July 2023 Reading

We made it through July!  Summer reading continues to be slower than I’d like, but I did finish five books, two nonfiction and three fiction.

Nonfiction first.  America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America by Jim Wallis is a great book.  I had read excerpts from it with a group of people at church and wanted to read the whole thing.  It outlines, for people of faith in particular (although other people may also be interested), why we have a moral obligation to dismantle the structures and practices of racism.  The history many of us learned in school was the history of colonizers and conquerors, leaving out the bits about genocide and cultural and literal imperialism.  And racism is continuing today, not just in rednecks who wave Confederate flags, but in the persistent results of biased systems that have deprived people of color of wealth, safety, and often their very lives.  I will be writing more about this book in the coming weeks, so I won’t go into huge detail right now, but let me just strongly suggest:  read it.

 

I continue to work my way through all of Ursula K. Le Guin’s books.  This month I read Words Are My Matter, which is a collection of her nonfiction work, including essays, transcripts of talks, and book reviews.  Her ideas are always interesting and her prose is lovely.  Check it out.

 

On to fiction.  I have enjoyed Naomi Novik’s work for a long time now—I remember reading the Temeraire books out loud with T. back when we still read together regularly.  This month, I read a more recent trilogy of hers, including A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves.  Ultimately, I liked them.  It took a while, though, because the protagonist is really irritating.  As the stories unfold, we learn more about her and we understand why she is so difficult, but she is really hard to like for a good long while.  The world of the books is unusual and interesting.  I like how magic works in it.  Perhaps because of the other reading I’ve been doing, I found the themes particularly compelling.  What happens when a system is founded on something terrible?  What is the cost?  How do haves and have-nots survive?  I won’t go plot-spoilery here, but those questions permeate the action.

 

July total:  5

Summer total to date:  9

Year to date total:  52