August’s Reads
Total books/audiobooks/short stories read in 2025 by month end: 98.
We are shifting now into late Summer, warm, dreamy days and peaceful nights, and the last chunk of the school summer break. I have been taking a lot of family time and making sure I spend time with my children before they vanish back to school and university, as I am sure everyone is right now. Lots of good food and relaxation, what a lovely time of year! I achieved much smaller numbers of books read this month, but read some huge bestsellers, a variety of inputs, and there were some personal preferences over last month.
The first title to mention this month is Evil Eye by Madhuri Shekar. This is only available in audiobook form for a very good reason; it is written as a series of narrated telephone calls. This production is immense fun, and I strongly advise picking it up. The stand out character for me was the father, who manages to seem so terribly henpecked just by voice delivery. This is not a long book by any means, but it has a twist, some shocks, family life, and some really great humorous moments.
My second shout out is for The Hillside Stranglers by Darcy O’Brien. Reading this is not for the faint of heart, it is truly sickening, but also viscerally real in its depiction of the actions taken by the Stranglers towards their victims. Compared to many true crime books I have read (and this is a favourite genre of mine), I personally also found it victim-sympathetic, but achieved through the means of forcing the reader to imagine they are right there in these peoples’ shoes. It is an awful, terrible thing to read.
Next up is Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle. I gulped this one down, and feel it is a bestseller for good reason. It holds a very unsubtle mirror up to the entertainment industry, and what it reflects really is not very pretty. The issues highlighted in this horror novel exist in books too, with non-white and LGBTQ writers often having a harder time going mainstream than those who are white and straight. I am a huge lover of World Fiction, and so feel this is a real shame, and not necessarily down to the readers; often we notice (and therefore read) what appears on bestseller lists, which are of course curated for us.
I’m going to make an honourable mention for Marigold: An Investigation of an American Haunting here. This is not a perfect read; I gave it three stars. I felt the pacing was off, and I easily foresaw the ending, which would be fine if that was the intention of the writer, but I wasn’t sure that was the case. What I absolutely loved about this is that it is a horror story written, produced and delivered as an episodic podcast; something different happens in each ‘podcast episode’. This is the only thing I have read in this format all year, and I felt it was worth mentioning just for that, but it is in fact also solidly written.
Now for the big hitter on the list; Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. This is another difficult read for many because of the format. The protagonist, who is never named and is the mother of a toddler, believes she is, or really is, turning into a dog. I personally loved it, felt it was fantastic throughout, and loved the ending (in case you do not know, the ending is a particular bone of contention for many readers). I could not stop reading, and drank it down by staying up late into the night to keep going, a habit that made the content seem even more eerie. As a mother, and particularly as someone who has been an exhausted, confused, antisocial mother, I also found the content inherently relatable. The sense of being inhabited by, and then in thrall to, a tiny alien force is something I have even described myself. This is a feminist text, but to me it lets the anger women feel seep out onto the page where it can be seen and understood, because we are angry, aren’t we? Or at least, if we’re not, maybe we should be.
As always, my thoughts on everything I have read are available in brief on each of the book pages in my read list. Here I talk about books that have stuck out to me for some reason, but that does not mean I have not loved and enjoyed everything I have read, so if something suits you, feel free to take a look at the book pages or ask me about it.
