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 July, 2020…

Lumberjanes, Vol. 14: X Marks the Spot, Campfire Songs, and Bonus Tracks, by various authors – Finishing up my lumber-binge (at least until later this month, when Volume 15 comes out) I enjoyed X Marks the Spot – because everyone loves a good treasure hunt story, especially when it has a Greek myth component.  The ‘Janes embark on a treasure hunt and find a broken statue, which they reassemble (of course) and which immediately threatens to drain all of the magic from the camp (of course).  Diane makes an appearance, and hijinks ensue.  Good fun!  Campfire Songs and Bonus Tracks are two volumes of short “stories.”  As with all short story collections, there were some that I really enjoyed and some that didn’t speak to me quite as much – to be expected.  The contribution by Faith Erin Hicks (can’t remember which volume) was a highlight.  All in all – not as complex or fun as the standard ‘Janes material, but a nice way to spend more time in the world of Hardcore Lady-Types.

Sword of Bone, by Anthony Rhodes – After a month and a half of reading nothing but comics, I felt ready for some regular ol’ words on a page, and I turned to another tried-and-true slump-breaker – a memoir.  I’ve been meaning to get to Sword of Bone, one of the classic forgotten memoirs in the Slightly Foxed bibliography, for quite some time.  After all, who can resist a book described as an “amusing” book about Dunkirk?  Not me.  And it was amusing – if you’ve never chuckled at a description of the Maginot Line, go get this – and the Dunkirk chapters at the very end were absolutely gripping.  Slightly Foxed hits it out of the park every time, and this volume was a fabulous read.

Tory Heaven, or Thunder on the Right, by Marghanita Laski – As I meander through my own shelves, I’ve just been following whatever strikes me as a reading craving.  As I finished up the last few chapters of Sword of Bone, I got a hankering to read Tory Heaven, one of the newer Persephone releases.  It’s a sort-of-dystopian imagination of post-war England and I was here for all of it.  James Leigh-Smith, antihero, has been marooned on a desert island for several years.  Upon being rescued, he hears the distressing news that the Socialists have swept to nationwide power in England.  Oh noes!  Fortunately for James, that’s old news, and he arrives to find a Tory utopia in which classes are rigidly assigned to strata – A through E.  James – public school gentleman, son of landed gentry – is an A, naturally, and delighted with his new status.  But all is not as it seems, of course!  I don’t want to tell you any more and spoil it, but this was tense, dramatic, and good fun.

Wigs on the Green, by Nancy Mitford – Guess I was on something of a midcentury English right wing nutjob kick?  Wigs on the Green is Nancy Mitford’s irreverent send-up of British fascists in the 1930s.  Mitford herself suppressed the publication of the book for a long time, because her family – including sisters Unity and Diana – did not universally appreciate being mocked on the page.  The mocking was relatively gentle (Mitford could have been tougher on her Diana character, and the Unity character was straight-up lovable and funny – my 2020 reader’s eye, with its 20/20 hindsight, disapproved) but it was an interesting read for sure.

Only six books in July… that’s partly due to the fact that after Wigs on the Green, I picked up Mary Barton.  Elizabeth Gaskell novels are always something of a time commitment – although not as much so as, say, George Eliot.  August will probably be “light” for the same reason.  But it was a good month of reading, even if not a particularly packed one.  I enjoyed everything I picked up and it was a nice change to just follow my bliss, so to speak, and just read whatever happened to be calling to me in the moment.  I’ll definitely continue that trend into August, I think.

How was your July in books?