July 2026//Archive #18
Newness, returning, starting over, and the deep-running roots through the "cosmos of connections."
July was a month of slow reading, as well as picking up and putting down multiple titles that weren’t working for me in the season I find myself in. Blame the multiple record-breaking days of heat in Houston or the attention deficiency I’ve found myself in since adding a kitten to our family. Hermes is constantly finding something new to get himself into, and our home isn’t exactly kitten-proof. I read the same sentences over and over, stopping halfway to scoop him up, only to lose my place and start the page over again. While endeavoring in a very new part of life, I also returned. I returned to a book I had put down two years ago, finding my footing and an overall more appreciative experience through its interconnected figures, which I had not encountered during my first attempt.
The three books I read this month had a very clear theme, each handled quite differently: a poetry collection, a book of nonfiction, and a novel. All three were connected by roots, yes literal tree roots but also the intermingling and life below the soil the connections of figures through time, science, poetry, and discovery, like the illuminating figures in Figuring by Maria Popova, or the removal and subsequent haunting of a eucalyptus tree for poet Victoria Chang in Tree of Knowledge, and the epic life of a plot of land, it’s home, trees, and people who inhabit and discover its Edenic qualities like the many voices in North Woods by Daniel Mason.
Now onto my month in reading!
Here are the books I read in July, in the order I read them.
Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang was the highly anticipated new collection by the author of With My Back to the World. As always, I appreciate Chang’s poetry and their revolution around specific artists and their artwork. I enjoyed WMBTTW's focus on the art and life of Agnes Martin more than this collection, which focused on a broader array of artists. Chang’s focus in this collection is on the removal of a eucalyptus tree on her street, and its continuous haunting after its removal, leaving Chang to reflect on new forms her life and body are taking as she ages and ponders death alongside her teenage daughter's independence.
Figuring by Maria Popova. I’m a huge fan of Maria Popova and have been reading and following her blog The Marginialian for years. I picked up Figuring two years ago as a buddy read, which we both got about halfway through and decided wasn’t for us. Over two years, I have read more, explored more, and furthered my interests in art, literary figures, and the sciences, and returned to this feeling of clarity and appreciation I had not before. Sometimes you just need to take a step back and return to something in a new time. I love how Popova weaves figures through science, history, and literature to form an entirely new interconnected biography. Two of my favorite sections were obviously about Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson. I especially loved reading the intimate letters between Emily and Susan, as well as Rachel and Dorothy.
North Woods by Daniel Mason, what a novel! An Edenic book with a biblical genesis about place, an apple tree, murder, salvation, mystery, hauntings, and the land and home upon it. I loved the various styles Mason used to tell a generational story, like my favorite sections following a landscape painter and his love letters. I read a large portion of this novel while an old home near our house was very loudly being demolished, which added to both the pain and beauty of place, and its constant witnessing to life and death, and possibly, one day, its own tearing down.
“The sharp, shrill sounds of metal scraping on wood, its snapping and splintering, the tearing of seams and beams. Hours later, I can still hear the machines whirring, removing any remnants like a dry broom on wood floors. Only the soil underneath the home’s foundation doesn’t want to relinquish its history as easily as the machine brought the house down.”— Journal Entry, July 20, 2026.
Thank you for being here! Tell me about your July in reading and the books you have returned to?