Reading Roundup!
What I read in August 2025
August was an odd month - I was very much on deadline which meant stress, but also needing to relax my brain at the end of the day - and you can see that in the book list below…
So here’s what I read last month:
As always, just a note that these are commission links - that means that you pay the same price you would otherwise, but I get a tiny cut of that price.
Love Overboard - Ada Barumé
The Fiancée Farce - Alexandria Bellefleur
The Other Daughter - Caroline Bishop
The Tidal Year - Freya Bromley
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad
Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old And Wise - Katherine Rundell
Love and Other Human Errors - Bethany Clift
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care - Ashley Herring Blake
Preloved - Lauren Bravo
A Wife For The Prizefighter - Alice Coldbreath
Party of Two - Jasmine Guillory (a re-read of a favourite!!)
Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell (ditto!)
Wayfarer - Phoebe Smith (currently on 99p Kindle special!)
Small Pleasures - Clare Chambers
Last One At The Party - Bethany Clift
Summertime Punchline - Betty Corrello
Romancing The Duke - Tessa Dare
Say Yes To The Marquess - Tessa Dare
Not The Plan - Gia de Cadenet
Sad Girl Hours - Anna Zoe Quirke
More and More and More. - Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
Two of these were books that I had bought since I started this seven-month project with a goal not to buy any more books - Sad Girl Hours, which was in my huge order during Waterstones pre-order sale (and which I loved), and More and More and More. which was an academic purchase but which I read cover-to-cover and found super interesting, so I’m gonna include! I think Sad Girl Hours is a perfect successor to, or book to go along with Fangirl, which, while I still love it, is definitely showing its age with the way that some of the characters talk about subjects like weight, sexuality, and mental health. It did come out in 2013 and the characters are canonically only a year older than me - which is one reason I loved it when I first read it and why the nostalgia of re-reading has increased. That is what the internet was to me when I was in undergrad!
A sort-of new discovery of mine was Bethany Clift - I say sort-of because her books had been sitting on my Kindle since 2022 and 2021 respectively, but I have no memory of buying them. I’d describe both Love And Other Human Errors and The Last One At The Party as near-future speculative fiction with real heart, perfect for fans of Station Eleven. In Love And Other Human Errors we’re in 2030s (maybe) London; everyone’s using tech even more than we do now but in a way that you could totally see happening as a natural progression from today’s technology. Connectivity and algorithms rather than futuristic hoverboards, if you see what I mean? Our main character, Indiana Dylan, finds out over the course of a year that human friends and love are so much more than the algorithms she’s been working on… Meanwhile, The Last One At The Party follows a nameless protagonist at the end of 2023 (which was near-future when the book was published!) as a new, horrendously deadly and unpredictable virus sweeps the world. She learns what it is to be really self-sufficient, the joys of outdoors shops, and how to live when everything she’s used to is gone. I raced through it in maybe a day and a half - incredible.
And then the last book I want to talk about in its own right is Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers. This was everywhere in 2020 (which is also how long it’s been on my Kindle…), was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, and got amazing reviews (some of which you can see on the paperback cover!)
From the cover art and the chat about it, though, I managed to get the impression that this was going to be an Emma Straub or Maggie Shipstead esque “contemporary highbrow women’s fiction novel,” which never shouted out at me to pick it up. Friends, I love those, but this was not that - Small Pleasures is about how a young woman journalist in post-war Kent investigates a claim of virgin birth. The blurb says “As the investigation turns her quiet life inside out, Jean is suddenly given an unexpected chance at friendship, love and - possibly - happiness.” That sums it up - I absolutely loved it. A good reminder that sometimes the packaging doesn’t capture all vim of a book (although now I’ve read it, I can absolutely see how the cover is a good reflection of its themes)…
Last month, I told you I had 560 unread digital books (and heaven only knows how many physical ones); now, that number is 547. (I’m writing this on September 14th, admittedly, so it’s not an exact end-of-August position… please excuse my methodological inexactitude 😇)
I also did a pretty good job of reading books I’ve acquired across the last few years, which is great! For ebooks, I can see exactly when I bought something, and the same for paper books if I bought them online - otherwise it’s a case of trying to remember where I bought it, if I’ve moved house with it, that kind of thing - once again, please excuse my methodological inexactitude…
What have you been reading lately?
Speak soon,
Lily