June Reading Notes

The Bloomsbury Group and Beyond...

“We were full of experiments and reforms. We were going to do without table napkins – we were going to paint, to write, to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o’clock. Everything was going to be different...”
— Virginia Woolf

June felt like a month of reading that revolved around questions rather than answers.

Questions about how we live, how we create, how we love, and how we become ourselves.

📚 Books mentioned:

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900–1939 — Virginia Nicholson

The Voyage Out — Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf

Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden — Quentin Bell & Virginia Nicholson

The Art of Bloomsbury — Richard Shone

Bluets — Maggie Nelson

What Love Comes To — Ruth Stone

Arturo’s Island — Elsa Morante

Looking back, I see that many of the books I returned to this month were quietly in conversation with one another. Some through history, some through fiction, some through poetry. But all of them, in one way or another, were books about being.

Several of these were rereads. Several are still unfolding in my mind. None of them feels finished. And perhaps that is why I find myself writing about them here, rather than attempting a neat summary or verdict.

This is less a wrap-up and more a set of reading notes from a month spent thinking with books.

Reading as a way of living.

A Month in Bloomsbury

Without quite planning it, much of June became a return to Bloomsbury.

At the centre of this reading was Virginia Nicholson’s Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living, 1900–1939, a book I first read when it was published in 2002 and returned to again more than twenty years later.

What struck me most in this rereading was not only the extraordinary cast of figures—Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, and the many others orbiting their world—but the structure of the book itself.

Rather than treating Bloomsbury as a linear history, Nicholson organises it around the texture of life: love, beauty, sex, food, money, clothing, interiors, travel, society.

It is, in other words, not only a story about what they made—but about how they lived.

And that distinction feels important.

What continues to draw me back to Bloomsbury is not simply their work, but their willingness to treat life itself as something open to experimentation. Not always successfully. Not always comfortably. But with a sense of possibility that still feels striking today.

What if we lived differently?

Not as a slogan. Not as a doctrine. But as a question.

A question that sits quietly at the centre of so much of their art, their writing, their relationships, and their homes.

Alongside Nicholson, I spent time rereading Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out and A Room of One’s Own. Reading Woolf in different forms at once—fiction and essay, early work and mature argument—brings into focus just how consistently she returned to questions of independence, creativity, and the conditions needed for a life of thought and making.

I also spent time with two art books: Charleston: A Bloomsbury House and Garden and The Art of Bloomsbury. These books remind me that Bloomsbury was never only literary. It was visual, domestic, material. A way of arranging space, colour, objects, and the paraphernalia of daily life as part of the same creative impulse.

Something is compelling about that refusal to separate art from living.

Other literary companions

Alongside Bloomsbury, I found myself moving through a different register of reading—more fragmentary, more interior, more poetic.

Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is one of those books that resists categorisation. It moves between essay, diary, philosophy, and fragment, circling the colour blue while also circling love, desire, grief, perception, and attention. It asks less to be “understood” than to be lived with.

Ruth Stone’s poems in What Love Comes To offer something quieter but equally enduring: an attention to the ordinary textures of life—love, loss, memory, ageing, and survival. Her work feels grounded in the lived world in a way that lingers long after reading.

And finally, Elsa Morante’s Arturo’s Island, which I read as part of a buddy read, sits somewhere between fiction and fable—an exploration of imagination, isolation, and the painful process of growing up and the complexities of being young and trying to understand life.

Books About Being

Looking back, I don’t think this month can be reduced to a list of titles or recommendations.

What connects these books is something simpler and more difficult to define: an interest in what it means to be alive.

How we shape a life.
How we pay attention.
How we love and lose and remember.
How we create meaning from experience.
How do we become ourselves?

Some of these books explore those questions through the lens of history. Some through fiction. Some through poetry. Some through fragments of thought.

But all of them, in their own way, are books about being.

And I think that is why they have stayed with me.

Not because they are finished.

But because they are still unfolding.

Reading as a Way of Living

I have been thinking a lot lately about reading not as consumption, but as a way of living.

Not as something separate from life, but as something that shapes how life is seen, felt, and understood.

Perhaps that is the thread running through all of this.

Reading as a way of living.

How we evolve because of the books we choose.

And living, in turn, is something we are always still learning how to do.

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With LOVE,

Tracy 🩷

P.S. 📚If you’ve read any of these books—or if your own reading life has been circling similar questions—I’d love to hear what has been staying with you lately. What did you read this month?