August was the month an author I had already written off turned into some of the best reading I have done all year, and it was also the month a reading tree finally led me somewhere I did not like. Both of those happened inside the same seven books, and that feels about right. This is the table of contents for my month: every book, an honest review, and which ones inspired me to write something emotional or head down a rabbit hole.
August by the numbers
Books finished: 7
Dollars spent on books: 0, all free from the library
Google searches: 6 rabbit holes, including a goddess who asked Zeus to start a war because the weight of too many humans had gotten too heavy to hold up, the real 126 day siege that Bel Canto is built on, and why the Mona Lisa is brown
Emotional essays incoming: 3
Reading trees growing: 2, plus two clusters that turned out not to be trees at all once I looked at them properly
Stars: three 5 star, three 4 star, and one 2 star, my first 2 star of the entire year
Format split: 5 audiobooks, 2 ebooks
Narrators: Marin Ireland twice, on My Friends and Beartown, Anna Fields on Bel Canto, and two authors reading their own work, Natalie Haynes and Ann Patchett. No Julia Whelan this month, which almost never happens
Listening time: 57 hours 7 minutes at normal speed, or 38 hours 5 minutes at my usual 1.5x
Days of my life: about 2.1 days spent with a book this month
Top genre: literary fiction, 4 of the 7
Currently reading: as August closed I was about 90 percent through The Correspondent by Virginia Evans on audio, and about 60 percent through The Will of the Many by James Islington on ebook, both from the library
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I came to this one straight off Stone Blind, because I loved Stone Blind and immediately wanted more Haynes, and a Twitter thread about Medusa kept pushing me the same direction. What I loved was that it gives every woman in the Trojan War her own space instead of treating them as scenery around the men. I went in blind and did not realize it was a lot of smaller stories handing off to each other and overlapping as they go, and being caught off guard by that is most of why this landed at four for me instead of five. It never quite gutted me the way the five stars did.
Two things sent me googling. One was the goddess who holds up the earth asking Zeus to start a war because the weight of too many humans had become too much to carry, and that is a genuinely unhinged origin story for a war. The other was a section about men wasting and taking more land and resources than they need, and that one hit hard enough that there may be an emotional essay in it eventually, just not yet.
Things I Googled: the goddess who asked Zeus for a war because people had gotten too heavy to carry. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled. The other rabbit hole, about men taking more land and resources than they need, is going into a piece about the ancient world.
Where this book is sending me next: an emotional essay eventually, once I work out what I actually want to say about that greedy tidbit.
Reading Trees: Stone Blind is what sent me here, so this is a new branch on the Greek myth tree, still the healthiest tree I have growing.
My Friends by Fredrik Backman
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I picked this up for the least interesting reason there is, because it was everywhere and everyone kept telling me to. My first Backman, and now one of my favorite books of the year and honestly one of my favorites ever. What got me was the writing itself, the cadence of the sentences, the way they carried me along instead of just delivering information. I found out afterward that it is translated from Swedish, and suddenly the whole thing made sense. I have been thinking about the translator ever since. The story is a girl piecing together what happened around a famous painting and the four teenagers who were there when it was made, and I was as impatient for the next piece of the story as she was. It also made me want to go stand in front of a painting that does not exist, and I was legitimately annoyed that I could not. This one gets a spot on the shelf the day I have a shelf.
Things I Googled: the translation, the translator, and how much of what I loved was actually his doing. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled, and it is also the newest entry in a words and etymology grouping I have been building.
Beartown by Fredrik Backman
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I went straight from My Friends into this one because I wanted more of whatever that was, and I went in knowing absolutely nothing about the story, and that turned out to matter a lot. It is a small town in the forest where a junior hockey team is the last thing anybody there has left to be proud of, and then something happens that forces the whole town to pick a side. It is heavy, and I would go in knowing that much and nothing more. What I kept noticing while I listened was that the sentences were not carrying me the way My Friends had, and I assumed the translation was the difference, since the translation was the entire reason the last one worked on me. It is not. Same translator on both, Neil Smith, and the same narrator, Marin Ireland. So the gap is the book itself, a stranger and better answer than the one I walked in with. My Friends carries you along on the sentences and this one puts you in a room and makes you stay there.
Things I Googled: whether da Vinci really got a discount on brown paint, after a sarcastic line about it in the book. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled.
Where this book is sending me next: nothing yet, though there is something the mother says about wanting a thirty six to forty eight hour day that I am not finished thinking about.
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
I read this because it was popular, not much of a reason, and then I almost quit it, not much of an endorsement either. The opening drops you into a city that does not exist with names that do not sound like names and slang nobody bothers to explain, and I have read a lot of fantasy without ever hitting that particular wall. I stayed past the point where I would normally have bailed and it turned into a genuinely great story. What got me was the way it is built, the heist running in the present and then a whole chapter peeling back into one character’s history, timed so that every person I thought I had figured out became somebody else. The cliffhanger annoyed me, I get why it is there, and Crooked Kingdom is now on my Libby holds.
Where this book is sending me next: another essay about my rules for quitting books, the nine it has cost me, and what happened when this one made me break it. Then Crooked Kingdom, eventually, once I forgive the ending for Six of Crows.
Whistler by Ann Patchett
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I almost did not read this one. I DNF’d Tom Lake earlier this year, decided Patchett and I were not going to work out, and then asked Threads about it anyway, and Threads told me to go audio and start with The Dutch House. That worked, so I kept going, through Bel Canto and then into this one. Whistler is now one of my all time top tier books, above both of them, and honestly up there with the TJR and Kristin Hannah books I have loved most. It is a woman and the stepfather she lost for forty five years, one night in 1980, and a horse in a story inside the story. Patchett narrates it herself and does the thing almost no narrator does. She gets quieter in the big moments. Two paragraphs are still following me around, one about a house being sold and never getting to walk back in, and one toast at a fiftieth anniversary party that counts a family forward instead of backward.
Where this book is sending me next: two essays, one about the farmhouse I grew up in and the friends I was never allowed to bring home, and one about the dumb logistical accident my entire family is standing on. After that, back to Tom Lake, the book that started all of this by being the one I could not finish, this time on audio with Meryl Streep reading it.
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Third stop on the Patchett tour I only took because Threads told me to. I went into this one knowing nothing at all, and I now think that is the correct way to read it, so I will keep it vague. A birthday party in an unnamed South American country, a famous opera singer, a Japanese businessman who came only to hear her sing, and then terrorists coming through the air vents after a president who did not show up. It hooked me fast and then did something I was not expecting. The siege goes on so long that the book stops being about a siege and becomes about people learning each other’s languages and cooking together and falling in love inside a bubble where the usual rules stopped applying. About a third of the way in I paused it to google whether any of this was real. It is. What it never did was gut me, though, and that is the whole difference between this one and the five stars this month. Very good, and not the kind of good that follows you around after.
Things I Googled: whether the siege actually happened, which I stopped the book a third of the way in to find out. It did. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐
This one was not for me. Two agents on opposite sides of a war across time leaving each other letters, very short, very ambitious, and the writing itself is the entire point. I could not get into it, and the opening never handed me anything to hold onto before the language started asking me to work for it. I finished it and never found the door in. Plenty of readers I trust adore this book, so take my two stars as a mismatch rather than a verdict. What I actually got out of it is about me, because the two things that lose me in a book are a story told in fragments and no early hook, and this is deliberately both, so I may have walked straight into my own known trap.
Where this book is sending me next: the harder question, whether you keep following a reading tree after the branch breaks. I have not answered that one yet.
Reading Trees: this branch grew off two books I had already loved, and it is the first one on any of my trees where a branch broke like this. I am leaving it right where it fell for now. Whether you keep climbing after a branch breaks is the harder question, and I have not answered that one yet.
All seven of these got a full review on Goodreads too, along with everything else I finish, including the books that never turn into an article here. If reading the reviews is the part you like, that is where all of them live. Come follow me over there.
The thread running through August
I was wrong twice this month, in both directions. I had written off Ann Patchett after I could not finish Tom Lake, and she went and wrote one of my favorite books I have ever read. And I had been following one book to the next, trusting it the way you trust a friend with good taste, and it handed me the first book all year I could not find my way into.
So what I keep turning over is how much to trust the way a book gets to me. A book that grew out of another book feels like the reliable route and a hunch about an author feels like the risky one, and August says neither comes with a guarantee. It also says the miss was worth having. A tree where every branch is a five star is a marketing brochure, not a reading life.
The best book I read in August, and I am picking two
Whistler and My Friends, and I am not going to break the tie. Whistler broke something open about family and time that I am still carrying around and will be writing about twice before I am done with it. My Friends is the one whose sentences I would read out loud to a stranger in a parking lot. One of them changed how I think about my own people and the other one changed how I think about sentences, so take whichever of those you need more right now. Ask me again in a year and I will probably still be stalling.
Reading Trees
A reading tree starts with one root book and the itch it leaves behind, a topic, a place, a feeling you are not done with yet. From there it grows branches, other books that reach back to that same root, whether it is a direct mention in the text, the same region, or just chasing the same gut punch. It is not a genre list and it is not an author's backlist. It is a line you can trace from root to newest branch.
Two of them added new branches in August, while the 2 star book broke its branch clean off, and I am leaving right where it is.
Trees keep growing every time one book hands me the next one. Paid subscribers get the full tree, root to newest branch, plus a new tree every month, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the rabbit holes, the essays, all of it, stays free right here.
Free and paid
This recap is free, always will be. The reading trees are the one thing that lives behind the paywall, one new tree a month plus the full growing vault, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the Google rabbit holes, the essays, all of it, stays right here for everyone.
I don’t have a shelf yet. I have a map.
A note on my links: I’m a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you’re a book buyer and you’re going to own a copy anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.
Tell me in the comments: has an author you previously gave up on ever turned around and given you a favorite?