Hi, it's Maija here with my August Reads and
Receipts. In these videos I go through what I read, my TBR count, how I did with my challenges,
and what books I have bought that month. And the goal of all of this is to get my physical
TBR count down. Usually I have a full script for these videos, but that has become quite cumbersome
and I'm just gonna try to do this with just a few notes, because I have been [having] trouble
getting into the headspace to do more taxing videos lately. So let's
see how I do. As always,
timestamps will be in the description for specific books, and let's start with the Reads. My TBR
count at the start of the month was 68 books. I started August by reading an owned ebook, and
that one was Thornbound by Stephanie Burgis, which is a fantasy novella, and it's a fantasy of
manners series and this is the third novella in the Hardwood Spellbook series. The novella series
is set in this alternate England called Angland, so it's like England with magic and F
ae. And there
has been three novellas, this is the second one to star Cassandra Harwood. The first one was
Cassandra Harwood, then there was a prequel, and then this third one is about Cassandra Harwood
again. So Cassandra is the first woman magician of the nation, but she subsequently lost her magic -
and that's not a spoiler, that's where the first novella starts. So she doesn't have or can't use
magic anymore, she burned it all out, so if she tries to use it again she will probably die.
So
in this novella I liked the Fae part of the plot, the supernatural part, and I liked the ending, but
I had a lot of trouble with the other parts of the plot. So I liked the setting, it has a school
setting, but the main character wasn't really allowed to do anything in that setting, because
the majority of the time of the novella was spent on people rebuking the main character about her
life choices and it was very tiring to read and I didn't find it fun at all. So she couldn't
really d
o anything without people harping on her and bringing her down, and I just had a bad time
with it. But, like I said, I liked the Fae parts and I liked the ending, so I gave it three stars
in all. Then from the library I read the horror novella The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer
Giesbrecht. This one has two main characters, there's Johann, who's a murderer with no morals,
and there's Florian, who is a magician with a vengeance. And these two form a partnership and
later a romance, and it'
s all very murdery. So this one is set in this dark port city with sort
of a historical Nordic feel, which is why I called it Elend /hɑːven/ and not /ˈheɪvən/ because it
had like this Nordic sense to me. But it's set of course in a fantasy land and not in our world.
I really liked the characters, they were a bit twisted, and I would have hoped that the novella
would have focused more on them and what makes them tick, and also the relationship of the two. I
really liked especially Florian, h
e's just my kind of character. He was the mage and this sort of
"mage with a grudge doing dark things" is really interesting to me. Basically the atmosphere wasn't
all there for me, I wanted a bit more 'oomph'. This felt like something I could have really
loved with the darkness and the magic, but it wasn't quite there for me. I gave it three
stars. Then I read my Netgalley review copy of The Four Profound Weaves by R. B. Lemberg. This is a
high fantasy, I think novella? It's a bit under 20
0 pages so either a short novel or a novella.
I have done a full review of this, and I will link it above and below, but I will just say that
this is a beautifully written desert fantasy with great atmosphere and weaving magic, which I really
liked, and it follows two trans elders who go on a quest. There's Uiziya who wants to learn to weave
from death, and then there's the nameless man, nen-sasaïr, who wants to get a new name. This one
got four stars from me. Next I picked up an owned phys
ical book, and that one was the horror
anthology The Humanity of Monsters edited by Michael Matheson and this was a buddy read. And
this was published by ChiZine Press, I'm gonna say that right now, and this is a publisher that
sort of imploded last year because it was revealed that they didn't pay their authors on time or
at all, and there was also a lot of bullying and harassment unearthed and, like, a bad working
atmosphere there. So this publisher sort of has gone away and I wouldn't, l
ike,
recommend buying their stuff if it's still available. But I have bought
this past Worldcon, so in 2019, before all this came to light. And the editor of this anthology
revealed that they had to fight really hard to get the authors compensated. That's about the
publisher, let's talk about the book. This didn't have a lot of stories that I loved and quite a
few of them were quite forgettable, but let's talk about my favorites first. My favorites were The
Bread We Eat in Dreams by Cather
ynne M. Valente, which is about a demon who lives on Earth, and it
has very lush writing in the Valente way. And I also really liked The Emperor's Old Bones by Gemma
Files, which is very dark and brutal, and it was like a perfect fit for this book and the title of
the book. I'm googling how to say "proboscis"...proboscis? /pɹoʊˈbɒsɪs/. My surprise favorite of the
anthology was Proboscis by Laird Barron, and it was a surprise because it had unlikable
characters and an uninspiring setting - l
ike, unlikable characters in a way that I wasn't
interested really in them, and I really usually need an interesting character to follow. And I
also hadn't read anything from the author before, so I didn't know if i would like them or
not. But you can really get me with a great "something happens on video that didn't happen
when you filmed it" scene, and that one hooked me. This story was also the only one that had a
feeling of dread for me, like I felt this constant growing feeling of drea
d when I was reading
it, and I liked how a lot of things were left unexplained. So those three were my favorites,
other than that I really liked The Things by Peter Watts, which is like a retelling of The
Thing movie. I did have a few gripes especially with the word of the use 'rape' in the story, but.
