The Best Books I’ve Read from July-September 2023
Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash
These last three months have flown by! And I’ll admit, I haven’t been able to do as much reading this month since I’m in the middle of a huge move. It’s crazy how much stuff can accumulate even when you don’t think you have too much. One of the most painful things, of course, is going through the books to see which ones I really want to keep. Sigh.
That said, here are my picks for this quarter:
I’ve been re-reading Dorothy Dunnett’s The House of Niccolò series, and finishing that took up a huge chunk of my fiction this summer. I finished the last three books in the series, To Lie with Lions, Caprice and Rondo, and Gemini. As much as I love Dunnett’s writing overall, I still have to say, I love the Lymond Chronicles more. It’s neat how at the very end you see how the two series tie together, but overall I simply don’t dig Nicholas and his gang the way I do the characters in the Lymond Chronicles. It’s incredibly difficult to bring an 8-volume series of 700-page books together in a satisfying way, and I’m continually dazzled by the complexity of her characters and her writing. If you are intrigued by 15th-Century European history (dipping down to Africa and over to the Middle East) these books are a feast for the mind and senses.
A mystery series I really enjoyed is S.J. Bennett’s series where Queen Elizabeth II is the sleuth. They’re fun, twisty, and give a bit of authentic palace life and intrigue in the process. The first three are out in the U.S.: The Windsor Knot, All the Queen’s Men, and Murder Most Royal. If you’re an Anglophile and a mystery lover, these are a great read. The author has family and friends who’ve worked “in service” and so she really nails the details.
In nonfiction, I picked up Pema Chodron’s latest, How We Live Is How We Die, which goes into It draws its teaching from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but it’s not just about the process of death – it's about how to live your best life, in the flow of each moment, which is a birth and death unto itself. As always, she does a splendid job of bringing ancient teachings into the contemporary world, with great wisdom and compassion.
I’ve also been reading Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, by Stanford design professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They use design principles to help you uncover and design a holistically satisfying, authentic life in the four main areas: Health, Work, Love (all relationships and community) and Play. In a series of exercises that include mind mapping, iterating, and prototyping, they lead you through playful exploration and taking action toward a life that corresponds with your deepest values. They’ve also written Designing Your New Work Life, which is next in my to-be-read pile.
I don’t know how much reading I’ll get done between now and the end of the year, since my move won’t be complete until Nov. 1. I do have a beach vacation scheduled in October though. (Yes, I know – but it was planned long before the move. Trying not to panic here.)
What was your favorite summer read? Let us know in the comments!
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