August sure has slipped away, hasn’t it? Alexa, play august by Taylor Swift, thank you.
Hi besties! You know what time it is, it’s wrap-up time! As I publish this I am sitting at the airport because I’m headed to the East Coast to visit my best friend Helena — yes, of Bubbling Up With Helena fame! And I figured as I sit here because of my… 5-hour layover (wouldn’t be surprised if I end up finishing another book while I’m here) I might as well share my August wrap up, so let’s get into it!
My reading has been a little all over the place this month. With my work’s summer camp program finishing up at the beginning of the month, I was feeling pretty burnt out, so reading was put on the back burner and I was reading pretty slowly. I picked up the pace once my work vacation started — I read 6 books in 4 days, so I would say I got back to my old self pretty quickly. I definitely have gotten my excitement back for reading, and that’s a really great feeling!
Partway through the month I decided to try out the CAWPILE rating system (original introduction video / latest update video) and I am honestly LOVING it. I’ve found it especially helpful when trying to figure out ratings for books that I’m a little on the fence about. So far, it’s been working really well for me and I’ll definitely be continuing to use this system. If you’ve never heard of the CAWPILE rating system before, I would highly recommend checking it out and seeing if it may be something that you’d be interested in.
This month I ended up reading 17 books and my favorites were:
- The Narrow by Kate Alice Marshall (which I reviewed this month, the link is down below!)
- Heartstopper, Vol. 1-4 by Alice Oseman (rereads)
- The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu (ARC)
- The Getaway List by Emma Lord (ARC)
- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series by Holly Jackson (rereads)
Blog posts and vlogs I loved this month:
- I love watching Leonie’s retrospective videos — she has quite a few — and this month I watched her retrospective on the young adult fantasy golden age, and her retrospective on teen dystopian books. It’s always so interesting to see how the trends in the publishing industry start, and which books/authors seem to be the catalysts for specific subgenres gaining popularity.
- I love watching Gavin’s (How to Train Your Gavin) videos where he reads an entire series and then chats in-depth about each book. These videos definitely helped keep me entertained while at work the first two weeks of the month and although they’re long (I love long vlogs), if you want a real good laugh I can’t recommend them more! I also seriously commend all the hard work that clearly goes into these vlogs — reading the entire series, note-taking, planning the videos, filming, and editing. It’s honestly incredible. These are also really entertaining to me because all of these are TV series that I watched (and mostly loved) but never read the books for — well besides the Bridgerton books — so I loved hearing about what was the same and what was different.
- Yes, I am in my How To Train Your Gavin era because I really am just watching all of his videos. I had to also include his vlog on reading all of Jane Austen’s novels — we have a lot of similar opinions (including which novel is our favorite) and this vlog has made me so excited to continue my rereads and annotations of Austen’s works.
- I absolutely love the musical Six, it’s one of my favorites (I’ve also seen it 3 times in 3 different states, which I think is kind of cool!), so obviously I loved Helena’s post on Books (she) Would Recommend to the Six Queens
- Really, it wouldn’t be a wrap up post from me if I didn’t share links to multiple posts from Helena, so here’s another one! We both received ARCs of Emma Lord’s latest, The Getaway List, on the same day and were extremely excited about it. Helena’s review hit on all the points of the story that I loved, and while I’ll be sharing my review very soon, I definitely recommend checking out her review if you’re looking forward to The Getaway List!
My posts this month:
We finally finished our 9-week summer camp program this month — and to quote Taylor Swift, “long story short I survived”. It was an…interesting summer, talk about the epic highs and lows of youth theatre summer camps. However, while it was a truly crazy (and sometimes cruel) summer, it was another successful one and I’m very proud of everything that we accomplished. And, if I’m being honest, I am also proud of myself for running the entire 35+ summer camp program on my own for the second year in a row. It’s definitely easy to focus on the negative — especially when you’re in the thick of it — but I am trying to also recognize all the hard work that was put into this summer, and relish in that feeling of accomplishment we all felt once it was finished.
I could not be more grateful that I’ve been able to take 3 weeks off of work — this summer really burnt me out, and I made a lot of jokes about sleeping for 10 hours on my first day of vacation, but that’s kind of what I ended up doing, and it was totally what I needed. I’ve mostly just been relaxing at home, and that’s how I wanted the majority of this time off to be. The summer was SO busy (especially July, I was busy every weekend), and I really needed to slow down. I’ve done some cleaning and organizing that desperately needed to be done, and I got to visit with family that I haven’t seen in a while which was really nice.
I’m looking forward to closing out my vacation with a trip to visit Helena. We’ve been planning this trip since the beginning of the summer, and it’s definitely the perfect way to close out the summer.
I’d love to hear how the month of August treated you, and what you’re looking forward to in September!
Until next time!
I was so proud of that post, so I’m glad you liked it!
Wait I was so focused on the fact that you included my Six post that I didn’t see the Getaway List one. You’re the best <3