My Bookish Month of July 2021

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

Boy oh boy what a month it was, and I don’t mean that in a good way. It started great, with a few days off work, but then I got my second jab and July went to hell in a handbasket. As some of you know, fatigue is pretty much a constant in my life due to MS, but that second dose of vaccine managed to exacerbate things so I’ve basically been dead on my feet since early July. That’s been fun 🙄 Especially since last week I had to work on my weekly day off as well, due to my colleagues’ holidays. The same goes for this week but I’m off work as from 12 August so I’m trying to hang in there until then.

Thanks to my mini-holiday at the start of the month and having absolutely no energy to do anything but read in the evenings and on the weekends, I did have a brilliant bookish month. I’m so glad my fatigue was mostly physical and my brain fog wasn’t too bad, which meant I could still read cos being too knackered to read really sucks! Knowing I had a busy couple of weeks ahead and wanting to make a head start, I threw myself into the 20 books of summer challenge so I wouldn’t have to worry about blogging when being busy and exhausted, which means I now only have three books left to read and review.

For my Spanish challenge I chose an easy reread in a genre I’m not particularly fond of these days, but I do still have a weak spot for Jane Green’s Jemima J. I also read for my Agatha Christie, FairyLoot and non-fiction challenges. To shake things up I also read a few graphic novels and the few sunny days we had triggered my love for horror novels (cos reading horror out in the garden always takes me back to reading Stephen King on the summer holidays as a child) and I found myself picking up not only horror fiction but also horror non-fiction. Paperbacks from Hell turned out to be oodles of horror fun, definitely a must-read for any horror aficionado out there!

I read heaps of good books in July but these were my favourite reads of the month:

In figures July looks like this:

July
Novels: 7833 pages across 21 novels and 4 graphic novels
Audiobooks: 80 hours across 12 audiobooks

And here’s what I did in July, and some of what I’ll be posting in August:

What I read:

Velvet Was the Night, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (review to follow)
Black Reed Bay, Rod Reynolds
The Perfect Life, Nuala Ellwood (review to follow)
Come Closer, Sara Gran
A Killer Harvest, Paul Cleave
The Prison Healer, Lynette Noni
100 Ways to Understand Your Cat, Roger Tabor
Winterkill, Ragnar Jónasson
A Narrow Door, Joanne Harris
How to Be a Cat, Lisa Swerling
Heart and Brain: Body Language: An Awkward Yeti Collection, Nick Seluk
Wicked Little Deeds, Kat Ellis (review to follow)
Quiet Girl in a Noisy World: An Introvert’s Story, Debbie Tung
Happily Ever After & Everything In Between, Debbie Tung
Blood Men, Paul Cleave
The Rabbit Factor, Antti Tuomainen
Los Patitos Feos También Besan (Jemima J.), Jane Green
The Hollows, Mark Edwards
Clown in a Cornfield, Adam Cesare
Watch Her Fall, Erin Kelly
The Queen of the Cicadas, V. Castro
Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, Grady Hendrix
The Tall Man, Phoebe Locke
The Butcher, Jennifer Hillier
Murder on the Menu, Fiona Leitch

What I listened to:

When I Was Ten, Fiona Cummins
The Echo Wife, Sarah Gailey
The Players, Darren O’Sullivan
The Prank, L.V. Matthews
The Good Sister, Sally Hepworth
Songs in Ursa Major, Emma Brodie
Falling, T.J. Newman
Meet Me in Another Life, Catriona Silvey
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, J.R.R. Tolkien
A Beautiful Poison, Lydia Kang
Endless Night, Agatha Christie
Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, Rivka Galchen

What I read earlier but reviewed in July:

No Honour, Awais Khan
The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix
The Light of the Midnight Stars, Rena Rossner
Cabin Fever, Alex Dahl

I also shared an extract from The Lost Girls by Heather Young, did a cover reveal for Question Mark Press, looked at another bookish quarter in pie charts and shared a 20 books of summer update.

Let’s have a look at the books that landed on my lap in July:

A paperback I’ve read many good things about, a gorgeous FairyLoot hardback and a horror hardback I couldn’t resist:

Three eBooks I bought, one NetGalley eARC I got a widget for, and one eBook I was gifted by the author in exchange for an honest review:

One audiobook in the Audible sales, four credit buys and one audiobook added to the eBook:

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