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, 2022.

The Book Lover’s Bucket List: A Tour of Great British Literature, by Caroline Taggart – When I was just getting into reading books for adults, as a junior high school student, and also developing a yen for traveling, I happened upon a book called A Reader’s Guide to Writer’s Britain, and devoured it. So when I spotted The Book Lover’s Bucket List among the new publications being brought out by the British Library, I immediately pre-ordered it expecting pretty much the same reading experience – and that’s exactly what I got. Taggart takes readers on a tour of the different regions of England, as well as Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. I appreciated that she featured both classic writers like Shakespeare and Austen, but also modern writers who will doubtless be classic someday, like Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. My reading list and my travel list expanded duly.

A Poem for Every Spring Day, ed. Allie Esiri – Once again, I got hopelessly behind on Esiri’s seasonal poetry collections – trying to read one poem in the morning and one at night every day is a lovely practice but doesn’t seem to be working in my current stage of life. So once again, as with A Poem for Every Winter Day, I found myself sprinting to the finish line. But it’s okay, because I enjoyed the selections very much.

Mariana, by Monica Dickens – A few years ago, in a fit of honesty, I told a friend that “I don’t really want to read Dickens, but I want to be a person who has read Dickens.” That’s still pretty accurate, but if Charles Dickens’ great-niece Monica Dickens counts, then I definitely want to read Dickens. Mariana is a captivating, readable, and thoroughly enjoyable story of a young girl growing up in 1930s England. The reader follows Mary through childhood holidays with her late father’s family in the country, to school – where she meets and befriends the irrepressible Angela but has an otherwise crummy experience – to a short-lived, ill-advised, and spectacularly ill-fated attempt at drama school – to a similarly ill-fated romance in Paris – and finally to her meeting and falling in love with her soulmate. I couldn’t put it down.

A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf – Cross this one off the list of “I’ve been meaning to read this for years.” A Room of One’s Own is Virginia Woolf’s long essay, adapted from a series of lectures she gave on women and fiction, in which she arrives at her famous conclusion: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. I know Virginia Woolf was a snob and not very pleasant to her domestic staff, but I didn’t find her exactly unsympathetic to the plight of working women throughout history, as I’d expected to. Rather, she laments that there could have been untold numbers of geniuses at the Shakespeare level (she even invents a sister for the Bard, “Judith Shakespeare,” and endows her with a better brain than her illustrious brother Will) but because women have been downtrodden and overwhelmed with childbearing, raising families, and just trying to keep everyone alive through the centuries, they have been cheated out of countless opportunities. I expect she is right about that. This was a good, interesting read.

Rhododendron Pie, by Margery Sharp – Sharp’s first novel has been something of a white whale for the bookish blogosphere – out of print and very difficult and expensive to get hold of – until Dean Street Press brought it out recently. (A common story. My shelves contain so many forgotten classics bought very affordably now. Thank you, Dean Street Press!) The Laventies are a haughty, intellectual family – mostly. Father Richard is into trendy interior design. Eldest sister Elizabeth is an inscrutable genius essayist. Brother Dick is an avante garde sculptor. And then there’s Mother, who hides away in her room, and sister Ann, who likes jigsaw puzzles, walking over the Downs, and going on picnics with the very run-of-the-mill neighbors. Ann is proud of her intellectual family… but also wants a more ordinary life for herself – setting herself up for a clash of values with her snobby intelligentsia relatives. I enjoyed this so much!

That’s a wrap on June – not much of a total for you, I’m afraid. Partly, that’s the result of a lot of doomscrolling this month; I’m working on that. And partly, it’s because of my decision midway through the month to start reading a lengthy Charlotte Bronte novel contained in an omnibus tome. I’ve transferred that over to my kindle and am nearly done, so I’m expecting more of a haul in July. But in the meantime, I may have only read a handful of books in June, but those books I did read were universally delightful. “Mariana” was the runaway highlight, but I really loved everything I read this month.

What were your reading highlights in June?