August 2026 Reading

This month’s photo looks different.  That’s because I finished only one book in traditional format.  I also listened to seven audiobooks because I have been busy with my various craft projects.  (That’s a total of eight books, for those doing the math.)

Is it really eight books?  The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is, as it says on the cover “five novels in one outrageous volume.”  It could be argued that I read twelve books.  But arguing is silly.  Anyway:  I thought I had read all the Douglas Adams novels, but I was wrong.  I had definitely never read Mostly Harmless before and I remembered little of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.  What I liked in this reading/rereading was much the same.  The works are creative, funny, and quotable.  (Plus, that thing about Thursdays is just so absolutely true.)  It all seems like madcap chaos.  But then there was the end.  I had gotten so used to Arthur and Ford somehow surviving that I was unprepared for the ending.  It gave me a bit of an existential crisis, kind of like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  I can just blame August for that (it is the Thursday of months).  Worth the read.

 

The rest of my reading consisted of listening to Agatha Christie novels via the Libby app and my public library.  This time, I listened to The Sittaford Mystery, Taken at the Flood, Dead Man’s Folly, A Caribbean Mystery, Five Little Pigs, Black Coffee, and The Man in the Brown Suit.  Hugh Fraser is by far my favorite narrator.  The more of these books I listen to, the more I am struck by the way they have aged.  The plots, while ingenious, are slightly insane in their complexity.  Disguise is not a feature of modern life.   The xenophobia gets old, even when it is set off ironically by the presence of Hercule Poirot, the very un-English detective.  All of the imperial colonial stuff irritates me.  That said, they are reasonable brain candy for while I work with my hands.

 

August total:  8

Summer 2026 total:  40

2026 YTD:  82