June 2026 Reading Roundup (and some newsletter news)
I read a lot of books from the to-be-read pile for once. I'll try not to dislocate my shoulder while patting myself on the back for this.
But first, newsletter news! If you're a subscriber, you know that the Sawdust newsletter hits your email inbox every Monday. If you're not a subscriber, this is a diary of my little literary life, with notes about what I'm reading, writing, and editing in my backyard shed where I work. There are often animal cameos, both wild and domestic. Sawdust has been email-only for a couple of months, but I thought other people might like it. I'm not sure, though, that those off-the-cuff dispatches are quite ready for prime time (I barely even proofread them. You may have noticed), so I'm putting them online behind a paywall. Anyone who subscribes for free still gets Sawdust in their inboxes like usual, but after a week they'll be published on the Wingback Workshop website for paid subscribers only. These monthly reading roundups are still free for everyone all the time.
With that out of the way, on to my June reads!
You cannot go wrong in picking up a novel by Percival Everett. I've had Erasure on my TBR pile for ages and finally plucked it off the stack. It is hilarious and poignant, as you might expect if you're read anything by Everett. It's also far more about Thelonius "Monk" Ellison's relationships with his family members than it is about exploiting one's trauma, real or imagined, for the publishing market. I think the movie American Fiction, which was based on the novel and which Everett had a hand in writing, focuses more on the publishing angle (I haven't seen it). The novel examines the dynamics between siblings and parents as kids and the adults they become through the eyes of the most singular sibling. And there's a novel within a novel, which I do enjoy. https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9781555975999
The Written World and the Unwritten World by Italo Calvino has been lingering on the TBR pile even longer than Erasure. I like Calvino, I like the Oulipo movement, and I especially liked Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium on the future of literature. And yet I found this collection of essays uneven. Some of them were worth annotating with my trusty pencil, while others I skimmed. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780544146990, https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780544146679
I was tired of listening to podcasts, so I borrowed the audiobook of Ronnie Spector's memoir Be My Baby from the library. I was delighted to learn it was read by actor Rosie Perez, which was the perfect choice. Readers of Sawdust know that I do have a soft sport for the rock memoir, and this is one of the better ones. Bonus points for the epilogues that detail how she got paid the royalties owed to her by the dastardly (and eventually murderous) Phil Spector. https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9781250837189
Last year, I watched a documentary about the painter Hilma af Klint and became mildly obsessed with her work. I ordered this biography of her and it, too, sat on the TBR pile for a while before I got around to it. Klint was long assumed to be some kind of recluse who didn't want her work shown, but Julia Voss has the (hard to find!) receipts that show Klint was well-traveled in Europe, showed her work in a few places, and tried very hard to get it accepted elsewhere. She is also arguably the first abstract artist. It's a real masterclass in not accepting the standard history, especially when it comes to women, the LGBTQ+ community, and really anyone on the margins. https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780226689760
I don't remember how I even found out about In Love with the World by Yongey Mingur Rinpoche. Maybe Kobo thought I would like it? Probably. In any case, I borrowed it on a whim from the library, and it was fine. He absconded from his monastery at midnight to go on a wandering retreat, and he shares lessons from his first days on his own for the first time in his life, really, and he was in his thirties. It's interesting to see how his years of intense Buddhist training serve him when he has given up everything he knows, including his monastic robes. I was hoping it would describe more of his external realities and less of his inner, spiritual lessons. Not every book is for me. No problem. https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780525512547
Another TBR pick! This might be a record. I chose Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett from the pile because it was short and different. I'd also heard that Bennett wrote about weirdos, and as this list shows, I do like a weirdo (Monk and Klint are both oddballs–one fictional and one real–and I love them). It took me a minute to find my rhythm in reading Pond, but once I did, I was happy to be carried along in the river of the protagonist's thoughts. There's a great interlude where the narrator goes on for a bit about The Wall by Marlen Haushofer. Intertextuality at its finest. https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780399575907, https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780811231947
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