Then I also liked In Winter by Sonya Taaffe, which was a Snow Queen retelling - just because I like
Snow Queen, it was like really short. And another quite short story was Silvia Moreno-Garci
a's A
Handful of Earth, which was a short look into the "lives" of Dracula's brides... so the undead-
death of Dracula's brides? But anyway, I really enjoyed that. So those were the high points for
me. One thing that I didn't understand was why Tasting Gomoa by Chinelo Onwualu was chosen
as the opening story - I don't think it works as an opening. Like I said, a lot of the stories
were quite forgettable, but there was one story that I skipped, and that one was Night They Missed
the Horror
Show by Joe Lansdale. This one was written in the 80s, and it is very 80s horror.
And this is the kind of horror that tries to be gritty and disturbing by focusing on mundane,
real world evil, and I don't really care about that sort of horror. I decided to skip this one
only after glancing at the first two pages, so the first spread of the story. On the first page the
main characters, who are racists, use the N-word repeatedly, and it's written out in full, and then
on the next page a dog t
hat's been hit by a car is described in, like, vivid glory detail, and
this is the sort of horror that I just can't with. So I gave this one 2 or 2.5 stars, maybe 2?
And reading this brought my TBR down to 67 books. Then I picked up another owned physical book, and
that one was The True Queen by Zen Cho, which is so pale-- maybe here? Yeah. So I picked up The
True Queen, and this is a historical fantasy of manners novel. This is set in the same world as
Sorcerer to the Crown, so this magica
l Regency England, but this book is also set in Malaysia and
the Land of the Fae. Two sisters, Muna and Sakti, are cursed and they have to leave their island for
London to get help from the Sorceress, but they have to travel through the Land of the Fae to
get there. And Muna is our main character and she has to save her sister Sakti without revealing
too much of their magic or the situation to the English, who she doesn't completely trust. I
have to say that this one was quite predictable;
I guessed some things like right from the
start, and then when we were given more clues, I guessed the rest. Usually I'm not a plot-focused
reader, I'm a character-focused reader, but this one was a bit too predictable for even me.
What I liked was the dragons, I really liked the dragon characters. They, like, do a trip and see a
bunch of dragons. I was especially happy about a dragon having a Regency nickname like 'Rollo'.
I also really liked Mak Genggang, who is this powerful Malaysian wi
tch, but she doesn't feature
a lot in either of these books, I just like her. She features more in this one than Sorcerer to the
Crown. But I did like Sorcerer to the Crown more. Even though both of these are light in tone and
occasionally silly fantasies, Sorcerer to the Crown had, like, more serious topics that it dealt
with on the side. So this one got three stars, and it brings my TBR count down to 66 books.
