what i read in June.

lady chatterley's lover, white nights, my favorite Italian author and more🍓

Jul 04, 2025

“Woman Brushing her Hair” (1897) by Władysław Ślewiński

First of all, I want to thank you for the love you showed my latest article.

I'm really glad you appreciated my not-so-mainstream book recommendations; this encourages me to always do better.

One more thing before leaving you to the June reading wrap-up.

My partner and I love to cook, and we just created a Substack page dedicated to the food we love the most and do best: pasta.

If you love it too, but you always make it the same way, or you never get it perfect, you no longer have excuses. Now, thanks to us, you will have fun creating many delicious pasta variations for you, your friends, and family.

We, like most people, are always in a hurry, but that doesn't mean we want to give up eating with taste; that’s why our recipes are fast and easy to prepare.

Our recipes are peppered with sarcasm and humor, so you will also have fun reading them.

If you are a pasta enthusiast eager to explore hundreds of ways to enjoy a plate of pasta, then join us!

Without further ado…here is everything I read in June.

Enjoy!

The Dead City by Gabriele D’annunzio

The story takes place in Greece, near Mycenae, during archaeological excavations that bring to light Mycenaean tombs. It revolves around 4 protagonists and their internal conflict, given by the inability to escape their destiny and their feelings. We have Leonardo, an archaeologist, who is obsessed with the discovery of the tombs of Agamemnon and Cassandra. Then there is Alessandro, the poet, who is tied to Anna, his wife, who is blind. Both Leonardo and Alessandro are attracted to Bianca Maria and live a tormented love, in a spiral of desire, guilt, and remorse. Bianca Maria's sense of guilt and Anna's awareness of their passion create an atmosphere of tension and drama.

How rich, how gorgeous this play is!

There's drama and big questions on love and life.

It explores universal themes such as love and guilt, reflections on decadence, the power of nature, the fragility of human existence, blindness as an ability to see beyond appearances, the relationship between art and life, and more.

But the thing that makes every book by D'Annunzio a pleasure to read is the richness of his language. It's probably not for everyone, because it's flowery and lavish…and that makes it, personally, excruciatingly gorgeous. I don't know how to render it justice. He writes so beautifully. How well he describes everything — weather, cities, and clothes —everything.

Not to mention how he recounts emotions and feelings...ah! Dreamy, hot, almost obscene because he manages to make it all so rich and unforgettable.

He craves and covets beauty; how he lingers on everything that is every day and manages to make it worldly, a pleasure to savor.

I appreciate the fact that in many of his works, if not all, he inserts references to myths, historical facts, literary characters, and so on, which connect perfectly to the themes throughout the book and act as a mirror to the characters in the story.

In this instance, he includes references to Cassandra, about the character of Anna, who, despite being blind, manages to see what others cannot grasp, and therefore also predict.

And then to Antigone, about Bianca Maria, who reads a passage from Sophocles' tragedy right at the beginning of the story, and I think it serves as a warning and foreshadowing of her demise.

So, when you read his books, you will find other reading ideas and stories to discover.

I won’t ever stop recommending his works!

*you can read it for free thanks to Archive.org

The Triumph of Death by Gabriele D’annunzio

The soul is incommunicable. You cannot show me your soul. Even in our most ecstatic moments we are two, always two—separate, strangers, lonely at heart.

Giorgio, recovering from a period of existential crisis and troubled by the death of his uncle Demetrio, retires to Abruzzo with his lover Ippolita. Here, he seeks refuge in nature and love, but his desire to overcome mediocrity and elevate himself to a higher life leads him to live a tormented relationship with Ippolita, seen as an obstacle to his achievement of a more intense and spiritual existence. Obsessive jealousy and a sense of inner emptiness push him to consider an extreme act as the only way of liberation.

This novel explores the depths of the human soul, its struggle between high aspirations and falls, and the dark charm of death as a possible path of redemption or annihilation

Good; I live, I breathe. But what is the substance of my life? To what forces is it subjected? What laws govern it? I do not belong to myself—I escape from myself. The sensation I have of my being resembles that of a man who, condemned to hold himself upright on a surface constantly in oscillation and never in equilibrium, feels support constantly lacking, no matter where he places his foot. I am in a perpetual anguish, and even this anguish is not well defined. Is it the anguish of the fugitive who feels someone at his heels? Is it the anguish of the follower who can never reach his aim? Perhaps it is both.

I won't repeat myself on the beauty of D'Annunzio's writing. Exquisite.

In this case, it is declined in the narrative version. This novel is filled with passion, insecurities, and high expectations vs harsh reality. We are in the head of the protagonist, Giorgio, who, like almost all of D'Annunzio's male characters, is unlikeable, at least by our modern standards.

