Volume 4, No. 26: 30 Days of Water & The Words that Always Hold Me

June Reading Reflections

Greetings, book and treat people! Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s subscribed in the last week. You can do that here. You can also pledge to subscribe, if that works better for you. I’m still pretty far away from my goal, but you know what? Anything’s possible!

Since my June reading reflections are basically a love letter to Mary Oliver, I want to first mention a few of the best books I read in June that were not Mary Oliver books. I highly recommend all of these gems:

She Tried Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks by M. NourbeSe Philip (poetry); Cinema Love by Jiaming Tang (historical/contemporary queer fiction); Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle (essays on poetry); Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant by Curtis Chin (memoir); Still Life by Katherine Packert Burke (contemporary trans fiction); Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn (biography); The Address Book by Deidre Mask (nonfiction); and The Butterfly’s Burden by Mahmoud Darwish (poetry).

Now we can get back to one of my two reading loves of 2024 (the other one, obviously, is Martyr!).

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I love doing these monthly reading reflections. At first I followed the same pattern every month, but now I’m trying something new each time. June was a weird month. It’s the beginning of summer, which is always a hard time for me. I can feel my body start to shut down and my energy begin to leak away. Outside my little corner of the world, there is my government, funding genocide in Gaza. There are millions of people suffering in Sudan. The paragraphs go on and on. None of it is ever very far away from me. In June I went to a protest. I donated some money to families in Gaza who are trying to live. I baked a strawberry cake. There were days when I did not want to get up and face the sun. I read some beautiful books. My living, the dailiness of it, feels so dissonant, so resonant.