Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby.  I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book.  Here are my reads for June, 2014…

Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, ed. Ann Hood – This was a Christmas gift that I finally got around to picking up.  I expected something light-hearted and this was in places, but mostly it was actually quite dark.  Lots of essays – beautiful, well-written, moving essays – about how knitting got the writers through all kinds of tragedies and terrible situations.  The editor picked up knitting to deal with her grief after her five-year-old daughter died of strep throat.  There were occasional moments of comedy (loved the essay about the dog who loves clothes) and if you’re looking for lovely, heart-wrenching writing, you’ll find it here.  If you’re looking for comedy, stick to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.

Frog Music, by Emma Donoghue – I didn’t read Donoghue’s first novel, Room, but was intrigued by the premise of this one.  In San Francisco, 1870, in the midst of a heat wave and a smallpox epidemic, Jenny Bonnet is shot dead in a railroad saloon.  Her companion and survivor, burlesque dancer Blanche Beaunon, thinks she knows who the killer is, but the authorities aren’t taking her seriously.  Blanche embarks on a dangerous search to find Jenny’s killer, who also has Blanche’s missing infant son.  The book was exceptionally well-written and very intense.  The sexual content was strong, though, so use caution if that bothers you.

The Steady Running of the Hour, by Justin Go – Tristan Campbell is an aimless young American trying to decide what to do with his future when he receives a potentially life-changing phone call from across the Atlantic: he might be the heir of a massive fortune.  Ashley Walshingham, a wealthy mountain climber who died on the slopes of Mt. Everest in 1924, left all his money in an eighty year trust to his beloved, Imogen Soames-Andersson, or her descendants.  The trust is about to expire, but if Tristan can prove that he is descended from Imogen – that his grandmother Charlotte was Imogen’s daughter rather than her niece as the family always believed – he will inherit the money.  But he only has a matter of weeks to make his case.  The story alternates between Tristan, racing around Europe searching for evidence, with Ashley and Imogen’s love story.  I loved the descriptive writing and the character of Ashley, but I rather thought he could do better than Imogen, and Tristan didn’t do much for me either way.  I’d heard the end was frustrating, which I can see being the case if you had bonded with the characters, which (aside from Ashley) I really didn’t.  The book is still worth reading, just for Ashley, though.

My Life in Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead – Rebecca Mead first read Middlemarch as a precocious, bookish teenager in small-town England, and it came to symbolize for her everything she was seeking to learn and experience.  Over the years as she built a journalism career, she didn’t have much time to read, but she always came back to Middlemarch.  This book is a love letter to a favorite book, mingled with biographical details about the author and a discussion of the book in context with the times (both the times in which it was written and the times in Mead’s own life when she re-read it.  I loved reading about how her opinions of various characters changed as she aged (she gave a moving tribute to Casaubon), and she made me want to both re-read Middlemarch (which I read for the first time last year and loved) and pick up my own constant favorite, Jane Eyre.

I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, by Courtney Maum – Richard Haddon should be happy.  He is in the midst of his first solo art show, his paintings are flying out the gallery doors, and he has a beautiful, intelligent French lawyer wife and an adorable five-year-old daughter.  But Richard is despondent over the loss of his lover, Lisa, an American journalist who left him to get married.  He snaps out of his doldrums and decides to recommit himself to his wife Anne-Laure – right about the time she finds out how deep his affair actually went.  Richard embarks on one attempt after another to win Anne back.  Mostly, I loved this.  The characters are well-drawn (except for Lisa, who seems a bit of a caricature, but that could be intentional) and I had no trouble rooting for Richard and Anne’s marriage despite Richard’s profound idiocy and the fact that Anne was clearly way out of his league.  Richard made me laugh and cry.  My only  complaint was that the book was predictable – I knew exactly how Richard’s attempts were going to work out, how his new art project would go over, and I predicted the final result and the event that precipitated it about 40% of the way into the book.  Still, I think it would be a great choice for book clubs (with another warning about sexual content), with its meditations on the ups and downs of a marriage.

Lots of intense reading for me this June.  Between Knitting Yarns and Frog Music, and a really intense book I started at the end of the month, I will be looking for some more calming reads soon.  (Of course, I also have to deal with the consequences of my indiscretions with the library holds list.)  It was a bit of a slow month for me (again; that seems to be the norm these days) as house-hunting and starting marathon training took up most of my off-work free time.  I’m excited about the books I have in the stack for July, though, so here’s hoping for a good reading month to come.