Happy July everyone! I hope you’re all having a good start to the summer. Or at least as good as you can be considering the world is refusing to stop being on fire. We will not be acknowledging what day today is as anything other than the day my obnoxious neighbors play with fire. Because I hate it here. And also, we celebrate on the wrong day because Americans have are not the smartest bunch, let’s be honest. Anyway, I am prepared to not get any sleep tonight, so hopefully I can get some reading in instead.

But there is a cool July holiday we can celebrate: July is Disability Pride Month! Which is kind of a fun holiday celebrating the anniversary of the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (you can read more about it here). As a disabled person, I think this is a pretty cool holiday and, like every other holiday, I plan on celebrating with books.

Overall, though, I tried to put together a fun reading list this month. It’s been a bit of a rough year so far, and my reading habits have not been great. I just need to get my reading mojo back and find a book or two that is worthy of my staying up way too late for. I’m taking a few days off work this month to have a reading staycation, and I am very excited.

Here are the books on my reading list for July:

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

I picked this one up back in January. It’s about a boy who, after his father, starts hearing inanimate objects speak to him. Which gave me strong Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close vibes, and seemed right up my alley. I’ve also read Ruth Ozeki before, and really enjoyed her writing. Since this fit in perfectly to the July prompt for the Buzzword Reading Challenge – “a book with a book related word in the title” – I’ve been holding off on reading it. But now it’s time, and I am every excited.

This just won the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction. The last two winners, Piranesi and Hamnet, have been favorites for me, so I’m even more excited to read this one now. I honestly can’t quite tell if this is going to be more sad or funny, but hopefully it’s a good balance of both. I’m not sure I’m quite in the mood to read something that might make me cry this month. So fingers crossed.

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong

The first of the books I’m excited to read for Disability Pride Month, and this feels like the perfect pick. It’s a collection of essays written by disabled people. I recognize a few names on the list of authors for this book, and it seems like they have a wide range of disabilities. I’m excited to learn and experience different perspectives. I have read some truly fantastic nonfiction so far this year (including a book about disability, which I’ll talk about in another post this month), and I am especially excited about reading this one in July.

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke

This is a new release I hadn’t heard of, but immediately picked up when I came across it while book shopping a few months ago. My disability is also a chronic illness, and I know I am not remotely the only person who has a disabling chronic illness. So I decided to also include this one in my July reading list. It’s all about the rise of chronic illnesses (you’re not imagining that there seem to be so many more people with chronic illnesses nowadays), and how we get treated in America (hint: it’s not great).

As someone with a chronic illness, I can tell you that it’s really not something people tend to react well to. Healthy people don’t want to make allowances for people who are chronically ill. Just recently, I was told by someone at work to stop complaining simply because she wanted to go out to lunch and I didn’t feel like going outside on a ninety-degree day due to my heat intolerance (I simply told her it was fine if she went without me, but I wasn’t able to go). Just little things like that make having a chronic illness even harder, and they’re due to a lack of empathy and understanding. So I’m looking forward to discovering what this book has to say.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

I have absolutely no idea why I haven’t read this book yet. It has been out for a full year now, and I’ve been telling myself to read it almost as long. I knew I wanted to read it this year, because it’s already been way too long. This month felt like a great time to do so since this kind of feels like a summer book to me. Don’t ask me why. It just does. I did pick up the audiobook, because that’s how I’ve read Andy Weir’s other novels, so that just feels right. Hopefully I will have finished my current audiobook by the time this post goes live and I will be jumping into this one next. I am a huge Andy Weir fan, so I am very excited to finally read this one!

Hide by Kiersten White

For some reason, I have really been craving a thriller lately. But I’ve also been really indecisive about which one I’m actually in the mood for. I ended up picking this one because it sounded good and it’s pretty short. Also, it’s set in an abandoned theme park and involves a game, which I’m feeling a lot more than every single other thriller that has something to do with marriage. (I know it’s not all of them, but it is a lot of them.) And abandoned theme park just gives me “summer thriller”.

It’s gotten pretty mixed reviews so far, so I’m pretty curious to see how I feel about it. I have not read Kiersten White before, so I kind of have no idea. (We will not be talking about the fact that this is the fifth one of her books I have purchased. I am fully aware that I have a problem.)

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

Finally, we have Six of Crows. I might be the only book blogger in existence who hasn’t yet read this book. But I decided it is finally happening. This book has been sitting on my shelves for almost seven years. Which is ridiculous. I bought it after reading the first book in the Grisha trilogy. (I started that one a little late.) Pretty sure I might have even preordered it (I definitely preordered Crooked Kingdom.) But I know this ties into the Grisha trilogy and wanted to fit that one in first. I just never finished the second book. Because I hate Mal. I mean, his name literally means “bad”, so I’m pretty sure he was meant to be annoying.

Anyway, I never made it through the second book. And then I decided to just give up on that series and never read this duology. Despite owning both books. But the other day, I was bored and picked it up and read the first few pages and was kind of into it. So I am officially skipping the rest of the Grisha trilogy and diving into this one. I am in desperate need of a fun read this month, so I’m pretty excited to get to this one.

This month I will also be working on a new reading experiment (not sure whether it will be going up this month or next month, but there is a new one coming). So these are just some of the books I’m planning on reading in July. Hopefully this is a better reading month than June was. We’re not off to the best start, but it’s still early.

What are you planing on reading in July?

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