August was such a busy month. My roof finally got replaced. Yay! Now I’m broke, though. 🤣 Home stuff is just so expensive, and the roof took a nice chunk out of our savings. Despite the cost, I am extremely grateful to have it all finished and to have had the resources to keep a functional roof over our heads. My wife and I also visited what could potentially become our new home. She had a site visit at a potential employer in the Midwest, and we both really loved it there. Fingers crossed that everything works out. I’d definitely like to leave this Louisiana heat behind.

On the blogging front, my blog hopping has still been extremely limited. I hope that will change soon, but if we end up moving in the near future, it probably won’t get any better for a while. I did participate in the Trope-ical Readathon in August, though. It went pretty well all things considered, even though I didn’t quite finish all the prompts like I usually do.

What I’ve Read

Books & Audiobooks

August was a somewhat better reading month than July because things finally started quieting down a bit. I finished 14 books for a total of 5,492 pages. I completed most of the Trope-ical Readathon prompts, all but two of them. My average rating came in a little low in August at 3.82 out of 5. I usually average at least 4 stars, but I think my mood made me rate a little harsher than I typically do. Nothing stands out as being particularly awful, but there were some books that I expected to love much more than I did (e.g. The Girl With No Reflection, The Final Empire). The books I finished in August are listed below (ratings link to my review, if available):

• The Sky on Fire by Jenn Lyons (📖 / 4⭐)
• You Had Me at Happy Hour by Timothy Janovsky (📱 / 3.75⭐)
• These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs (🎧 / 4.25⭐)
• The Girl With No Reflection by Keshe Chow (📖 / 2.75⭐)
• Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell (🎧 / 4⭐)
• The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer (📱 / 3.75⭐)
• Fool Moon by Jim Butcher (📖 / 4⭐)
• The Witch and the Tzar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore (🎧 / 3.75⭐)
• Time’s Agent by Brenda Peynado (📱 / 4⭐)
• Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth W. Harl (🎧 / 3.5⭐)
• Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi (📱 / 4.25⭐)
• The Grace of Wild Things by Heather Fawcett (🎧 / 4.25⭐)
• Dark Water Daughter by H. M. Long (📖 / 3.75⭐)
• The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson (🎧 / 3.5⭐)

Comic Books

One of my goals for the year is to read more comic books. Specifically, I set the arbitrary number at 100 floppies, but I’d love to read way more than that this year because I am years behind on issues at this point. I didn’t read any comic books in August. Womp. Womp. It really puts me behind for the year. So, I’m going to have to kick my comic reading into high gear for the rest of the year…

Progress On My 2024 Reading Goals

This year I am keeping things much simpler. I don’t have as many specific goals to track and am just trying to go with the flow. I do want to keep some sort of record of the trackable ones, though. So, here’s a quick peek at how my year is going so far.

• Goodreads Challenge: 117/100 books (+14 in August) – COMPLETED!!
• Storygraph Pages Challenge: COMPLETED!!
• Read from My Shelves: 39 books [27 physical, 12 audio] (+4 in August)
• Books Unhauled: 27 sold on Pango (+0 in August)
• Read Comic Books: 54/100 floppies (+0 in August)
• Read Pre-2024 ARCs: 4/14 ARCs (+0 in August)

Apparently, August was the month of zero. lol. I sold zero books on Pango, and I read zero comics and backlog ARCs. I did read some stuff from my shelves, though. So, the month wasn’t a complete bust on the goals front.

Final Thoughts

This was my slowest blogging month ever. I wrote fewer posts in August than any other month since I started blogging. My views dipped accordingly, but they didn’t fall off a cliff as much as I expected thanks to SEO. You can find the few posts I did write in August in my blog archives if you are interested in checking them out. I still managed to add a huge number of books to my shelves in August (yes, again!), which you can see in my book haul post.

Overall, I had a decent month of reading. My average rating was 3.82 in August, and my favorite book was These Burning Stars. What was your favorite book from August? Let me know down in the comments!

Thank you to everyone who has visited the blog and engaged with comments and/or likes! I appreciate all of you and always enjoy reading your input in the comments. I hope everyone is having a great September!