My Bookish Month of July 2020

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

I’m having trouble believing another month has come and gone and it’s August already 😱 As opposed to the last couple of years we haven’t had the best summer weather here, some July days I was convinced we’d skipped the rest of summer and had just fast-forwarded to October, but as I’m writing this, the sun is out and I’m on my patio and life is good 😊

July was a busy and sometimes rather trying month. We had a Colorado potato beetle infestation. They’re cute when they’re on their own but when there’s literally thousands of them? Not so much. The beetles have gone, probably because there was little left to eat, and now we have rats in the garden 🙄 I keep thinking about that one scene from The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires *shudders*. After the whole fish debacle in June, we now have new fish in the pond (so nice to have some animals we actually chose to have 🙄😂) and it’s been brilliant AND they’re all still alive, halle-bloody-lujah!

But this is a bookish month post, so let’s talk books! I hit the ground running in terms of audiobooks, but I had a slow start with reading in the traditional way, which I guess makes sense, as I can’t do both at the same time. By the end of the month, I was listening less and reading more so the numbers have evened out, making July a pretty average month.

By now I’ve read 18 of my 20 books of summer (most of those were excellent!), I finally read The Priory of the Orange Tree, I listened to a few books that had been on my wishlist or TBR for ages and I also managed my one Spanish book, which was a Linwood Barclay that I really enjoyed. (We shall not speak of all the books that I bought.)

In figures July looks like this:

July
Novels: 4975 pages over 14 books
Audiobooks: 66 hours over 8 audiobooks

And here’s what I did last month, and some of what I’ll be posting this month:

What I read:

The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
A Ruined Girl, Kate Simants (review to follow)
A Song of Isolation, Michael J. Malone (review to follow)
The Sun Down Motel, Simone St. James
The July Girls, Phoebe Locke
Faithless, Kjell Ola Dahl (review to follow)
Epiphany Jones, Michael Grothaus (review to follow)
The Apocalypse Strain, Jason Parent (review to follow)
Dead Wrong, Noelle Holten (review to follow)
Sin Una Palabra (No Time For Goodbye), Linwood Barclay
Sins of the Father, JG Faherty (review to follow)
Precious You, Helen Monks Takhar
The Minders, John Marrs (review to follow)
The Bone Shard Daughter, Andrea Stewart (review to follow)

What I listened to:

The Cry, Helen Fitzgerald
The Other Side of the Wall, Andrea Mara
Thunder Bay, Douglas Skelton
We Sold Our Souls, Grady Hendrix
The Rust Maidens, Gwendolyn Kiste
Perfect Prey, Helen Fields
Finding Dorothy, Elizabeth Letts
Mr Nobody, Catherine Steadman (review to follow)

What I read earlier but reviewed in July:

The Bone Jar, S.W. Kane
The Waiting Rooms, Eve Smith
Shadows of the Woods, Duncan Thompson
Alpha Omega, Nicholas Bowling
Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
One By One, Ruth Ware
Come Join the Murder, Holly Rae Garcia

Last month I also shared a 20 books of summer update and an excerpt from Hinton Hollow Death Trip.

I hope you had a good month and that you are safe and well! Thanks for joining me today and happy reading xxx