August 2023 Reading Review + Summer Reading Review

Hello to Monday and hello to you! I hope your weekend was full of good things. Mine was very good! Not only did I manage to publish a post early on Saturday morning, but we took a drive into the mountains, I did a lot of knitting in the car on that trip, and I squeezed in every ounce of reading that I could. I call it a major win!

I intended to publish this post last Monday and didn’t manage to finish it but I’m very happy to wake up and have the bare bones of this draft ready for me this morning. August, despite feeling otherwise, was another fantastic month of reading. My favorite book of the month? You’ll have to read to find out for sure, but a quick hint: it’s about 🎶summertime in Northern Michigan🎶.*

I’m not going to try to write about all of these books this morning, but I’m excited to share some of the highlights with you!

Books Read in August 2023:

---

August Highlights:

Favorite Book of August:

Tom Lake, of course! First of all, I love the beautiful cover with the watercolor flowers. And while part of this story is set during covid, this is not a covid novel. When the whole world shut down in March of 2020, Lara’s daughters all came home to their cherry farm in Northern Michigan. As they worked the fields, they begged Lara to tell them her story about dating Peter Duke, a world famous movie star. Lara and Peter met while performing a summer stage production of Our Town and fell madly in love but parted ways as the summer ended.

Tom Lake is gorgeously written and is such a well-told story. I said this in my previous blog post about this book, but it was so wonderfully nostalgic and there were moments when I had to close the book, put my head down on the table, and just cry. It is pure perfection. I could gush about it forever but will stop here for now. Please read it!

Booker Prize Reading:

---

I read four books on the Booker Prize longlist in August. They were all so interesting, different, and worth reading so it’s hard to narrow down my favorite but if I were to recommend two they would be:

How to Build a Boat: such a joyful story of a young boy searching for ways to connect with his mother who died during his birth. I love stories that are full of imperfect people doing their best to help others and this story was exactly that.

Pearl: reminded me so much of A Ghost in the Throat, my favorite book of last year. In this book Marianne’s mother goes missing when she’s a young girl and this is the story of her grief. It sounds very sad on the surface — and it is sad in a lot of ways — but there’s so much to enjoy here. There were some creepy bits that I savored, a very cozy home in the English countryside, and so many moments when I wanted to pour Marianne a cup of tea and give her a big hug.

Chapter Book Readalouds:

---

We finished a morning readaloud in August: Wishtree by Katherine Applegate. The narrator for this story is an old oak tree in a neighborhood that has seen a lot of people come and go. One day a boy carves the word leave onto its trunk, a message aimed at a Muslim family who just moved in. When the community finds this cruel gesture, they gather together to ensure that this family feels welcome. Katherine Applegate is one of my favorite writers to readaloud and this was another phenomenol work by her!

Bronwyn and I have finished all of the Kit books! And I am happy to report that Kit is now my second favorite American Girl, just behind Addy. I loved how plucky and ambitious Kit was and how she used her writing skills to call attention to the people who needed help in her community. And we still need to watch the Kit movie!

Bronwyn and I also met Zoey and Sassafras in August, which is listed on her Kindergarten curriculum. Zoey is a young girl who has been tasked with taking care of the magical creatures who show up and need her help. She uses the scientific method to make hypotheses and narrow down the solutions to their problems. These books have been a lot of fun so far!

Summer Reading Review:

Despite the current heatwave, I’m officially saying that summer is over! And that means that I can reflect back on my efforts with my summer reading plans. I think I did pretty darn good sticking to this list; I stayed very loyal to it until August, which is when the Booker prize announcement came. Here’s where I ended up:

Slow & Steady Books:
✔️ Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak 
✔️ When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
❒ The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson
✔️ Taking the Leap by Pema Chödrön

Toni Morrison:
✔️ Love
✔️ A Mercy
✔️ Home

Prize Reading:
I have a few books from this year’s International Booker Prize list that I’d like to read this summer:

✔️ Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov 
❒Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan (abandoned; this one wasn’t for me)
❒Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel
❒ The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

And one more from this year’s Women’s Prize longlist:

✔️ The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff

New Releases:
✔️Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
✔️ The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller
✔️ The Postcard by Anne Berest
✔️ Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
❒ Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
✔️ The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
❒ Enchantment by Katherine May (not right now – will try to read later)
❒ Victory City by Salman Rushdie (abandoned)
✔️ House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Backlist Titles:
✔️ Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
✔️ Fight Night by Miriam Toews
❒ So Big by Edna Ferber (abandoned)
✔️ Telephone by Percival Everett
❒ When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (to read later)
✔️ The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
❒ The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
❒ Horse by Geraldine Brooks
✔️ Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward (free to listen with Audible membership)
✔️ Tears of Amber by Sofía Segovia
✔️ Three by Valérie Perrin

I still want to read Stillborn, The Birthday Party, When We Were Orphans, and The Luminaries so I don’t want to forget about them. The good thing is that I own 3/4 of those titles and will be able to easily reach for them when the mood strikes!

---

How was your reading life in August? Did we read any of the same books? And how was your summer reading in general? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

*I sincerely apologize for quoting Kid Rock in my blog post today. But it was just too good to pass up!