The Hollands have returned from our two-week trip up the middle of the United States in an RV. It turns out that driving 3,000 miles in 14 days creates loads of reading opportunities in the car, so I read a lot on this trip. I started our journey two books behind on my reading challenge and ended it five ahead. A couple of the books I read aren’t out yet, so I’ll share my thoughts closer to their release. Fear not, I have plenty to share in the meantime.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
[B]ut he had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.
Elizabeth Strout is my favorite living writer. The characters in her novels feel exquisitely real, but also wise and transparent in a way real people never are. The stories she tells are never terribly exciting, even when dramatic events happen. Her books are often about loneliness and the distances between us we find so hard to bridge. My friend Lacy calls her books “smart fiction.”
Her past several novels have taken place among the intersecting lives in the fictional town Crosby, Maine. The Things We Never Say leaves that world and tells the story of high school history teacher Artie Dam. I loved Artie immediately and felt his struggles and burdens profoundly as a reader. I was sorry to say goodbye at the end of this short novel, as I always am at the end of Strout’s books.
Flesh by David Szalay
Thinking about death makes everything seem sad because it makes everything seem unimportant, at least for a moment.
The 2025 winner of the Booker Prize, I read Flesh on the flight home in about three hours. This spare novel tells the life story of a Hungarian man named István. His life takes twists and turns - sometimes lucky and oftentimes tragic. And yet István spends much of the novel shrugging or answering the questions of those around him with evasive answers or simple “okays.” Szalay moves masterfully through the timeline. Years pass between one chapter and the next, then he’ll slow down and dial in on page after page of dialogue where István reveals little or nothing to the reader or to himself.
I’ve never quite read anything like it, and I was completely entranced. I didn’t like István or anyone around him much, and it didn’t really seem to matter. I read compulsively just the same.
This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History by Beverly Gage
No matter where you are, there’s no getting away from what once was.
Nicholas and I spent two days of our road trip listening to This Land Is Your Land. I was a huge fan of Gage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of J. Edgar Hoover and was delighted to see her follow-up align so perfectly with our summer travel plans. So perfectly, in fact, we were literally listening to her describe Medora, North Dakota, as we entered the town in our RV.
Gage organizes the book loosely by geography, using different areas of the country to move chronologically forward from the country’s founding. She starts in Philadelphia and then uses historical sites to tell the story of our country through slavery and the pioneering of the American West (and the myth of the American West) through the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the American city. I absolutely loved how she carefully examines each era and how every place struggles to convey both the triumphs and the tragedies present in our history.
During the celebration of America’s 250th year, I’ve been hungry to hear the next phase of historical examination articulated. One that doesn’t ignore the mistakes, but also doesn’t erase the successes. Not surprisingly, considering her gifts as a historian, I think Gage pushes us forward into that next phase with this book. Highly recommend reading it, especially if you’re on your own American road trip.
Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips
Years are nothing: story conquers all distance.
This memoir was recommended by Anne Bogel in her Summer Reading Guide. As a small town girl and a lover of memoirs, I was immediately intrigued. Phillips is a masterful writer, which I feel silly saying considering she won the Pulitzer for her 2024 novel Night Watch (a book I ordered the second I was done with this one). Her tales of childhood and family were striking and lovely, but that’s her story. I knew she had me when she told a part of my own with incredible beauty.
The memoir is a collection of essays, and one is about her time as a journalist in Paducah attending the funerals of three of my classmates - forever small town girls themselves - killed in the shooting at my high school in 1997. The feeling of people you know in real life being turned into a narrative on the page is always unsettling. It’s a feeling I still remember even after all these years, of realizing the people I saw on the nightly news were real. I had it in reverse reading Phillips’s essay. I realized after pages of reading her most intimate stories that she was also real, and that for one day in 1997 we had shared a space inside a Baptist church and had been changed by it.
Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein
Because I am here to protect the difference between giving and being had.
Earlier this summer, I read a Substack postulating what would be the book of the summer (the answer is two books down!), and one commenter absolutely raved about Dear Monica Lewinsky. This comic novel follows Jean as she re-examines an affair from early adulthood with a professor. The affair took place during the summer of 1998 - the same summer Monica Lewinsky was crucified for her own youthful desires. Jean imbues Monica with modern sainthood and prays to her for help. Monica appears and accompanies Jean on a look back to that summer , one she just so happened to be spend studying medieval imagery in churches. I really loved this imaginative story that did a lot with a little and helped me rethink youth, female desire, and how we’ve treated both over time. I’m also wholly convinced that Monica Lewinsky can and should function as a modern-day saint.
Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life by Grace Hamman
The virtues are not about being a special individual who is better than other people. They are neither clumsy one-size-fits-all rules nor a dry works-righteousness perfectionism to be shoved upon others.
A very, very different examination of the medieval period, this book was recommended by several people after I spoke about my interest in vices and virtues on Pantsuit Politics. I listened to a chapter every month (paired with the corresponding virtue in Elizabeth Oldfield’s Fully Alive) and really loved Hamman’s ability to unmask these virtues from our modern assumptions and expectations. I am more and more convinced that our way of living - disconnected from ourselves and from each other - is allowing us to lean into all our worst instincts and I appreciated Hamman’s ability to apply ancient anecdotes to this problem.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.
Whew. I don’t even know where to start.
First of all, I convinced Beth to read it, and we’ll be discussing it on our first Spicy Live back together in a couple of weeks, because I think we can all agree this blockbuster of a novel can’t exactly be summed up in a couple of paragraphs.
Second of all, all the credit in the world to Burke for having a hell of an idea and executing it well enough to set the literary world on fire. I don’t think this novel is perfect, and I think the critique that her understanding of religious fundamentalism is shallow at best is fair. However, I think the novel is at its sharpest when she’s unflinchingly assessing the internet, social media, and what it does to women (not to mention what we do to each other).
The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 2 by Beth Brower
Our conversation was very June and very Afternoon, meaning it meandered like a honey bee.
I’m making my way slowly through this enchanting series. I don’t feel the need to speed read to find out what happens to Emma, especially since I know we’re very far away from the twenty total books Beth Brower plans to write. I find these slim volumes the perfect palate cleanser between longer, more arduous reads.
How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University by Theo Baker
Instead, to succeed is “to aggregate enough of the capital of the world to then reallocate it against your worldview.”
I followed Theo Baker’s takedown of the president of Stanford as it was happening and have been interested in him ever since. Plus, I am endlessly fascinated by elite universities and the toxic environments they create. This memoir is Baker’s telling of his first two years at Stanford, including the reporting on the president that ultimately led to his resignation. As messed up as the New England Ivies are, it turns out that if you add a healthy dose of Silicon Valley greed to the mix it can get even worse! The intricacies of some of his reporting made the middle of this book a little slow, but overall, I found his reporting from the front lines of Stanford as he experienced it worth the read.
What have all of y’all been reading on summer break?
Looking forward to the discussion of Yesteryear. I read it and the whole time I was reading it I kept thinking “this woman hates being a mother and a wife” and it made me wonder how many people in the tradwife circles actually hate their lives but can’t say it.
I’m in love with the Emma M Lion series. I’m listening to it on audio, and it is just delightful.