It's time to review my reading in August. I won't lie, I'm not proud of my progress this month. Although, maybe I shouldn't think that way. I was and still am in a HUGE reading slump. Seriously, I cannot get myself to read more than a chapter at a time. Right now I'm reading Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age, and it's not that I don't like it, but I can't really get into it if you know what I mean. I don't know if that's the book's fault or something else. So this month, I only read 2 books. Neither of them was in Icelandic so I didn't fulfill my goal from last month but I'm not beating myself up about it; I still have next month.
I've been pretty tired recently and when I have time off from work, I linger in bed the entire day and listen to the same music on repeat. I go on my computer and stay in my pajamas all day. Knowing I'll be at work the next day, I don't beat myself up about this either. I haven't been in the mood to read anything lately, but maybe if I read something light after Such a Fun Age, I'll find my way out of this slump. I blame this on my menstrual cycle. The devil.
August's reads:
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
OKAY I AM WELL AWARE OF THIS PROBLEMATIC AUTHOR but I was eyeing this book on my bookshelf and wanted to relive my middle school days for a second and decided to reread this beautiful monstrosity. How she has not been sued by J.K. Rowling is a mystery to me. This book is absolutely ridiculous and I love it. I obviously don't approve of Rowell's silence on the hurt that was caused by Eleanor and Park, but with that in mind, Carry On was a great pick me up from the heaviness of A Room of One's Own, which I was reading simultaneously, and I'll definitely be finishing this trilogy. In my memory, it only gets weirder and worse as it goes on, and I cannot wait. Maybe this will cure my reading slump.
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
I'd never read anything by Woolf and I've been meaning to for the least few months, so when I found this in a second hand bookshop in Italy this summer, I decided that it was time to. It's not even 100 pages long but it always takes me a while to read older books because of the heavy English, so this took me a few weeks. I also had to break up the reading with Carry On...Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book. It reminds me a lot of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which I read for school this year. Published in the 1920s, I found it most interesting how she explains the reasoning behind women's reluctance towards working, while I've only known the modern perspective of women in the workforce being the only way towards equality. I will read it again in a few weeks and then make sure to annotate it; I want to condense my thoughts on it further.
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And that's it for August. I'm working full time in September, so again, I won't have as much time as I'd like to fulfill all my reading goals, and I also just started an online chemistry course, so I have some other commitments. I'm now in a creative writing club at work as well, so that's another thing I have to keep up, even though I don't think I'll be a perfect regular there. I find it hard to force creativity when I feel uninspired and then I just hate what I write.
I'm not sure if I'll finish Such a Fun Age. I realise that the frustrating part about it that I can't get past is the whole point of the book: the shallowness of being "woke", but sometimes life is too short to persevere when it's just not that deep.
Here's to hoping that September goes better! I've rediscovered a book café I found last summer and despite the long distance from my house and the horrible parking around it, I think I'll be visiting it for some reading and chemistry studying this month. Maybe a change in scenery is all I need.
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