Then I reread the first two novellas in the science fiction novella series Murd
erbot Diaries,
so All Systems Red and Artificial Condition by Martha Wells. I own these as ebooks. So these are
told from the point of view of Murderbot, who is this security android who has hacked its governor
module and given itself the moniker of Murderbot while continuing to protect its-- protect
its clients and also watching a lot of, like, space soap dramas to pass the time - even while
on the job, yes. These are just a lot of fun, Murderbot is a lovable character with social
anxiety
, and also very relatable at times. The second one is my favorite of the novellas, because
that one has the research transport character ART, who is interacting with Murderbot, and I find them
lovely together, and I love ART. Even though the second one actually has less memorable or less
well-defined human characters, I don't mind that at all. I gave the first novella four stars
and the second one five stars. I also read a manga in August, I read from the library Delicious in
Dungeon volume
8 by Ryoko Kui, and this one is a fantasy manga. So this one tells about a group of
fantasy adventurers who are exploring a dungeon, but they run out of stuff to eat, so they cook
the monsters they encounter. So this weird high fantasy manga / cooking manga mix, and it's
hilarious, and I'm just so happy that there's this high fantasy comedy manga of such great quality
around! I love the art, I find the jokes funny, the characters are lovable, the dungeon lore is so
great and we learn more
and more with each volume, there's just so much to the world and we just
keep getting more! And this one was the first volume that I went and gave five stars to. I also
went back and gave my favorite volume, Volume 6, five stars. I had given it 4.5 stars before, but I
changed it to five stars, because I just admitted how much I love this series. I highly
recommend it. And finally I read from the library Convenience Store Woman or 'Lähikaupan
nainen', because I read the Finnish translation, b
y Sayaka Murata. So this is Japanese contemporary
literature, and I had no idea what I was getting into! I thought "slice-of-life with the beauty
of the routine of working in a konbini (or convenience store)", and yes, I got some of
that, but I also got a lot of other stuff, as well! It took some very weird, unexpected
directions, some of which I didn't care for. So the main character is Keiko and she doesn't really
understand everyday human interaction or social codes or behavior rules, an
d she just really likes
to work at a convenience store. She thrives there because there are very set rules and routines: how
you talk to customers, what sort of stuff you do at what part of the day... So there's a routine
and your rules of interacting and rules of behavior are stated clearly. Usually in everyday
life she just guesses or models herself after other people, like her sister or her
friends. I have no idea what to rate this, because I didn't particularly care about it, but
I did
read it in two sittings and I clearly wanted to know what was going to happen and what the
book was about. I, like Keiko, mostly enjoyed the convenience store parts. So maybe it would be
like two stars because it wasn't really for me, but I can't really give it a rating. So now we're
moving on to the Receipts. Did I make progress in my 10 books to read in 2020 list? No, I didn't.
Did I make progress in my reread challenge? No, but I did start to read Dragons of Autumn Twilight
and I had a
lot of fun doing that. And then I didn't also complete my TBR jar challenge,
which was to read a book featured in a Book Haul Revisit. By now I'm, like, do I even want to
read the books that were in my book haul revisits, like books from my old hauls, if I just keep
putting them off and not doing this challenge. That's maybe something for me to think about.
So let's move on to the haul part. I bought two ebooks in August, I bought Mapping the Interior
by Stephen Graham Jones, which is a hor
ror novella that I'm currently reading for Fortnight Frights
readathon. I also bought Dragons of Spring Dawning by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. This is
the third book in the Dragonlance Chronicles, which I'm rereading. It's a nostalgic childhood
high fantasy favorite. I'm currently reading the second book, so I'm gonna get to this one soon.
Then two of my pre-orders came in, I got Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, which is the sequel to
Gideon the Ninth. This is a gothic space fantasy se
ries. This brings my TBR to 67 books. And I
got The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, the third in this fantasy series called the Masquerade, by Seth
Dickinson. And this one brings my TBR to 68 books. I just wanna say: all these three books
have, like, different finishes to the dust jacket. The first one had this, like, buttery feel - it's
right here - and the second one had this sort of gritty, bit sandy feel, and this one is just
shiny, sort of sticky thing that I don't really enjoy. So, that's a bi
t about the tactile feel of
these books. So I knew that those two pre-orders would arrive in August, so I wanted to make sure
that I read at least two books off my TBR so that my TBR count wouldn't go up, and I did manage
to do that. So I read two books off it and then I got two books in the mail. And now for the
stats: in August I read nine books, that was 1 846 pages. I read on average 60 pages a day
and took on average 9 days to read a book. And my current physical TBR number is still 68
books. So that was my August Reads and Receipts, let me know if you have read any of these books.
I hope to get the September Reads and Receipts filmed for you soon, and that's all from me
for now and I'll see you in my next video.
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