June 2023 Reading

Every year I forget:  summer is not a time when I get stuff done.  I just don’t.  Reading is no exception.  I read four books in June.

One of those books was a picture book.  It’s called Strong by Rob Kearney and Eric Rosswood.  It is an autobiographical picture book about the only openly gay professional strongman in the world (according to the book flap copy).  Rob, despite his obvious strength, felt he needed to hide himself in dark and subdued clothes for competing.  In the story, he learns that to be truly strong, he also needs to show his true, bright, colors.  It’s a very sweet book and I love it.  I mean, what’s not to like about a book about someone who loves weights and wants to be himself?

 

I read two nonfiction books.  One of them was left over from my year of butterflies.  Johannes Goedaert wrote Of Insects in the seventeenth century, and it was translated into English in 1682.  The editor of the English edition is pleasantly snarky about Goedaert’s over-reliance on his art and his laziness in describing the colors of the various insects he observed.  Much of the book is about butterflies, but there are also descriptions of the lifecycles of various flies, grasshoppers, and the like.  There are occasional places where Goedaert lapses into the error of spontaneous generation and he doesn’t fully understand the way parasites that lay eggs in caterpillars work, but it was an interesting read nonetheless.  I’m glad I read it, but wouldn’t exactly recommend it.

 

The other nonfiction book has been on my shelf even longer.  Yoga:  The Art of Transformation edited by Debra Diamond is a fancy, coffee-table-style book that looks at various pieces of art depicting yoga or yogic practices.  The pictures, not surprisingly, are fabulous.  The text is informative, portraying the complicated history of yoga as it has been interpreted through time.  I liked it, but did not find it to be a serious page-turner.

 

Finally, I read one fiction book.  I don’t always love Neal Stephenson’s books, but I do always find them thought-provoking.  Termination Shock is both a book I very much enjoyed and one that made me think.  The opening sequence made me laugh out loud.  A novel about climate change seems like a hard project, but likeable characters and compelling events do the trick to make it hard to put down.  (Brent is currently reading it and liking it, too, and we don’t always enjoy the same books; it speaks to the appeal that two such divergent readers are both liking it.).  Highly recommend.

 

June total:  4 books

Summer total to date:  4 books

Year to date total:  47 books