Despite this, I invite you to get over this matter and immerse yourself in his work to savor the ardour, the frenzy, with which he manages to make us experience the same emotions that his characters feel, bring to heart the uncomfortable questions that we all ask ourselves, and put us in difficulty with the potential answers to these existential questions, which we are all scared of and refuse to accept.

Now she is free. Why, then, am I more uneasy now than formerly? The husband was a sort of guarantee for me; I looked on him as a guardian who shielded my mistress from all danger. Maybe these are illusions; because at that time, also, I suffered much.

D'Annunzio is one of the exponents of the Italian Decadent Movement, a late 19th-century artistic and literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The Decadent movement first flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United States. The movement was characterized by a belief in the superiority of human fantasy and aesthetic hedonism over logic and the natural world. […] An interest in description, a lack of adherence to the conventional rules of literature and art, and a love for extravagant language.

So, as you can see, the richness of language is one of its key features.

One of the things I love about D’annunzio’s writing and his stories is that I feel them charged with the same intensity and damnation typical of the romantic era.

The story between the two protagonists highlights what we all feel when we are in love and during the various phases of romantic relationships.

There is a great focus on the intensity of feelings when you are at the beginning of a relationship and how gradually the feelings change, evolve, and can fade.

Hippolyte smiled; but, hearing him speak with an evident preference for all the first manifestations of his love, at the bottom of her heart she felt displeased. Did those days seem sweeter to him than the present—were those distant recollections his dearest recollections?
An indefinable desire for intimacy had seized her. She pressed closely to him, became suddenly caressing, and her voice, look, contact, gestures—and all her being—were full of seduction. She wished to shed over the loved one the most feminine of her charms; she wished to intoxicate him, to dazzle him with a display of present happiness capable of eclipsing the reflection of bygone happiness. She wished to appear to him more amiable, more adorable, more desirable than ever before.

The unjustified and imaginary jealousy that takes us when we are distant from the person we love, and we imagine them doing who knows what while they are not with us.

Always questioning if things are going well and if they still work.

Spiraling as soon as there is something unexpected, that makes us see the loved one with different eyes, or perhaps...for what they really are and not the version we imagined, and so on.

The ending is shocking. I stared at the last paragraph, and especially the last line, for a few minutes before closing the book and being devastated by the intensity of what I had just read and felt.

An indescribable fury seized them to torture themselves, to rend and martyrize their hearts.

Overall, I highly recommend it.

*you can read it for free thanks to Project Gutenberg.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

In the short summer night she learned so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame...She felt, now, she had come to the real bedrock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked an unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how onself really was! There was nothing left to disguise or be ashamed of. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.

Constance Reid marries Sir Clifford Chatterley, a wealthy baronet, shortly before he leaves for war. A bomb leaves Clifford crippled and impotent, leading to a crisis in their marriage. Connie, unsatisfied and longing for passion, begins a clandestine affair with the estate's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, rediscovering her sensuality and vitality.

This novel explores so many great themes: female desire, wild nature vs. industrial environment, clash between the social classes and their divergent conception of life and love, and an innovative look at the role of women, who emancipate themselves from their status as wives and mothers to assert their individuality and desire.

In short, it all revolves around the struggle between progress and instinct, between reason and passion.

Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.

This book was a surprise to me. I didn't expect to like it, given its reputation, let alone love it! And yet, that's what happened.

I loved the gorgeous descriptions of nature. The love scenes have the right amount of spiciness. This encapsulates perfectly the search for fulfillment, freedom, and identity in life. How to break the mold, find your own way of living, dictate your own rules, not submit to what society imposes as "the norm".

You get to experience the first encounter a woman has with passion and physical desire. She gets to liberate herself from society's expectations and constraints, following what her heart wants and craves.

When Connie went up to her bedroom she did what she had not done for a long time: took off all her clothes, and looked at herself naked in the huge mirror. She did not know what she was looking for, or at, very definitely, yet she moved the lamp till it shone full on her.
And she thought, as she had thought so often, what a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!

But this book, even if it is primarily known for its sexual tone, and indeed, almost always only this theme is shown (as for example in the various film adaptations), this book is so much more!

I really appreciated the speeches about social dynamics, the changes that were taking place in that period with industrialization, the concerns about what the future held for workers now that they are being replaced by machines, etc. It is a very current criticism, among other things, because what they were afraid of...in the end came true.

But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there’ll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it’ll be all machines.

This book was a pleasant discovery. So don't be prejudiced against it because it has a lot to offer, a real gem.

