June Reads
With July coming to a close, I’d like to tell you about the books I read in June.
I didn't mean to spend my summer reading about grief, but the two books I read in June happen to follow grieving protagonists. Not to spoil July’s reading list, but the theme continues.
Pure Color - Sheila Heti
When I picked up Pure Color by Sheila Heti after submitting my thesis, I was completely judging the book by its cover. I wanted to quiet the passages of A Midsummer Night's Dream still ringing in my ears, and a book with a beautiful green cover seemed like it would do the trick. I felt calmer just looking at it.
Pure Color follows a young woman processing the death of her father who finds herself existing inside a leaf. Yes, a leaf. By exploring what grief looks like from above the world, when you're not just in a tree but part of a tree, Heti masterfully captures grief in its many unique forms.
The narrator's story is revealed both in the leaf and in snippets of relationships, memories of a time before the leaf. This novel is a masterclass in what my former film professor would call "slices of life." We carry these little slices of our lives with us as we grieve, reinventing, reinterpreting, reliving what it means to have been so loved and to have loved so strongly.
If you've ever lost someone, loved someone, missed someone, or really felt any emotions at all toward another person, this is a must-read.
The Seven Year Slip - Ashley Poston
I ended June with an "easy" read. While I didn't love this book, I did read the entire thing in about two days, staying up until 3 AM to finish it, and that has to say something.
The Seven Year slip follows a young publicist at a publishing firm who is, you guessed it, grieving. But she's also falling in love with a man whose name is impossible to announce unless you're fluent in Welsh. And don't worry! He has a southern drawl, some tattoos, and a passion for cooking. The best part? They both live in the same time travelling apartment. Does that make sense? No? Yeah, I didn't really get it either. But again, I must emphasize the rate at which I devoured this book. Surely that means it was good.
Although it was an easy read with a happy ending, I do think Ashley Poston could have gone deeper into the protagonist's grief journey. Unfortunately it was hard to relate to the protagonist’s grieving in a genuine way.
My only big complaint is that this book is absolutely riddled with typos, to the extent that some sentences were hard to comprehend. If you're going to write a book about working in publishing, I recommend checking for typos more than the average bear might.
With all that being said, if you want an easy summer romance, this may very well be the book for you. It kept me super entertained, and I had to use almost no brain power. (That's not a bad thing! In fact, I needed an intellectual break after the famed thesis that I won't shut up about.)
