June Reads and Favorites: 2024
Yes, I am still reading. Yes, I am still posting articles. No, you can never escape. The good news is that last month I found some amazing books.
I am not sure in what world I am still managing to chew through books at this rate, but here we are. Some of these are so short that I feel guilty including them as books. The Yellow Wall-Paper, for example, is a great story, but is it an actual book or a short story?
Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne
The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Keep Moving: And Other Truths About Living Well Longer by Dick Van Dyke
The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
The Necrophiliac by Gabrielle Wittkop
When She Returned by Lucinda Berry
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven Peck
Hazardous Lies by Stephen Wallace
Stoner by John Williams
Home is Where the Bodies Are by Jeneva Rose
Penpal by Dathan Auerbach
Hey, You’ll Not Hate These
Devoting an entire podcast episode to Jacqueline Harmpan’s beautifully dark dystopian novel should be enough to convince anyone it is worth reading. Given that I talked enough about this one in the episode, I will spare you any repeated details except to say this dystopian story surprised me and became a favorite.
When She Returned
Lucinda Berry is a talented author. One thing she cannot do, however, is write a bad book. There are few authors I have read where they are consistently this good across their entire body of work. Lucinda Berry could write the back of a cereal box and I would read it.
When She Returned is about a woman who goes missing and then eleven years later, mysteriously appears at a gas station in another state, screaming, and holding an infant. Knowing Berry’s work, coupled with that plotline, I dove right in. It’s getting to the point where I see Berry’s name on the book and I don’t even question it. Buy it. Read it. Love it. However, as with all of her books, you have to be prepared for an ending that may crush you, you may not expect, and one that will stay with you well beyond finishing the book.
A Short Stay In Hell
I wish I knew where I first heard about this book so that I could find the person and thank them. A Short Stay In Hell by Steven Peck is a wild ride packed into a little over one hundred pages.
I am most certainly dating myself when I reference the 1991 film Defending Your Life, however, this book reminded me of that in the way that it begins. The main character finds himself in hell. But not the hell that is often described to us in our childhood, that of flames, evil, and devils abound. This one, oddly enough, is far more terrifying and hopeless.
“I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.”
The further you read, the further into despair you go. But the despair is unlike anything you are prepared for.
Penpal
I have had this book sitting on my shelf for so long that I nearly forgot about it. It wasn’t until some grumpy reader in a Facebook group posted a photo of it, ripping it to shreds as a terrible story, that I remembered it and thought that would be the best time to pick it back up.
Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal quickly became a new favorite of mine. The story centers around a man putting together the puzzle of all of the strange and terrible things that happened to him during his childhood. As you move toward the end, you discover all of these incidents are related and it makes the overall story even more dark and sinister.
Few books have tapped into my childhood like this one. No, I am not saying that anything terrible happened to me like it did to the main character of the book. What I am saying is that I could easily see myself in many of these situations as a kid. For example, the book describes a young boy exploring the woods near his home. The depictions here reminded me of my childhood. At the end of the street in front of our home, the paved street ended and the woods began. Though later cleared to make room for a neighborhood development, for a while, there were woods. I did not know where they ended, just that they were there. Being young, they felt as if they could have gone on forever. When Auerbach wrote “How far can you go into the woods?” that triggered something in me that instantly took me back to being a kid, exploring the woods with excitement and fear.
This was a truly haunting read. People that have rated this low probably think Keeping Up With The Kardashians is a fantastic show because there is really no other way to explain it. It has been a long time since a book made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Penpal is a fantastically dark story.