June 2026 Reads

In June, I settled pretty solidly into Summer Reading Mode--lots of fun books, little that's too serious. 

Fiction
Once again, I started the month with the next installment in Elizabeth Peters's Vicky Bliss series, Silhouette in Scarlet, a caper-style thriller that takes place in Sweden and features the inimitable John, the handsome international art and jewelry thief. Perfect hammock read.

I picked up Elly Griffiths's A Dying Fall at the used bookstore, and it comes somewhere in the middle of the Ruth Galloway series. I enjoyed it--always love an archaeological element to a mystery--and will no doubt be starting the series from the beginning.

I found a copy of Nevada Barr's The Rope in a Little Free Library in Denver, while on vacation, and since the book I'd brought with me was a dud, I switched over to this one. I used to be a loyal reader of Barr's Anna Pigeon mysteries (which take place in different national parks), but then her villains got more psychotic and the murders got more gruesome, so I gave them up, many years ago. The Rope is not a recent book, but it came in pretty far into the series but serves as a prequel, or origin story for Anna's finding herself in the employ of the National Park Service after a traumatic life event and being forced into discovering her own badassery. And while the villain was indeed unwell, it was not too psychotic for my taste.

One of the book reviews that got eaten by my computer last month was of Deanna Raybourn's A Sinister Revenge, a Veronica Speedwell mystery that I also picked up used and that also falls somewhere in the middle of the series. I loved it, of course (I mean, Victorian lady naturalist?!?! All my favorite things) and sent off for the first several in the series. A Curious Beginning is the first, and it's a very fun romp through Victorian London and the English countryside with side tracks through the circus and the royal family. Veronica has a little bit of an Amelia Peabody vibe, but she's bit racier. Very fun and I look forward to racing through the whole series, butterfly net in hand.

Nonfiction
When I was in Pittsburgh in April, I visited a small local bookstore (on what happened to be National Independent Bookstore Day, and man that place was crowded!) and picked up a couple of volumes by local authors, including the memoir-in-essays Homing Instincts of a Rust Belt Feminist by Sherry Flick. Flick grew up in a manufacturing community outside of Pittsburgh and witnessed the collapse of the economy in the 80s, then went to college in New Hampshire, traveled around the country, living at times in Sand Francisco and Nebraska, before returning to Pittsburgh. I enjoyed Flick's stories about all these different experiences, and as a fellow Gen-X-er who moved from a completely different kind of working class community to New England (but, sadly, not back again), I found her perspective both novel and relatable. However, her *aggressive* use of the present tense was really distracting. As an editor, I ask my clients about intentionality a lot, and I really want to know what went into her decision to eschew past tense, even when three or four timelines are threading through a single essay.

I say Richard Blanco (inaugural poet for Obama's first term) read at a poetry festival recently, and it reminded me that I had Blanco's memoir The Prince of Los Cocuyos hanging around in my TBR pile and picked it up and flew threw it. The book covers Blanco's childhood, growing up in Miami as a child of Cuban immigrant parents (he was born in Spain, mid-migration, and thus felt somewhat placeless). The primary conflict in the book is between young Ricardo, who hates baseball and wants to do "girly" things like paint his nails or make a needle-punch tiger (for which he bikes five miles to the craft store), and his grandmother who is afraid of what his preferences will mean about his sexuality, and bullies him into acting more like her version of how a boy should act. Amid this heartbreaking tug-of-war, Blanco relates some really funny stories, like the time he tried to create a traditional American-style Thanksgiving and everyone ended up indisposed from the undercooked turkey.

I've been getting back into writing about hiking and other adventures, and so I picked up The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher (by Colin Fletcher), which has been on my shelf for a while, unread. Fletcher (author of The Man who Walked through Time) has a wonderful way with words and description of the natural world, and some of the essays were masterful. In one, however, near the end, he spends a lot of time contemplating man's depredations on nature, which leads him meditating on population control, which bumps right up against (as it inevitably does) eugenics, his version being that certain diseases would do the work of wiping out a portion of the human race. This was kind of a bummer, but not wholly surprising in a man of his generation (and actually pretty mild compared to the outright eugenicist practices and goals of our current administration and the techbro corporate overlords).

Finally, C and went to see a theatrical performance of Grandma Gatewood's Walk in May, and it was really wonderfully done. C was inspired to read the book by Ben Montgomery, and after he finished, I reread it after many years. It's the truly inspiring and incredible story of a woman who overcame an extreme amount of hardship and suffering, and taking charge of her own destiny, setting off on the first of several Appalachian Trail through-hikes in her 60s.

What have you been reading lately?