When reading from a variety of genres on a range of topics one can have the sense of meandering through life. During our professional careers we often feel the need to focus, keeping up-to-date on our “areas of expertise.” Some subjects, however, call for different perspectives as they are better understood “through analogy, context, parallels, the view from the distance, rather than via direct and dogged pursuit.”

There is a benefit to reading widely that I wish I had discovered earlier in life: a variety of viewpoints and voices helps deepen my own vision. This hope for a wider and deeper understanding of the world sustains my monthly intention to read a minimum of five books on a variety of topics from different genres. Here are the books I read in June 2025. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on MORE TO COME.

Enrich your reading habits and your life. Wander. Dawdle. Live.

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On Juneteenth (2021) by Annette Gordon-Reed is a work of both history and memoir that explores the long road to the actual events toward emancipation on a June day in 1865 and then forward to the recognition of that date as a national holiday in the 21st century. Juneteenth remembers and celebrates June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state: Emancipation Day. Gordon-Reed, best known for her deep and earth-moving scholarship on the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemmings relationship, looks at a more personal subject here. A native of Texas, she examines her own life and mixes it with historical events from the state, nation, and world to shape a more truthful narrative around emancipation. By taking the long view, Gordon-Reed helps the reader see, as one reviewer notes, “that historical understanding is a process, not an end point.”

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The Death of Shame (2025) by Ambrose Parry is the most recent installment of the Raven and Fisher mystery series. Set in 1854 Edinburgh, a prologue has the reader at the top of the Scott Monument, where we see one character’s dramatic response to public humiliation and shame. After some scene setting we then move into the heart of the work. In a world with strict moral codes and very restrictive societal roles for women, Sarah Fisher—a young widow left with financial resources after the death of her husband—is helping fund Dr. Will Raven’s emerging medical practice in exchange for being secretly trained as a doctor. As the story progresses, Will and Sarah are drawn into an ever more confusing and dangerous web of treachery, blackmail, secrets, and murder among the city’s more sordid residents. In the end, Sarah uncovers the way to break the bonds held over this cast of characters by unscrupulous and vicious men and women, leading to a successful conclusion to the case as well as an ending that has life-changing consequences for Raven and Fisher.

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Still Life (2005) by Louise Penny is a traditional mystery set in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines south of Montreal. A beloved local fixture, Miss Jane Neal, has been found dead on Thanksgiving morning in what the locals think is a tragic hunting accident but Chief Inspector Armand Gamache fears is something much more sinister. In this first of a series that now stretches over 20 years, we see the Chief Inspector’s strength, integrity, and underlying compassion for the victim, the townspeople who mourn Jane Neal’s death, and for his own team. Penny writes in a crisp and readable style, providing us with key insights into Gamache, his detectives, the quirky townspeople, and ultimately the killer. Throughout, Gamache falls in love with the tiny village as Penny is setting up the longer series and the Chief Inspector’s continued involvement in the life—and deaths—of Three Pines. 

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No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain (2025) by Rebecca Solnit is a celebration of indirection. Focused on history, power, change, and possibility, Solnit writes in beautiful prose poetry to inspire hope in dark times. She builds this work on two terms she suggests we all adopt: One is “longsighted,” which she writes is “the capacity to see patterns unfold over time.” The other, as alternative to “inevitable,” is the rarely used adjective “evitable.” As she notes in the introduction, the “misremembering of the past (or not remembering the past at all) ill equips us to face the future.” In a series of essays Solnit uses her formidable storytelling skills to seek out examples of slowness, patience, endurance, and long-term vision. “I’ve come to recognize,” she writes, “that changing the story, dismantling the stories that trap us, finding stories adequate to our realities, are foundational to finding our powers and possibilities.”

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The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver tricked, tormented, and reinvented baseball (2025) by John W. Miller is a splendid new biography of one of the game’s great characters and innovators. Weaver—forward-looking genius, shrewd evaluator of talent, brilliant strategist, superb entertainer, part wizard—is deserving of the royal treatment. The Bismarck of Baltimore came into the game at the twilight of the age of the baseball manager. His uncanny skill at figuring out so many things about the game without the benefit of the computer probably hastened the age’s demise. Now they just program the machines to think like Earl, but they can’t teach them . . . or today’s managers . . . his character. As Miller shows in this masterful new work, they broke the mold with Earl Weaver.

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What’s on the nightstand for July (subject to change at the whims of the reader)

• Paris: A Short History by Jeremy Black
• The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin
• Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by Leah Litman
• It’s Not Even Past by Anna Scotti

Keep reading!

More to come . . .

DJB

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NOTE: Click to see the books I read in May of 2025 and to see the books I read in 2024. Also check out Ten tips for reading five books a month.

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Photo: The Library at Erddig, Wrexham © National Trust Images / John H / via International National Trusts Organisation