s female non-fiction writers to her. I enjoy Didion’s elegant prose and her precision (she can conjure a place with one sentence). What I loved in The White Album, however, were her obsessions. She is passionately fascinated by the California water system, shopping malls, the traffic control, biker movies and the Hoover Dam. And this, even more than her Celine ads, make her my kind of woman, too.

4. Children of Blood and Bone by Toni Adeyemi. This book was the only disappointment in this month’s batch, but you have to keep in mind that my expectations were high. I enjoyed the Yoruba-inspired world building and some of the themes (credit really has to be given for depicting the political realities in more nuanced way than good vs evil), I even quite liked the characters. However, I found the writing less than stellar, the plot so contrived that it was difficult to look past it (we only have 10 days to do this thing, because we can only do this thing once in a 100 years and there’s only one person who knows how to do this and we found him by accident) and then there’s the instalove and other YA tropes that I’m probably just too old for. Still, if you are in the mood for an African fantasy story, give it a go – many people have liked it more than I did.

5. This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay. Another good summer read, this is a funny (and also sad and informative) diary of a junior doctor in the British NHS system. Occasionally, it’s difficult to believe that all this is true, both in terms of how the system operates (or is forced to operate in the current political climate) and when it comes to the things people do. Probably not the best book for prudes, because of all that talk of different objects found in vaginas, or pregnant people, because things happen to pregnant people and babies.

6. Educated by Tara Westover. I have zero trouble understanding why this has been one of the most popular memoirs of 2018. The story itself, about a girl growing up in a Mormon survivalist family, never going to school and ending up with a PhD from Cambridge, is extraordinary. It is also absolutely beautifully and movingly written. I really liked Westover’s voice and her attempts to understand, not just condemn the family who abused and controlled her: they clearly loved her too, even if with disastrous results. The last third was possibly a little less engaging than the first two, but I also understand that life doesn’t always follow the narrative arc as cleanly as one would like. Highly recommended.

7. Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore by Terry Newman. This book gives nice snapshots of famous writers’ relationship to clothes. There are the usual suspects, like Oscar Wilde and Colette, the Fitzgeralds and Donna Tartt. There are more surprising choices as well, though, including David Foster Wallace, Samuel Beckett and Djuna Barnes. And Joan Didion is on the cover, of course. A quick and pleasant read.

8. Zaitoun: Recipes and Stories from the Palestinian Kitchen by Yasmin Khan. This is a cookbook and doesn’t therefore fully qualify. Still, I wanted to include it, because 1) it’s a beautiful book that includes great recipes and 2) it goes beyond recipes to tell you about Palestine. I have always thought food is a good place to start when learning about a culture and this conviction has only grown stronger recently. This might also be a good place to remind you of Kahn’s first book, The Saffron Tales.

How was your reading in July?