August ’22 Wrap-Up: This Month Was Both Two Years and Two Seconds Long

Hello again honeybees! Your inconsistent blogging icon is back (I’m so kidding!!! Does anyone even read my blog anymore?) This month was full of events and little things to get done. I moved into a new apartment, started driving, and somehow also found the time to read 6 books?? I don’t even know.

Let’s get into the books I read this month.

Books Read

4/5

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam

I was in a podcast/nonfiction-type mood and Before We Were Trans was a great fix for that! I read this while packing and finished it while moving everything, and it was a really engaging bit of history on trans and nonbinary people and the importance of recognizing the figures in history that brought us to a more progressive place today. I really appreciated the parts on intersectionality and how gay/queer history helps us recognize unseen aspects of trans history.

5/5

Coraline by Neil Gaiman (reread)

I was having a hard time picking up a book for a while. I just wanted all the spooky Halloween vibes. Coraline is my comfort movie and the book is enjoyable, so I watched and read both. Always a fan of the narration but the mice’s songs are still really creepy.

4/5

The Field Guide (The Spiderwick Chronicles #1) by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black

I’ve watched this movie at least thirty times in my life. I’m a huge fan of the concept and wanted to read the book to compare (and continue with the spooky theme). Did you know that Mark Hamill narrates the audiobook???? An icon, a legend, we stan. He’s honestly what made me enjoy it so much. I’m not a big middle-grade fan so the writing and characterizations weren’t really for me, but the story was still fun. It went a bit slow (the audio was only a few hours long but I thought more would happen given what took place in the movie). A solid read for what it was, but I do enjoy the movie better than the book.

3/5

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. by Samantha Irby

I wanted to like this sooo bad. A ton of my booksta friends have recommended Samantha Irby’s work and she’s been high on my TBR since I found out she was also a disabled writer. Unfortunately, I just didn’t vibe with the book and that’s okay! I think Irby is hilarious but it was almost too much comedy for me. I wanted the emotional bits to be a bit more emotional, and I found that a joke in every other sentence just disrupted the flow.

3/5

Dead Flip by Sara Farizan

I received an ARC of this novel from Algonquin Young Readers and was so excited for the 80s/90s vibes and all the spooky happenings in this book. It was certainly entertaining and I read through it fairly quickly, but the characters didn’t stand out to me and I really disliked Cori and how her character arc was written (I love a sapphic romance but Cori was so annoying and selfish for most of the novel? I wanted to connect to her more than any other character but I hated the way she was written). Overall this was really fun but not incredibly memorable.

4/5

Lord of the Fly Fest by Goldy Moldavsky

Ahhh this one! I was able to listen to an advanced audiobook version of this thanks to Penguin Random House Audio and I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it! The story centers around influencers being stranded on an island after being scammed out of thousands of dollars to attend an exclusive music festival. The MC has a murder mystery podcast and is hoping to interview a famous rockstar that she believes is actually a murderer. The Lord of the Flies plotline meets Gen Z influencer madness is right on brand for me. I love all of these types of books that keep coming out (I’m a part of Gen Z if you didn’t know) and this was witty and twisty and entirely entertaining. The narrator was phenomenal (I loved her as Veronica in Heathers 2013) which made it that much better.

4.5/5

We Had A Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesteroff

I was a bit bummed to learn that this book wasn’t written by a Native American but am impressed and thankful for the thorough and sensitive way in which Nesteroff wrote about Natives in comedy and all the history that comes along with it. I must admit I had very little knowledge of Native comedy going into this but was instantly engrossed with the story of Charlie Hill and his influence. I related to a lot of the newer generation of comics and learned so much about Native American history (some of which I thought I was already pretty well-versed in but that proves the point that you can always learn something new). This was an engaging and emotional read for me and one I highly recommend for non-fiction lovers.

That was my reading month! The other parts were hectic but I’m glad I got so much reading done. I hope next month I have more quality reads.

How was your reading in August? Which book was your favorite? Did you read any recent releases? I’d love to know!

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