She lay quite still, in a sort of sleep, in a sort of dream.

*you can read it for free thanks to Planet eBook.

Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates

Where do the missing go, when they disappear? For surely the missing are not missing to themselves, only to others.

We are in Detroit, Michigan, between 1976 and 1977.

A serial killer, known as Babysitter, stalks the city, killing children, but only the unloved and undeserving ones (wtf?!), capturing their vulnerability in photographs before leaving their lifeless bodies to be discovered.

Then we meet Hannah Jarrett, a stunning 39-year-old housewife from Far Hills, north of Detroit, who shares a charmed life with her wealthy husband, Wes, and their two beautiful children, Conor and Katya, embodying the essence of the perfect upper-middle-class family.

However, Hannah harbors a secret: she encountered Y.K., a mysterious man whose dark allure draws her into a tumultuous relationship of passion and control, leaving her in a whirlwind of euphoria, fear, and despair.

At what point in a marriage, Hannah thought, do you begin to see the other? When does the other begin to see you? Wondering who this person is, why you are together?

The killings quietly loom over the narrative, as the driving force of the story: a news item in the newspapers, a cross-line that connects and unites the protagonists.

Joyce Carol Oates weaves a suspenseful novel around a true crime story, highlighting the corruption, racism, and sexism endemic to American culture.

In the house Ismelda was vacuuming, cleaning rooms that are already clean, the roar of the vacuum abrasive to the nerves but if Hannah were to tell her please never mind, don’t bother, you just vacuumed yesterday, Ismelda will blink at her employer in surprise, alarm; too much effort to try to explain and then, subsequently, Ismelda will neglect parts of the house that need daily cleaning like the kitchen floor and Wes will notice, for Wes invariably does notice such neglect. Hannah, what the hell? Why is the floor sticky? Or, Hannah? These shirts are poorly ironed.

And after this long preamble, here are my impressions.

The writing is alienating and disturbing; it keeps you in a constant state of anxiety and tension.

It's an uncomfortable read. It reminded me of On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel, another devastating and traumatic story.

I have to say that even though they are important books, very well written, relevant, and that shed light on the darkness in our world, they are not my favorite reads. Or at least, I can't read them very often, otherwise they increase my already existing state of constant anxiety.

The novel touches such powerful and still relevant themes: sexual assault, racism, class, and religion, the psychological impact of violence, and more.

I found it interesting that she delved deep into the role of women in the 70s, especially the white, rich, and privileged ones, who are trapped by their own privileges and in their golden castle, in what should be, on paper, the perfect life.

How frail the vessel—family. How desperate to keep family from pitching into the rough, devastating waters of oblivion, a frail vessel held together by love. And what is love but emotion. And what is emotion but a wisp of smoke, a motion of the air, invisible.

Also, Oates goes heavy; she doesn't leave out any detail, even the most crude and violent, so be prepared.

I thought several times while reading it about stopping and not finishing the book. But then, due to a combination of curiosity and appreciation for how it was written, I took courage and continued, managing to get to the end.

Only recommendation before reading it: check out the trigger warnings, I'm serious.

The female body, stark-white, slovenly. At its core a hungry mouth that can never sate its hunger.

White Nights by Fëdor Dostoevskij

My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?

A tale of unrequited love, loneliness, and longing unfolds over four nights and a morning, weaving through shadows and the edges of awareness.

A young dreamer, who thrives on emotions and impressions, encounters a weeping, lonely girl at night, becoming his anchor to the tangible reality of daytime.

In the nurturing embrace of St. Petersburg, this story of two voices—rich with nighttime whispers, dreams, and aspirations—will leave an unexpected taste upon awakening, prompting us to ponder where the dream world truly concludes.

I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

These "white nights" are used as a backdrop, symbolizing both the fleeting nature of the connection between the characters and the dreamlike quality of their encounter, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.

This is such a short and cozy read. You have to immerse yourself in it and read it all in one go.

It is one of those books that you can reread endlessly, and depending on the stage of life you are in when you read it, each time it can reveal new insights, it can feel like reading it for the first time.

As I sit here next to you, it is already painful to think of the future, because there's nothing in it but a lonely, stale, useless existence.

Now I'm curious and maybe, just maybe, a little less intimidated by reading Dostoevskij's other books.

I know the other ones are very big and more challenging, but at the same time, they attract me more.

This was a pleasant read, but too short, and above all, I decided to read it because it's all over Instagram lately, and I wanted to see what all the hype was about.

I'm not saying that it disappointed me…but maybe I was expecting too much.

In the end, it's a novella, and it's perfectly calibrated with insights and gorgeous quotes, for the length it has.