Mrs Blackwell’s July Reading Log

Well, well, well… I should under-estimate myself more often.

I came to July not sure if I would read even one book with all the wonderful distraction of the Greytown Festival of Christmas, but here I am, with five excellent books to share.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst

Easily the best book I’ve read so far in 2025.

Thank you to the many people who recommended it to me.

Our Evenings follows David Win, a fictional British-Burmese actor as he reflects on his his life and relationships starting as a schoolboy in the 1960s, through his adult life as a stage actor and ending during the pandemic years where we meet a large cast of intimate and familial characters along the way. Dave’s romantic relationships change, but his mother and high school bully, Giles Hadlow, appear often.

If you like a big character-driven story, told from one person’s point of view, then you too will enjoy this book. I recommend it for fans of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, or Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

I started reading this in a beautiful hardcover edition I got from Unity Books in Auckland, but found myself so eager to keep going with the story that I downloaded the audiobook. I was initially hoping to get in an extra chapter or two in on my walks, but the stunning narration by Prasanna Puwanarajah kept me glued to the audiobook.

Mrs Blackwell holds the Australian edition, published by Penguin.

The Book of Guilt by Catherine Chidgey

The unstoppable Catherine Chidgey, one of our most prolific writers!

The Book of Guilt is set in a boys home in England’s New Forest in the 1970s. Brothers Vincent, Lawrence and William are the last remaining residents and each day their “Mothers” observe them, record their behaviours, and keep them full of a course of drugs to ward off the mysterious illness that has taken the other boys who once lived with them at the Captain Scott Home for Boys.

Simultaneously, we meet Nancy, about the same age as the boys, but who lives a sheltered, reclusive life with her parents in a nearby town.

Like the other Catherine Chidgey books I’ve read, this one very gradually reveals itself, as we learn that all is not as it seems in these households.

If you like Catherine Chidgey you’re bound to enjoy this book too. Having said this, if you have ever read - or seen the movie based on - Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, now in 20th anniversary edition, you will find the similarities curiously distracting and frustrating at times.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein are both US podcasters and journalists at The Atlantic and The New York Times respectively.

Like many books of this kind, it’s hard to summarise all the ideas in Abundance in just a few sentences, but to give it a go, the overarching message here is that governments do have the ability to create a society of abundance, but through years of policy-making focused a bit too heavily on risk-avoidance, and then layering those rules on top of each other, liberal governments have unwittingly built systems that lead to levels of scarcity for their citizens.

While almost all the examples are from the United States, and their system of government is quite unique, their problems are not. I think there is valuable ideas in here for anyone in a position of leadership, or with the ability to make or change rules.

Read Yourself Happy by Daisy Buchanan

If I go a day or two without reading, I notice that I am more prone to worry, I’m a bit irritable, and I tend not to feel like myself. But I’d never spent much time thinking about why I’m like this, or what reading brings to my life that balances me out.

Daisy examines a whole range of the things that reading does for our mental health in Read Yourself Happy including how it makes us less lonely, calmer and more secure, courageous at points, and even how it might make us more romantic.

In one of my favourite chapters, she discusses returning to reading after a break like you’d return to the gym. Don’t start out with a 600-page Booker Prize winner, start with something you once loved or a genre you feel familiar with and work your way up to something more challenging. That’s a good tip.

As a lovely little hardback, this would make a great gift for any book lover in your life.

Books & Islands in Ojibwe Country: Travelling Through the Land of My Ancestors by Louise Erdrich

I picked this up on a visit to Books & Co in Otaki - I was drawn to the cover and when I realised it was nonfiction from Louise Erdrich I figured it’s was meant to be for me!

At age 37 Louise is mother to a new baby. She heads to an area know as Lake of the Woods, this is north of where the US state of Minnesota means the Canadian province of Ontario - there are many thousands of small islands in this area. This is the part of North America where Louise’s ancestors are from, as well as where the father of her new baby lives and she discusses all her connections to the place. The title reference some of the islands filled with books.

Until the end of August you can use code: MILLIEREADS for 10% off in-stock titles mentioned in this post.