August 2023 Wrap Up #2

Welp, the second half of August was not quite as bookish as the first half. I have 4 books to update you on.

I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider - This is a collection of cute cartoons about books and people who love books. I had seen a lot of these as memes on the internet. It is cute.

Smoke by Dan Vyleta - This is what actually took up most of my reading time. It was 450 pages of very small print and small margins. I really liked it, though. In an alternate Victorian era, people show their sinful thoughts by letting off smoke. The worse the thoughts, the darker and thicker the thoughts. Except for the rich and titled of course. They are naturally sin free. Except these two boys (sons of wealthy people) find out that isn't true. The wealthy can afford special candies that keep them from smoking. Anyway, they meet someone who is doing experiments about smoke to prove something. I never worked out if they were proving it's ok to smoke, or that it isn't natural because they keep finding random people in tiny buried villages in Africa who don't smoke. It's very weird, but the pacing is fast, the characters are fantastic, and I enjoyed the experience.

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind by Alan Jacobs - So okay. What I got from this book is that readers should meet dead authors where they are. Yes, some authors had some terrible ideas about race and women's rights, etc., but that doesn't mean the rest of what they had to say was not worth reading. So far, I am on board. The subtitle is "A Reader's Guide to a Tranquil Mind". I feel like in the last chapter he may have attempted to connect his feelings about past writers to having a tranquil mind, but I didn't get it. I missed the lesson. That's too bad because a) I really like the cover of this one and b) I sure could do with a tranquil mind.

The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis - I barely squeaked this in on the very last day of August. It is a hoot! Francie is in Roswell to convince her flaky best friend not to marry a UFO nut at the UFO museum on the anniversary of the 1947 UFO crash outside Roswell. Instead, she kids abducted by an alien that looks like a tumbleweed. From there it just gets progressively weirder and more ridiculous until it wraps up with the alien and Francie and an FBI agent driving into the sunset.

And that wraps up the month! That's nine books for the month of August. I've done worse. I'll take it.