August 2024 Reading

Another month over!  I read or listened to eight books in August.

Audio first.  I continue to work my way through Louise Penny’s books in audio format.  (Side note:  Hoopla through the public library is an awesome way to listen to audio books without paying a bunch of money.  Or any!)  I listened to Kingdom of the Blind and A Better Man.  As always, the books made me want to move to Three Pines and eat fabulous food with quirky neighbors while someone figures out murders.  As I have mentioned before, I find murder mysteries soothing, as long as they’re not too gory or scary.  Penny manages to maintain the stakes for her characters while also giving me confidence that it’s all going to be more or less all right in the end.

 

Gail Carriger is an amazing writer and also an amazing human whom I know in person.  She met my previously unknown need for spicy gay werewolf romance perfectly with The Omega Objection.  Her characters are compelling and I root for them all the way through, even when they do dumb stuff and get in messes for a while before it all turns out in the end.  Highly recommend.

 

I finished the last two books in the Inheritance Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms and The Kingdom of Gods.  What I love about her work is how creative her world-building is.  Strong characters and interesting plotting keep me interested in a world that is very different from my own.  She also does not shy away from the difficult bits.

 

I continue to work my way through the works of Ursula K. Le Guin.  This month I read Powers and The Eye of the Heron.  Both were engrossing in different ways.  Powers is a story of tragedy eventually overcome.  The Eye of the Heron is, I think, more of a thought experiment about how we make our lives, about class, and about how cultures define us.  They both contain the elegant and beautiful prose that keeps me coming back.

 

Finally, I bought and read the brand-spanking-new Ann Cleeves book The Dark Wives.  It’s a Vera novel and exactly right in all the usual Vera ways.  Go get it now.

 

August total:  8

Summer total:  29

Year to date total:  81