June 2023 Reads!

Another pretty light month on the book front! Must have been another podcast heavy one.

In case you missed it...

January 2023 Reads February 2023 Reads
March 2023 Reads
April 2023 Reads
May 2023 Reads
Reads from previous years

(44) 🛹🪐 The Memory Index by Julian Ray Vaca (384 pages, 2022). Audiobook. In an alternative 1987, a global disease begins destroying human memory. While there's no cure, the lucky ones can create "artificial recall" via a daily treatment. Others, like Freya--the "degens"--need the treatment several times a day. Desperate to make sense of her father's mysterious and violent death, she makes a poor decision that gets her invited to a special school trialing a new technology that claims to make artificial recall obsolete. But questions abound--why is Freya the only degen in the trial? Why are students starting to vanish? And what is the school dean doing in a bunker in the woods behind the school? This book was weird and dark and kind of overly dramatic. There's a sequel but I keep feeling...not really that compelled to read it.

(45) ✨🎭Bunny by Mona Awad (320 pages, 2019). Audiobook. Mona Awad really is a genre all her own. At least, if there are others out there writing with a similar vibe–deeply haunted & jaded protags; irreverent, absurd, yet desperate humor; absolutely *wild* speculative fiction angles–I have not run into them. I loved All’s Well in 2022 and this one was also great. Loner Samantha feels wildly out of place in her high-end MFA fiction program and is utterly repulsed by the rest of her cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and seem to move and speak as one. But one day the Bunnies seem to have decided they like Samantha and invite her to join their ritualistic, extracurricular “Workshop”. As Samantha falls deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ world and gradually abandons her only real friend, it becomes clear that something’s got to give, and it might end up being Samantha’s sanity.

(46) 🔍🗡️A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham (358 pages, 2022). Audiobook. This was one of the more intriguing, can’t-put-it-down mystery crime thrillers I’ve read in a while. Excellent storytelling, and so many layers! Twenty years ago, Chloe’s father confessed to killing six teenage girls and went to jail for life, which (of course) completely destroyed Chloe’s family and understanding of the world. Now, just as Chloe has attained some semblance of happiness and stability, similar disappearances begin to occur–even though her father is still in prison. Chloe soon finds herself digging into her family’s past in order to figure out who is responsible for the disappearances and how, in spite of what the staggering cost might turn out to be.

(46.5) Leave No Trace by Mindy Mejia (352 pages, 2018). Audiobook. A boy who disappeared into the Minnesota wilderness with his father, with both presumed dead, reappears. Violent and uncommunicative, he is sent to a psychiatric facility where language therapist Maya stark is charged with connecting with the unusual patient and making sense of what's happened to him. Alas I just had to give this one up. I got about fifty pages in and by then was so bored and desperate for something to happen and so uninterested in the characters that I couldn’t go on.

(47) 🧨🔍🗡️Strike Me Down by Mindy Mejía (352 pages, 2020). Audiobook. Forensic accountant Nora Trier is hired by feminist martial arts empire Strike, owned by legendary kickboxer Logan Russo and her marketing genius husband, Gregg Abbott. The company is about to host a major tournament when the twenty million dollar prize pot is discovered missing. But twist! Nora has a secret connection to Strike that makes her wonder if she should take the case. Not high literature but a fun & engrossing read, and I definitely did not see the ending coming.

(48) 🎭🔍🗡️Everything You Want Me To Be by Mindy Mejia (352 pages, 2017). Audiobook. Oof this book was d-a-r-k DARK! Tragedy strikes a small-town community when 18-year-old Hattie Hoffman, theater star dreaming of bigger things, is found brutally stabbed to death. Was it the besotted, semi-obsessed boyfriend? The mysterious secret online paramour? Or was daredevil Hattie simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? The book cuts back and forth between the murder investigation and the previous year of Hattie's life leading up to her murder. This was a nuanced, well-written, multi-layered, mult-faceted story, but it also left me feeling kind of sick after.

(49) 🧨🔎🔪I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh (371 pages, 2014). Audiobook. Jenna Gray moves to a ramshackle cottage on the remote Welsh coast to escape the last few years of her trauma-filled life, including losing a child in a horrific hit-and-run. Little by little, she begins to rebuild her shattered life. Simultaneously, we get the story of two police officers investigating the hit-and-run. Not the greatest I've read in this genre but plenty of twists & turns that kept my attention and an ending I didn't see coming.

(50) 🎭👯Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (390 pages, 2022). Paper book. In the early 1960s, chemist Elizabeth Zott falls in love with Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, highly lauded scientist she works with. But when Calvin died in a freak accident, Elizabeth is left scraping by as an unemployed single mother--until she somehow lands herself a TV cooking show. While women seem to adore her chemistry-focused show, it seems to make a lot of men--including her boss--extremely uncomfortable. It's against this backdrop that Elizabeth's odd little daughter begins investigating her father's past with the help of an avuncular priest. I have to say, if you're a woman, there are times reading this book will make smoke shoot out of your ears from identifying some of what Elizabeth faces. I found it by turns hilarious and extremely dark, and appreciated the comic moments because I'm not sure I would have gotten through it otherwise.