Unquiet
Things

At the onset of summer I challenged myself to read at least 25 books over the months of June, July, and August. I have an overall yearly goal (which I have already met!) but I thought it might be fun to set a specific summer reading goal, a sort of challenge-within-a-challenge.

How did I do? Well, I was going strong until mid-August, at which point I was distracted by a barely perceptible (probably imaginary) change in the air, a slight difference in the quality of afternoon sunlight through the trees. In my brief stint in living up North, these small changes signified the seasonal shifts leading to the oncoming Autumn months…and even though that’s actually kind of cute and laughable down here in FL (if anything, it gets hotter here!) there’s still something in my brain that switches on right before September and begins to look the end of summer around every corner. When I catch wind of it, my fingers begin itching for a skein of wool and wooden needles, and then, well, too bad, so sad, summer reading!

In June I managed eleven titles; six in July, and in August another six, making for a grand total of twenty three books completed in the course of my summer reading mini-challenge. Two short of my goal! Ah, well. There were a few books that I started during that time, but I am still reading, so I don’t suppose those count. And then in September when I was trapped in the house for a few days with no electricity, I read three more, but those don’t really count either!

See below for a full listing of the titles I completed over the course of the past three months, along with those read in September, and those I am still reading. I have marked the ones I thoroughly enjoyed with an “*”, and you’ll note that Grady Henrix’s Paperbacks From Hell:The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, even though I’ve not finished it, has quite a lot of *s. I think, even though it’s basically a book about books, that it’s going to be my favorite book of the year!

June:
Strangely Beautiful by Leanna Renee Hieber
Hunger by Roxane Gay*
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Snot Girl Volume One
Giant Days Volume Five
Jem and The Holograms Volume Four
Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu*
Bleed
Monstress Vol. 2
The Graveyard Apartment*
Southern Cross

July:
The Lottery (graphic novel adaptation)
Rachel Rising Vols. five, six, and seven
The Beguiled
Gilded Needles*

August:
Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth
My Pretty Vampire
One More Year*
Audition
Wet Moon*
The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington*

Early September Hurricane Reads:
Clueless
The Grip of It*
Mapping The Interior*

Still Reading:
The Dark Eidolon And Other Fantasies
Witches, Sluts, And Feminists: Conjuring The Sex Positive
Season of the Witch: How The Occult Saved Rock and Roll
Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin
Paperbacks From Hell:The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction ****