Monthly Reading Wrap Up | August 2021

How do the summer holidays always go by so fast?! Even though I am now a teacher, not a student, it still feels like the last day of school was just yesterday!

In August, I did not read as many books as I wanted to. Thought I thought it was going to be a relatively quiet month, August turned out to actually be rather hectic and busy. I did a lot of adventuring and day trips, as well as a couple of overnight trips; I finished my Masters, and my first edited novel; and I had a good time! Maybe August wasn’t as productive and book-filled as I’d expected, but sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

Brighton Book Haul!

I swear, I only went in for, like one book. Maybe two, at a push. Certainly not the *cough* five I came out with…!

I haven’t done a book haul on this blog for a while, but these books seriously excite me, and I want to share them with you!

Book Review | Bunny by Mona Awad

Trigger Warnings for this book: bestiality, murder, rape, assault, mental health, self harm.

Samantha is not the typical student you would on the famous Warren Creative Writing MFA, especially as a scholarship student. She is ostracised by the rest of her all-female cohort, a group of women who call one another “Bunny” and hug for too long. Then Samantha receives an invitation to their “smut salon”. As Samantha is dragged deeper into their sanctimonious world, the edges of fantasy and reality begin to blur, and the Bunnies push her to the edge.

Books I Would Like to Read in August!

I stopped doing TBRs a while ago, simply because I wasn’t reading the books I listed! Now, I write down 3 books I would like to get to each month in my reading journal, and most months I get to at least 2!

However, I thought I’d share some of the books I would like to read this August. As a teacher, August is my summer holiday, and even though I have things to do and a book to edit (!!), I’m hoping to have a couple of hours a day to read.

Monthly Reading Wrap-Up | July 2021

Another month is over in 2021, and I can’t quite believe how fast it’s going! The first four months of the year crawled by at a snail’s pace, and now they’ve flown by!

July was quite a busy month for me. I finished my first year of teaching (my training year, but it was also a full year!), went to stay with my partner, had a mini-break, and attended my first wedding reception as an adult! It was a blast, and I had a really lovely month, especially the last few weeks of it.

Unboxing | Books That Matter: “Herland” | July 2021

Books That Matter delivered another stellar box this month, and even though, for the first time, I already had the book, I was still very excited to open it.

“Herland” was themed around feminist utopia and dystopia. In recent months, pop culture has seen the rise of dystopias once again, with the likes of books released in the pandemic as well as hits such as The Handmaid’s Tale. I think it’s a really interesting theme to have a book box themed around, especially a feminist one like BTM.

June 2021 Reading Wrap-Up

June was an interesting reading month… and a pretty disappointing one in some regards! One book I loved, and the other four were pretty mediocre.

I managed to read six books in June. The breakdown:

Mid-Year Book Check-In! | 2021

We’re already half-way through the year: can you believe it?! The world is already different to just six months ago, and my reading has also changed from 2020…

You can see my 2020 version here, which was quite different to now! I was posting weekly reading wrap-ups of 2-4 books a week – I wish I was still reading that many books! The first few months of 2020 were spent working hard, and then being plunged into quarantine, and in April I read 30 books! This April? 7!

Books I Want to Read This Summer!

It really does feel like summer is checking in here in the UK! It has been hot, and it’s got me thinking, of course, about what I want to read this summer. Let’s take a look at my TBR…

I am planning on doing a “summer of series” this year, which I’ll talk about later on, but I’m only sketching that out to be the six week summer holiday (as I’m a teacher!), so all of these books are the standalones I want to dive into. This TBR is therefore pretty short, because I have many other books to read…

Review | Bone Talk by Candy Gourlay

10-year-old Samkad lives with his Father and his village in the Philippines 100 years ago. Life is not always fair and is not always safe, but Samkad is awaiting the day he becomes a man. But then a new boy arrives in the village, bringing someone called an “American” with them, and war is about to come.

I read Bone Talk as I will be teaching it at school, and this book raises a lot of questions that I think will be fascinating to discuss (though they could be tricky too!).