…when I am not thinking about much. School summer holidays are such a blissful time. No getting up at the break of dawn, no chasing the kids to bed at a certain time, and only a hand full of appointments to keep during the week.
You know what that means. Lots of time to spend with the kids and travel, or laze at the pool, and complaining about not getting enough pages read. Unfortunately, or fortunately?, the weather didn’t play along so far. We haven’t travelled much, but we’ve bought and read books. And yes, I have managed to read a lot this month; and bought a lot of books.

As you might have read already, I was time travelling a lot. But I’ve also read some romance, went to late 19th century England and Darjeeling with Raybourn’s Lady Julia Grey to solve mysteries, and went to the moon to solve some kind of locked room – locked lunar station – mystery with Robinette-Kowal’s Lady Astronauts [review to come].
It’s no secret that I love words and their origins, yet my non-fiction read about the origins of Nine Nasty Words wasn’t what I expected. The fictional story about a girl growing up alongside the Oxford English Dictionary and noticing that not all words of the English language made the cut, though was fairly good. [Short reviews of both these books can be found in my Summer Reading List update.]

Right now I am learning about the language of cults with Amanda Montell’s Cultish. I enjoyed her Wordslut very much last year and so far, about 20% in, Cultish doesn’t disappoint either. I’ve managed to read the first paragraph of Karen Coles’ The Asylum, a book club read for August. And I’ve started on Joanne Harris’s Orfeia. Furthermore I still have a few St Mary’s stories ahead of me; sadly, only a few.
Plans for August? Reading! As I’ve mentioned in my Summer Reading List update, I have a few books to read from the list left – I managed to tick two more off, though. Although I have kept away from requesting more ARCs this month, I have been invited by publishers to review a few books – Thank you very much! – which I’ll try to get to in August. Emphasis on try. There’s the usual Pratchett book for the Litsy.com #OokBOokClub, which is still running until November 2023; we’re reading A Hat Full of Sky right now and will dive into Going Postal next. And then there are those books that are tempting me from the sidelines, or TheLadyDuckOfDoom’s and TheMarquessMagpie’s current reading lists.
What about you? Any good books read recently? Any bookish plans for the next month(s)?