#38: July in books

New releases, what I've read recently & what I'm reading next

Welcome to Shelf Dispatch, a monthly report on my reading life. If you opened this in your inbox, I highly recommend reading it here instead :)

🐍 Out there

On My Radar: New books coming out this month

🐍 On my shelves

What I Read Last Month: Everything I read last month, reviewed

On My TBR: Books I’m hoping to read this month

On My Radar

Books coming out in July

July is about to be an absolute treat if you love a pretty cover and an enticing blurb as much as I do. Consider, for instance, Famous Men, which follows Will Miles as she leaves her small town for New York City to find out whether a famous poet is the father she never met. A gripping read “about ambition, parents and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes”, it sounds like a foolproof beach pick if you’re looking for a vivid exploration of sex, money, power, and art.

Unfolding across 24 hours, Natural Disaster tells the story of a mother determined to spend one last, perfect day with her children before she returns to work after maternity leave. What’s the worst that can happen? Early reviews say this is chaotic, tender, and laugh out loud funny, which is exactly what I’m in the mood for at the moment. (I am slightly cheating here because this specific edition of Natural Disaster actually came out last month; I first came across the other edition, coming out in July, but I liked the June cover so much I had to share it instead.)

Giving “do it for the plot” a whole new meaning, The Obsessed is a coming-of-age debut about a young woman who decides to map the love plot of her favorite novel onto her life and finds herself flailing when she gets into a relationship with a fellow literary obsessive. Readers are saying it reminds them of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, which I adored and will forever insist is a perfect summer read. Added to TBR!

In With Friends Like You, a broke young Manhattan mom becomes fixated on finding her vanished college roommate and tumbles from new-mom message boards into a world of porn, secrets, and a high-end escort service for global billionaires… If this is half as juicy as it sounds, I am sold.

If you’re into murderous old money families of the fictional kind, first of all, same, and secondly, you might want to check out The Mortons. This homicidal dynasty sends their progeny to a college where legacy kids strategically intermingle with ordinary students from wealthy families, and now it’s time for A grade student Jessica Morton to commit her first kill. I love that Charlotte McConaghy called this “slippery”; I could use a slippery read.

Speaking of death, I’ll say I don’t care about romantasy books until I’m blue in the face, but throw a vampire romance my way and it’s an entirely different story (I believe this to be the case with most Twilight-era tweens; you had to be there). Die for Me follows a doctor who finds herself falling for an alluring, much-younger man with a deadly secret, and it is said to be a “stay-up-all-night, smart, spicy romance” sizzling with suspense. Doesn’t this sound delicious? And the cover?! Us Twilight tweens had to make do with a pair of pale arms and an oversaturated apple.

What I Read Last Month

A quick roundup of June in books

🎧 Chain-Gang All-Stars: I went through a massive reading slump in June, and I blame half of it on the fact that I’ve been dealing with health issues for the better part of two months, and the other half on Chain-Gang All-Stars. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I dragged my feet through this and it ended up setting the tone for the rest of my reading month.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a multi-POV novel set in a dystopian world where, watched by millions, prisoners fight like gladiators for their freedom. This setting is, I believe, the novel’s biggest strength. From the technological advances (instead of physical handcuffs, prisoners are restrained by surgically implanted magnetic devices, for instance) to the endless ways in which big corporations involve themselves in, and profit off of, these livestreamed matches, Chain-Gang All-Stars introduces the reader to a world that feels solid and meticulously built, albeit not too different from our own. I consider myself a bit of a worldbuilding nerd, so as soon as I began listening to the audiobook I was, first and foremost, intrigued by the novel’s setting and the details that bring it to life.

These details are delivered through a panoply of POVs: we get to follow the prisoners, but also the executives developing the show, fans of the show, activists working to abolish the carceral system, reporters, family members of incarcerated people, among others. It’s a wide, thorough portrait of a complex, fatally flawed system, but it’s not often that a POV is repeated, especially in the first half of the book, which means new characters are being introduced all the time.

This is where I first struggled: almost as soon as I started the audiobook, I was overwhelmed by the amount of names and characters that kept popping up. Granted, I have terrible memory, and audiobooks make it harder for me to keep track of these things because I can’t as easily go back a few pages and check something. So for most of the book, I couldn’t really jump into the story with both feet because I was scrambling to remember who it was we were following, and whether they had appeared before.

