June 2025 Book Report

A mixture of crotch-wetting, tear-shedding and hope-for-humanity books to improve your month

This used to be called Reading Journal. Then Cam called it Book Report by accident and I realised that's a better name. So now I’m calling it Book Report.

Phew, just snuck this in before July finished.

OK, I’m going to be speedy with this one as I’m on holiday. Strap in for a collection of novels and non-fiction that loosely, if I was looking for the theme, would be something like Fucked Up Stuff People Go Through Because of Greedy Ignorant Dudes. Which could be the theme for most things. Let’s crack in.

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What I read

In June 2025, I finished the following books, in the following order:

• The Safe Keep by Yael Van der Wouden

• Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters

• Butter by Asako Yuzuki

• The Dry Season by Melissa Febos

• Girlhood by Melissa Febos

• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

• Moral Ambition by Rutger Brennan

• Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams

These books fit into three main categories

1. Books I picked up at the Auckland Writers Festival

2. Melissa Febos memoirs

3. The world is a bit fucked and full of greed but we can make it better.

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First: the weird outlier

“What do you mean you’ve been spying on me, with this thing in my hand that is an eye?”

The outlier to those categories is the Patricia Lockwood No One Is Talking About This, which is fitting, because this book is an outlier in every sense. I was laughing so uproariously in the first chapter that I woke Cam up to read it so I didn’t have to do it alone. No One Is Talking About This is one stream-of-consciousness zinger after another, which… almost forms a story by the end?

It’s experimental and fragmented. It might be about social media or perhaps about families and grief, or both, or neither. I’m not literary enough to understand if this is doing something very Important or Genre-Bending or if it’s just weird, but despite what a trip the whole thing was, I was unable to put it down.

“White people, who had the political education of potatoes – lumpy, unseasoned, and biased towards the Irish – were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once ev++ery forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.”

This is the kind of unusual, abstract creative work we’re going to need more of, to have any confidence in the future of literature. What value is a conventionally written book in ChatGPT Land? I can’t even read most newsletters anymore without assuming they’ve been AI generated or looking for/finding telltale clues.

“Good” might just come off as telltale and formulaic from now on. Which means only those with a well-developed voice, and/or the motivation and capacity to experiment with form, tone and style will survive this attack on culture and the written word. The bar for good is now: “YOU COULDN’T BE ME IF YOU TRIED.” I don’t mind it.

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Book of the month: The Safe Keep by Yael Van der Wouden

This is one of my Auckland Writers’ Festival books. It has since gone on to win the Women’s Prize for Fiction (and it was shortlisted for the Booker!). This is an astonishing achievement for a debut novel and wildly well deserved.

This book ruined me. I bought it for a sex scene (read to a live theatre at a spice salon in Auckland where you could have heard a pin drop everyone was so enchanted) so I was unprepared for the emotional and historical suckerpunch. The writing is phenomenal – airy, simple, light and tender. Claire Mabey did a great review of the book on her Substack. I devoured it in one go and sobbed my way through the last third, then I lent it to my eldest daughter who did the same. I believe it is now making its tear stained way around her flat. A must read.

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Auckland Writers’ Festival books

Of the other books I bought at the AWF, I’m giving second place to Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters. I chatted briefly with Torrey Peters at an AWF event and she was just as gracious, funny and clever as her writing would lead you to believe. The setup of the book: a trans woman who detransitions goes on to accidentally impregnate her boss, who is unaware of her history, with what she thought was a dud penis. It's fucking brilliant.

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, was not my favourite book, though the author was one of my favourite interviews of the festival. I enjoyed all of the food descriptions, and spent most of the book hungry, but I suspect a bit was lost in translation or cultural context here.

(Read about how Cam jumped on stage to take a picture of her in last month’s reading journal.)

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Melissa Febos memoirs

I have a crotch-pounding, knicker-wetting crush on Melissa Febos. I wrote a review of her book Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative in my April reading journal and have since read everything she’s written.