August Reading Wrap-Up – 2018

Hello Everyone!

August has come to an end, which means it is the end of summer and the start of autumn. The end of a month, as usual, also brings a wrap-up of everything I have read that month. This wrap-up will also include an overview of how well I did at completing my TBR for the whole summer. Let’s just get into it though and enjoy the last post of summer 2018:

The Secret Library by Oliver Tearle

This was the first book I finished in August and it was really enjoyable. It is a book that I bought from the charity shop several years ago and I had forgotten about it for a while, but I found it again whilst I was clearing out my cupboards and decided to give it a go. It is a book discussing all of the books from history that have largely been forgotten or have had an impact on literature as we know it today. It was a fascinating read and it really made me appreciate how lucky we are to have the books we have to today.

5/5

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

I am very late to the party on this one because this was big back in 2017, but I finally got around to reading it and I loved it just as much as literally everyone else did. I honestly haven’t heard a single negative review of this book, which is pretty damn impressive. I have already put a full spoiler-free review of this book up, so if you want more details about what I thought about this book, then you can go and have a read of that.

5/5

Happy by Fearne Cotton

I picked this up from Tesco months ago because it is a book all about the authors own experience with depression. I hoped that it would help me with my own mental illness and it kind of did that and it kind of didn’t. A lot of the book was based on you doing the little acticities in it, which I didn’t really want to do, which is probably why I didn’t find it as helpful, but I did still like it. It was a quick read and it did have some useful information dotted throughout the book. The biggest thing I took away from it was the yoga though. I have been wanting to try yoga for a while, but I didn’t know how, but there are several pages in this book with pictures and descriptions of each yoga pose and it walks you through them. I found this super helpful and I have really been enjoying doing some simple yoga in the mornings to get me going.

3.5/5

‘We Should All Be Feminists’ and ‘A Feminist Manifesto in 15 Suggestions’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If you saw my August book haul, then you would have already read a little about these books. I picked them up on a day in Nottingham and read them soon after because they are only about 5 pages each, so they are very quick reads. I have always been a feminist, but I am really interested in learning more about it from more reliable sources and from lots of different perspectives. these two books were really great and gave me all of the information I could need in a simple and concise manor.

4.75/5 and 4/5

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

This was my 3rd time reading Fangirl now and I adored it as per usual. I am in a bit of a weird reading mood because I really want to read fantasy, but I also want to read contemporary and non-fiction and I want to re-read Harry Potter, which then leads to me not being able to decided what I want to read, so I decided to read Fangirl because it kind of ticks all of those boxes. It is a re-read, a contemporary, there are snippets or fantasy in it because Cath writes fan-fiction and, since I am currently trying to write a book, it is kind of like reading non-fiction because I’m ‘doing research’. Or that’s what I tell myself anyway.

5/5

Has Democracy Failed Women? by Drude Dahlerup

I had some mixed feelings about this book. Overall, I would say that I did like it and it was incredibly informative and very well-researched, but I think it was just a little bit beyond me. I don’t know very much about politics, so there were quite a lot of things that I couldn’t quite understand due to my lack of background understanding. I also felt it was a bit information heavy for my liking. I prefer non-fiction books that have the information broken up by pictures, quotes, fun facts and diagrams instead of just one big block of text because I feel it reads a bit like a text book otherwise, which is ever great. It did teach me a lot though, even if some things went a bit over my head.

3.5/5

Fallen by Lauren Kate

Fallen was the last book I read in August and it was probably one of my favourites. I haven’t heard amazing things about this book and I had bought it originally about 3/4 years ago, so I wasn’t sure if I would still like it, but I really did. There were some plot holes, quite a few tropes and it was a little predictable, but I didn’t mind that because it was just a really fun romance novel. I was hooked the whole way through and I can’t wait to continue with the series. I have been describing it to people as the trashy romance novel always wanted. It has given me everything I wanted from twilight, but didn’t get.

4.5/5

I was surprised to see that I have actually read 8 books this month (although 2 of them were very short) because I feel as if I have read barely anything. I’m not sure how my reading will go next month as I am going back to school, but I am hoping to at least finish the Fallen series by Lauren Kate. Before I sign off I just wanted to talk about how I got on with my summer TBR. If you have been reading for a while, then you will know that I posted a TBR at the beginning of July that covered all the books I wanted to read this summer. There were 17 books on my TBR and I managed to get around to reading 8 of them. I could have easily finished them all, but I decided to read some other books (mostly non-fiction actually) because I just wasn’t feeling the books on my TBR at the time. I am now though, so I will be finishing off that summer TBR into September and October. What have you read this month? Did you complete your TBR?

Goodbye for now!

Over and Out