This structure also made it difficult for me to figure out where the plot was going. Some books start with a clear prompt, but Chain-Gang All-Stars is in no rush when it comes to giving the reader an inciting incident. This doesn’t usually bother me, but because it takes so long to set the scene, it was only around the 30% mark that I began to understand who the main characters were and where they were headed. Before then, information was delivered painstakingly and to the detriment of the narrative itself, as well as at a cost to my emotional involvement as a reader. In other words, by the 30% mark I certainly knew enough about the world the novel is set in, but I was also already somewhat detached from the story and didn’t much care for the characters (whom I felt I knew only superficially) or the plot. Action did pick up eventually at the 60% mark, when the story finally zoomed in on a smaller group of characters, and after that I sped through the rest of the book.

In summary, I felt that Chain-Gang All-Stars had a lot of potential that was somewhat squashed by its need to share every single worldbuilding detail. It’s not that it had too much detail; it just lacked some focus on character development and action to carry the reader through those info-heavier parts. As a reader, I wanted that information to be more evenly spread throughout the narrative, and a clear, early indication of where the plot was heading. Because that didn’t happen, the characters often felt underdeveloped, I failed to feel personally invested in the story, and although the book’s message was delivered, it was done so in a way that felt, to me, perhaps lacking in subtlety, or too hammered in. I had a similar issue with Babel.

One can argue that this is a subject we can’t afford to be subtle about; I understand that, and it certainly seems to work for most readers, if the reviews are anything to go by. Personally, still, I wanted these characters and their individual stories to be put above the message, to be trusted to share the message on their own, and I wanted, as a reader, to be trusted to receive and understand that message too, and to explore the novel’s themes and come to my own conclusions more independently. This is a very particular preference of mine, however, and most people seem to have a different opinion, so don’t let this review deter you from giving Chain-Gang All-Stars a chance.

Some aspects I really appreciated about my experience with this novel, besides the worldbuilding, were the audiobook narrators—they were excellent!—and the combat scenes, which were gruesome, of course, but dynamic and suspenseful, especially the last one. You can also clearly tell that copious amounts of research were made in order to make this book happen, and I appreciated the footnotes with statistics about the experiences of incarcerated people in the US. I do wonder how different my experience would’ve been had I read a physical copy, so if you pick up Chain-Gang All-Stars, keep that in mind. If your memory is half as bad as mine, a physical copy will probably suit you best.

📚 We Have Always Lived in the Castle: I was desperate for something short and familiar after Chain-Gang All-Stars, so I picked up a new Shirley Jackson, which for the most part put me to rights and partially healed my reading slump. I read The Haunting of Hill House and Hangsaman last year and loved both, so I knew there was a good chance I’d enjoy this one too. And I did! It’s a dark fairytale of sorts, with a deliciously unreliable young protagonist and dialogue that feels like a fever dream. What’s real, what isn’t? When it comes to Shirley Jackson’s fiction, it doesn’t really matter.

Shirley Jackson has become a big reference for me as an aspiring author, and I always learn a lot about craft from her novels. She’s an absolute must-read if you love horror and suspense.

📚 Physical Copy / 🎧 Audiobook / 📱 E-reader / * ARC

On My TBR

The books I’m excited to (hopefully? No promises) read this month

📚 Cassandra at the Wedding: This is my book club’s July pick and it sounds right up my alley: a nerve-racked, miserable graduate student drives back to her family ranch and is hell-bent on sabotaging her twin sister’s wedding. I can already tell the discussion throughout the month will be elite. Join us on discord if you wanna!

🎧 Honey: This is one my most anticipated reads of the summer and I now have it on audio, so if you see me walking around Lisbon with me headphones on, I’m probably listening to Honey.

📚 Oathbound: I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive, but seeing as I’m hoping to read plot-driven, fast-paced books in July, the third instalment in the Legendborn Cycle would be the perfect choice for me. I loved the first two books; they’re pure YA fantasy fun and the main character is fantastic. Let me know if you have recommendations for similar series!

*📱 Ravenous: If I manage to finish Agnes Lives! soon, Ravenous will be my next e-reader pick. This debut novel follows a pregnant elder millennial whose livestreamed quest for momfluencer fame spirals into depravity, and will be out next month. The blurb kind of reminds me of Yesteryear, which is a good thing because I had a lot of fun reading that one too.

📚 Physical Copy / 🎧 Audiobook / 📱 E-reader / * ARC

A quick note on affiliate links

No affiliate links have been used above. However, if you want to support my work by using them, you can use my Libro.fm link for audiobooks and, if you’re purchasing books in Portugal, my WOOK affiliate link. Affiliate links are a way to support your favorite creatives, and the companies they choose to endorse, free of charge. Thank you!