There have been a lot of changes since last I posted. My elder child graduated from high school and we went on a big graduation trip during which I fell in love with Quebec City. I bid farewell to almost two decades of homeschooling by starting my first full-time job in 20 years, moving my elder child to college, and starting my younger child at the local high school. So far both are loving their new educational situations, and although I’m experiencing some grief that my baby days are definitively done, I’m growing into my new role, both personally and professionally.
Although working full-time kind of pushes my reading goals to the margins of my days, especially since my schedule is non-traditional and involves working well into the evening most days, thanks to audiobooks, children who are much more independent than they used to be, and the fact that I’ve dramatically reduced the amount of exercise I’d been used to doing, I’ve been able to keep my head in the fictional world pretty well. August was 100% fiction, 100% audiobook, and mostly thrillers/mystery, with a couple of literary novels tossed in.
August’s Completed Books:
- The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (reading along with my son for his English class, my favorite of the month)
- Girl, Forgotten by Karin Slaughter (I don’t really like Karin Slaughter’s books, and yet I keep reading them)
- Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl (re-read)
- The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw (brutal fairytale retelling/reimagining)
- Go as a River by Shelley Read (similar themes as The Bean Trees—a woman confronting her identity and making a choice about whether to accept that identity or find another path)
- The Midcoast by Adam White (a thriller/mystery set along Maine’s midcoast, one of the regions we visited for my kiddo’s graduation trip in June)
- Wish You Were Here by Rita Mae Brown (a cat and a dog help the postmistress of a small mountain town solve murders)
- Rest in Pieces by Rita Mae Brown (a cat and a dog help the postmistress of a small mountain town solve murders again)
- Chasing the Dime by Michael Connelly (another Connelly thriller, this time making some eye-rolling points about the motives of the pharmaceutical industry)
- The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller (post-pandemic fiction…if you’re like me and believe that all novels written after covid came on the scene are influenced by the pandemic even if they’re not expressly about the pandemic, and you get comfort reading other people’s interpretations of lockdown time, this book might interest you. It captures well the quiet, anxious, waiting quality of time during lockdown)
Stats (pretty charts thanks to The StoryGraph):
Currently Reading:
- Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer (I’m a little hung up on why a 12-year-old boy (and his father) would be named after a goddess, and I think this is hindering my enjoyment of this novel)
- Gone Like Yesterday by by Janelle M. Williams (I fear this one will be a DNF)
- Murder at Monticello by Rita Mae Brown
To-Read for September:
In addition to my StoryGraph, you can see my Litsy profile for status updates throughout the month and my Instagram (@ImperfectHappiness) for mostly not-book-related photos.
Imperfect Happiness 