I’m pretty happy with the number of books I managed to get in this month, what with focusing on Blaugust as much as I did (typically taking an hour+ out of each day to post something, which could otherwise have been used for other things including reading), and with our pretty slammed schedule road-tripping out to clear out my mother’s storage lockers and visit family.
I can’t help but look back at least a bit on what I could’ve done to get in more still, with this personal challenge to get through 50 books this year. But I know that’s wasted energy, so I’m trying to shake loose any regret of that thinking, take away some lessons instead, and just keep moving forward.
Here’s how my August reading went:
Read
The Expert System’s Brother – Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Gates of Polished Horn – Mark A. Rayner
The Expert System’s Champion – Adrian Tchaikovsky
A Man Called Ove – Fredrik Backman
One Day All This Will Be Yours – Adrian Tchaikovsky
Started and stopped
The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message For An Age of Anxiety – Alan Watts
Reading
The Third Rule of Time Travel – Philip Fracassi
I’m still finding Tchaikovsky’s stuff pretty hit and miss for me, albeit mostly solid hits. The first book of that duology was solid and had me hooked enough to want to read the second one. Whereas the second one was seemingly a big change from the first, and I found it more than a bit of an effort to get through. I stuck it out in the hopes that it would somehow revert back to more like the first, but it didn’t. And by the time I realized it wasn’t going to, it was close to done anyway (all hail short books!), so I just finished it off.
I’ve read a bit of Alan Watts in the past, though I think only in bits and pieces, not an entire book. I’m dealing with some issues of self-doubt and insecurities lately, and figured I could do worse than reading up on some methods of managing them, and his name popped up in my search for such books, and I knew he had some pretty useful insights that I’ve read, so I figured I’d give his book a shot. Unfortunately, The Wisdom of Insecurity drops you right into some particularly deep philosophy and opining on thinking about thinking, as it were, and seemed to be mid-flight on having already established why certain, pretty advanced things about what we know about how we think were a given, perhaps from some previous work of his? It was immediately way over my head and I saw no chance of catching up to tread water, let alone be able to wrap my head around the probably rich insights of what he was offering on any level, so I figured I’d best put that one aside, at least for now.
And The Third Rule of Time Travel is an engaging idea but is lately treading a bit close to including moments that strike me as not jibing with what the characters would do. As I’ve said before, and has been said by many before me, fiction writers have to create worlds where X, Y and Z are possible, but do so with established rules and with characters that still must behave in a way we’ve learned they would. Any time that fails while I’m reading a book — “Wait, she did what? Um… no?” — it can bump me enough to stop reading the book. There have been a couple of moments like that in this book so far. It’s a testament to the concept being interesting enough that I can move past those when they’ve happened, but it’s getting close. Hoping I can see it through without getting bumped fully from it and putting it down.
Side note: With everything else happening in August, I totally forgot to track the books I was reading in StoryGraph, which I’d been trying out this year to offer insights into what I’m reading as well as to use as backup to ensure that my own book count, toward my 50 this year, was accurate. Oddly, when I entered the books I’ve read through August, StoryGraph somehow didn’t work. It added one of them, but not the others. Hey, technology is great when it works, right?
So it looks like I may have to rely on my own records from now until the end of the year, and cross my fingers that I don’t drop any in my tracking.
Looking forward to more fall-like weather and more time to read in September.