What I Read in August
It’s been a while since I wrote one of these, but I figured that recapping my August reads would be a good point to jump back into the proverbial saddle. August is traditionally a slow reading month for me. With school holidays lasting the entire of the month, it’s a time of year when I’m typically out and about more, and if I’m staying up late it’s to hang out with my teen - not to read. 2024 has largely continued this tradition, although I’ve found that this year I’m a lot more consistent with my reading on a month-by-month basis and so in August I read 8 books, which is within a handful of what I’ve read in every other month this year bar June. Rather than going through chronologically, I’m going to tackle this look back over the eight books I read in August slightly more haphazardly, but in a way I hope will make it more interesting, if only to me.
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I’m largely foregoing readathons this year, but my one big exception to this is the Lochfearn Readathon hosted by Lianne at Literary Diversions, in which participants visit various locations in the fictional and slightly haunted Scottish town of Lochfearn. This is a very relaxed paced readathon that is running for six months within Lianne’s Patreon having kicked off in June, and it’s this readathon along with the annual Buzzwordathon that I’m using to primarily shape my reading each month in the latter half of 2024.
In August, I visited The Loch, where my first prompt was to read a book featuring mythical creatures. For this, I chose Like a Charm by Elle McNicoll, a fantasy middle grade that I borrowed from my library. I ended up giving the book 4 stars and almost immediately picking up its sequel - Like a Curse - which allowed me to start and finish the series within the month and avoid adding it to my ever-growing ongoing series list. In this cute little Duology, we follow Ramya, a neurodivergent young girl with dyspraxia who is pulled into her family’s magical secrets when she and her parents move to Edinburgh. It’s a fantastical story filled with witches, fae, dryads, sirens, and dozens more mythical and mystical creatures living just below the surface of our world, but one that also celebrates neurodiversity.
My next prompt was to read a book set on or around a body of water and for this I chose to read Jurassic Mary by Patricia Pierce, a non-fiction book all about the life of Mary Anning that I picked up while on holiday in her old home town of Lyme Regis earlier this year. I did find this book to be ever so slightly repetitive, but that was a minor quibble and I mostly loved it. Jurassic Mary is also a very frustrating read as you come to a deeper and deeper understanding of how Mary’s contributions were overlooked in her lifetime and the poverty she faced while her discoveries were celebrated in museums and societies by those of higher social standing. However, there are glimpses of light throughout, and at least today we know that she is finally receiving the acclaim she deserved from the beginning.
The final two prompts at The Loch were to read a book featuring a portal world, and a book featuring horses. For these prompts, I realised I could continue working through C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia by reading The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy, respectively. Honestly, I’m not really enjoying the Narnia series all that much. The writing style isn’t one I get on with - it’s all a little too “golly gosh!” for my taste - and I find the authorial inserts weird. It takes me completely out of the world when, in the middle of a story, the author mentions another of their books, and that’s even more noticeable and irritating in the middle of a fantasy story. At this point, I’m mostly completing the series to be able to say I have, and to see if the final book really is as annoying as I’ve heard it is.
I read two other books in August. The first was Notebook by
, which I read after being kindly gifted a copy by the author via his Substack. Notebook is a hard book to explain as it is, quite literally, random extracts from the author’s personal notebooks, but I really enjoyed it and found myself laughing out loud at parts while nodding along in a vaguely melancholy yet peaceful way to others. As someone who now also spends a lot of my days wandering somewhat aimlessly around rural pathways, I found the book resonated with me in a way I don’t think it would have done even a year ago. My final book of the month ended up being White Fang by Jack London, a classic about a wolf growing up and gradually becoming domesticated that I’ve been meaning to get to for some time. I believe I read White Fang and its partner book The Call of the Wild way back when I was in primary school, and I remember liking them both. Today I found White Fang far more vicious a story than I remembered, but while I struggled with several sections - most notably the part of the book set during White Fang’s years in a dog fighting ring - the overall story was powerful and had an ending I appreciated; I’ll definitely be picking up Call of the Wild soon to complete the not-duology.