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June 2025 Reading Roundup

Kristen Hall-Geisler

• 4 min read
June 2025 Reading Roundup

I planned to write this post yesterday, but I tripped over a tree root during my hike with the dog yesterday and scraped my knee and tore a tiny hole in my favorite multipocket tights (from Janji, FYI) and I was miserable about it (just ask my friends, who got to read all my whiny texts). So I was not in any kind of headspace to put together coherent sentences about what I read last month. I mean, what does it even matter when I fell and the world is burning and cruel?

Thanks to the modern miracles of bandages, antibacterial ointment, ice, and a hard cider that tastes like a Rocket Pop, I'm feeling better now. I can not only string together words again, but I am back to believing what we read matters a lot In These Times, even when the world is burning and cruel. Keep reading books, keep buying or borrowing books, keep talking about books.

But maybe not The Mobius Book by Catherine Lacey. This double novel has been well reviewed by a lot of very smart people who know literature when they see it, so you might like it. I did not. There are two works in this book, one fiction and one autofiction. I liked the autofiction novel better, though its narrative of two married writers splitting up felt very insular to me, and not in an interesting way. The fiction narrative just made no sense to me at all. The protagonist sees blood seeping under her neighbor's door on Christmas, and doesn't knock, call 911, ask her other neighbors for help, or anything. Late in the story she's taken in for questioning, seemingly as a suspect though the situation in the neighbor's apartment is pretty clear. She's kept late into the night, and when she starts to explain her theories of love near dawn, the cop questioning her is like, "Let's see where this goes." That seemed beyond implausible to me.

I led a discussion of Ulysses by James Joyce at a local bookshop, and the owner of the shop generously gave me the galley of Ellmann's Joyce by Zachary Leader. I haven't read Ellmann's biography of Joyce in a thousand years, but this biography of its author and the creation of the book scratched two itches for me. First, it was enough of a reminder of Joyce's biography that I was quickly back up to speed for the discussion. Second, I'm working on a biography of Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century text, so a biography of a book is helpful for my research. If you're a Joycean, this book is well written and moves along pretty quickly. If you're a biographer, there's tons of great information about how Ellmann conceived of this book and how he researched it over several years.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams is benefiting from a Streisand effect. When she left Facebook in 2017, Wynn-Williams was under an NDA. Later, California struck down NDAs like the one that kept her from sharing her experience at the company. So she wrote this book, and it came out this spring. It is scathing, and if you are at all on the fence about Facebook and Meta, this will have you running to delete your accounts. Unsurprisingly, Meta is not happy about this book, but it couldn't stop its publication. It could, however, keep Wynn-Williams from doing any publicity for it—no book tour, no podcast interviews. The news about her inability became its own kind of publicity, and I put a hold on the audiobook at my library. This is the best kind of insider info, and Wynn-Williams is a good narrator.

I read The Idiot by Elif Batuman a few years ago and loved it. It must have been an ebook from the library, because I didn't have a copy on my shelf. I rectified that mistake and started rereading, and I picked up Either/Or too, which I'm in the middle of right now. If you like books about socially awkward kids in their freshman year at Harvard and authors who can write sentences that are both devastating and funny, Batuman will not disappoint.

Okay, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa and translated by Polly Barton is truly not for everyone, but if it is for you, it is very much for you. This novella centers on a wealthy disabled woman, Shaka, who lives in an assisted living facility that she owns. To pass the time, she writes porn and donates her pay to charities. Like the author, Shaka has myotubular myopathy, which causes severe muscular degeneration that affects even her ability to breathe. If you are looking for typical feel-good, inspirational, triumphant disability writing, you will not find it in this novella. You will find Nietzsche, David Lynch, the uses of different kinds of power, the uses of different kinds of bodies, and an ending that I still think about.

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KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle, and Volume 3: Luck, are available now.