July Book Recommendations
By Nina Romontio-Bodenhamer
Many of us read to understand the world, to make sense of our families, our communities, politics, and identity. This desire has an equal and opposite side—looking inward, which helps us explore our own experiences and inner lives and is an essential part of the total experience.
Reading is so much more than words, more than an occasional escape from our hurried lives (although that’s not a bad reason to pick up a book)—it’s how we learn to feel, understand, and connect with the world around us.
With that in mind, these three books are recommended to help us look at ourselves as we try to understand the world we live in today. Each book poses different questions, and together they offer a thoughtful pathway to finding our place in the world.
1. Greyhound by Joanna Pecock
Greyhound by Joanna Pecock offers a thoughtful look at culture and current events. She mixes memoir, reporting, and environmental writing to give readers an honest reflection of society.
In Greyhound, Pecock shows how these places have changed, thinks about how her own identity has changed, and explores what “place” really means.
Pecock looks at what the Greyhound bus service means in a world that is becoming more digital and, as a result, more isolated. Sometimes, passengers can’t board because they lost the phone with their ticket. She notices that “every payphone in every Greyhound station has now been ripped from the walls.” The amount of despair she sees starts to outweigh her original reasons for taking this 2023 trip. “In retrospect,” she writes, “I was so shocked by the state of the people among whom I was traveling that any search I thought I was undertaking was subsumed by the existence of so much suffering around me.” Her personal grief from 2006 is overshadowed by the losses she witnesses in 2023, as she meets more “people who seemed shocked into silent desperation than I had ever seen in my life.”
She sees a shortage of drivers, empty stations, missing bus stops, long delays, and a system barely held together by outdated rules. On her trip from Tulsa to Amarillo, she overhears “two Greyhound drivers talking shop” and learns that even the workers are frustrated with how bad things have become. For her, the only comfort left is the Greyhound bus itself, even though everything around it is falling apart.
2. The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa is a beautifully written dystopian novel set on an unnamed island where objects, and later even ideas, mysteriously vanish. The Memory Police make sure everyone forgets what has disappeared.
The book is a hauntingly provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss.
Objects start to disappear: first hats, then ribbons, birds, and roses. What begins as unsettling soon turns much more serious. Most people on the island don’t notice these changes, but the few who remember what’s gone live in fear of the strict Memory Police, who ensure the lost things stay forgotten.
A young woman trying to keep her job as a novelist finds out her editor is at risk from the Memory Police. She decides to hide him under her floorboards. As fear and loss grow, they hold on to her writing as their last way to keep the past alive. Ogawa shows that remembering can be both rebellious and risky.
The Memory Police is a stunning reflection on the times in which we live. “I had no intention of depicting a near-future setting as a political statement it was meant to be more like the past, before I was born. But then when I reread the book for the first time in ages, I was shocked that I included a tsunami, and it’s frightening to think that rather than getting further away from the world I created in the book, contemporary readers are connecting it with the near future,” writes author Yoko Ogawa. The book was originally published in Japanese in 1994, the English translation by Stephen Snyder gained significant attention and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020.
3. Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is a new, sharp satire about the tradwife lifestyle, toxic social media, lies, politics, and narcissism. It’s a lively novel that is both darkly funny and unsettling.
The hypocrisy to her posted lifestyle is clear: she uses modern kitchen gadgets, her husband doesn’t know how to run a farm, and her children don’t want to be part of her social media scheme. Still, the story is a reminder that what we see online rarely matches the real lives of influencers.
Her online followers don’t know about the nannies and other modern shortcuts that keep the farm and family going. They also don’t realize Natalie’s husband is gentle and maybe not very sharp. Most of all, they don’t see that Natalie is far from the “flawless Christian woman” she pretends to be online. It’s all for Instagram. But when the young producer she hires to grow her audience reveals the gap between her online and real self, Natalie’s perfect image unravels, as her dream life turns into a nightmare.
Natalie wakes up in a harsh, early-19th-century version of Yesteryear. She finds children she doesn’t know, though they claim to be hers, and a husband who looks like hers but acts differently. Time passes in a blur—“Was it a day, a week, a month?” Readers are left to guess how Natalie ended up there: is it a prank, a reality show, or time travel?
The book brings to life a familiar idea of a wife—the tradwife—who runs the house, has children, does as she’s told, and asks for nothing in return. But what does a woman gain from this role, and what does it take from her? Burke has created a character who is sharp, self-centered, sometimes uncaring, yet strangely relatable, as she explores these questions.
The big conclusions that Yesteryear reaches are not earth-shattering. They are, arguably, what people have been writing novels about since the invention of the novel. But it is the vehicle that adds something wickedly entertaining to this age-old conversation.