June felt like a good reading month to me. I only read 8 books, but I suspect my page count is significantly higher than my last several months. Anyways, I’m still “behind” on my reading challenge by a couple books, but there’s always this month to get caught up again. At this point I can’t tell if it’s optimism or insanity to think I’ll really do more reading, but we’re going with optimism.

1. Mastering Pizza: The Art and Practice of Handmade Pizza, Focaccia, and Calzone by Marc Vetri. This was the most phenomenal window into the science behind pizza dough. It really gave me a deeper understanding of pizza dough and the elements at play in crafting great crust. I am ever-so-slightly obsessed with pizza dough now and it’s a real struggle to keep trying to be healthy and only make pizza a couple of times a month.
2. I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam. This book is probably the reason why I’ve read more this month. I did time logs for a couple of weeks after reading this, and it was a fantastic way to really understand how I’m using my time. The singlemost important take away from the book for me was that time passes, whether you’re tired or not, and being swallowed by exhaustion is not the stuff of which memories are made. It made me consider whether I’m making the most of my time in memorable ways, or losing it to “being tired”.
3. Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy. This book was such a delight. I’ve read the vast majority of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s written works, and I was hesitant to read this–or really any fiction where another author tries to step into the world of a favorite author–but I am so glad I did. It was a light, quick read and it was enjoyable to get some imaginary backstory on Marilla. It was surprisingly sad. It shouldn’t have surprised me, given that I knew Marilla from the Anne series, but it did a little bit anyways.
4. The Huntress by Kate Quinn. Fantastic WWII/post-wwii fiction. It was riveting, suspenseful and unique. There were a couple of pages where I skipped over things I’m not comfortable reading, but even with that, the book was excellent. It’s the type of historical fiction I hope I can write one day.
5. Ring of Secrets by Roseanna M. White. Following fantastic historical fiction with mediocre historical fiction probably made my judgment of this a little more harsh than it might normally be, but it just wasn’t that great. I did finish it, but rather begrudgingly, and a little because I didn’t want to lose my reading momentum for the month while I was between big reads.
6. # I Mom So Hard by Kristin Hensley and Jen Smedley. Even though reading a book with a hashtag in the name goes against every literary sensibility I have, I went ahead and picked this one up. I love the Imomsohard Youtube channel, and they are pretty funny gals. I think their ultimate message with this book was to encourage women in their roles as mothers. When it comes to humorous books about parenting though, I am sensitive to the negativity, and that is a big part of their humor style. It is so easy to joke/complain about the hard parts of parenting, but I think sometimes we take it too far. Parenting has hard moments, but overall it is so much more blessing than pain. Anyways, I could go on–maybe I’ll do a blog post–but I’ll get off my soapbox now. Suffice it to say, an entire book in that vein of humor was not really my thing. There were laugh-out-loud moments, but a lot of the humor wasn’t really my style.
7. House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery by Liz Rosenberg. One of my favorite books this month. This account of Montgomery’s life was beautifully done and I highly recommend reading it if you’ve enjoyed any of L. M. Montgomery’s novels. Knowing some of what she was going through personally as she wrote some of my favorite novels really gives me a much deeper appreciation for the writer she was.
8. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (Stormlight Saga #2) Finally finished this one. These books are SO. LONG! But so, so good. The meticulous care Sanderson has put into crafting this world and characters is wonderful to behold, and a pleasure to drop into for hours… days… months… I have a problem now though, because I’m on to the third book in the series, and the next book isn’t published yet. So do I blaze on through the 3rd one, or try to pace myself and hope the 4th comes out while I’m reading it? I don’t really think there’s any hope of that, but I’m trying to savor this moment of still having a whole book in this series to read.

So that was my reading life this month. 3776 pages, according to Goodreads. I need to add up the page counts from a couple other months for comparison, but that doesn’t seem too bad! Here’s to July. Maybe I’ll catch up before we start school again at the end of the month…