July Wrap-up and August Reading Plans
Have I been spending too much time in Gilead?
July was a good month, with a 5-star, four 4-star reads, three 3-star reads and one DNF. I had three weekends at home, something which is quite rare for me, and we had some nice weather for reading out on the porch.
Books mentioned:
The Land in Winter — Andrew Miller
A Good Man is Hard to Find (Short Story) — Flannery O’Connor
A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver
The Wager — David Grann
The End of Woke — Andrew Doyle
Dragon Keeper — Robin Hobb
The Handmaid’s Tale — Margaret Atwood
The Testaments — Margaret Atwood
ADHD 2.0 — Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey
😍Loved
📖 The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1985
Fiction, eBook (Libby), Audiobook (Narr. Elisabeth Moss)
I listened to the audiobook of this in April while I was pressure washing our fences and driveway. I was halfway through watching season 1 of the TV show and was thoroughly enjoying it, so naturally I had to read the book immediately. At that time I was in a bit of an audiobook slump and I didn’t take it in properly. We finished the final season of the TV show in July, so I figured I’d read the book again, this time with my eyes. That turned out to be a good move and I enjoyed it a lot, so much so that I carried right on into the sequel. There’s just something about this world that intrigues me—it’s rich and interesting and has a feeling of just about being possible that makes it really eerie.
👍🏻👍🏻Liked a Lot
📖 The Land in Winter, Andrew Miller, 2025
Fiction, Physical Book (Library)
I just happened to catch an interview with author Andrew Miller on the radio by chance while driving through Argyll at midnight. It was a rerun of a Radio 4 show called Take Four Books and the interview took place at the Hay Festival. Miller had just won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has since had this novel longlisted for the Booker Prize. I don’t normally follow awards and build reading lists from nominations—my TBR is already long enough without all that!—, but this one piqued my interest. I’ve always loved winter themes, and this book has that in spades. It’s set during an unseasonal cold snap in the UK in January 1963 and follows the lives of two couples in rural southern England. The basic plot is about infidelity, not something I’m particularly interested in reading about, but Miller’s prose and his use of scene and setting really drew me in and I ended up really enjoying this book. I particularly loved the scene of one of the wives sitting on a cushion on the kitchen floor, leaning against the Aga for warmth and reading a sci-fi novel with a cup of tea and a cigarette.
I enjoyed this novel enough that I’ll probably seek out more of Miller’s work.
📖 A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver, 1994
Fiction, Physical Book
This was recommended by
on her Substack (this post). I’ve read poetry on and off over the years but often feel like I’m missing something. I hadn’t heard of Mary Oliver before. Since getting this handbook she’s cropped up in my feeds quite a lot, a bit like when you buy a particular kind of car and you start noticing them on the roads. I’ve yet to get a collection of Oliver’s poetry, but I have two in mind that I’ve recently seen recommended: A Thousand Mornings, recommended by Carolyn Marie on YouTube; and American Primitive, recommended by in her nightstand interview.A Poetry Handbook is short but full of useful information on the technical side of poetry and includes many examples of poetry to illustrate the discussion points.
Oliver advocates reading as much poetry as you can:
A lot of what she talked about made sense to me as a musician and an accomplished guitar player. Listening to music comes first, followed by imitation and then a style develops over time. It’s like the old adage of having to learn the rules first before one can effectively start breaking them.
I learned a lot from this book and followed up on a few poems and poets she referred to. I particularly enjoyed Snowbound by John Greenleaf Whittier.
The book ends with this wonderful quote:
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision—a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.
Yes, indeed, Mary Oliver.
📖 The Wager, David Grann, 2023
Non-fiction, eBook (Libby)
This was a recommendation from a fellow bookish creator and bookshop co-owner Ross Hardy on my one-year anniversary video on BookTube. It’s an enthralling story of seafaring, shipwreck and mutiny. It follows The Wager, a square-rigged Royal Navy ship that was part of a fleet that set out round Cape Horn to capture a treasure-laden Spanish galleon. It was shipwrecked off the coast of Chile in 1741 and the survivors ended up on an island that became known as Wager Island. It was a thrilling read that was way out of my usual reading zone, with excellent writing and characters.
📖 The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-revolution, Andrew Doyle, 2025
Non-fiction, Audiobook (Spotify), (Narr. Andrew Doyle)
I set out on a journey during the pandemic to learn what ‘woke’ meant and it was a bumpy road. One author and commentator who helped me on that journey was Andrew Doyle. His previous book The New Puritans was excellent and, if anything, The End of Woke is even better. The main theme in Doyle’s discussion of the culture war is authoritarianism, whether it be from the left or the right. Spoiler: it’s a bad thing irrespective of your politics. I loved his discussion on free speech, including the chilling spectre of #nodebate, a phenomenon that I actually saw online during the madness. If we can’t have reasoned debate, then where are we? I’ve read a lot around these issues and Doyle’s books is one of the most readable. It’s erudite and reasoned, coming from an author with deep knowledge of history, culture and literature. I have seen some ad hominem reviews that discuss errors in some of the facts Doyle presents: I’m not about to fact check them all, preferring to give Doyle the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging that he’s human and might well have made a mistake or two.
My biggest quibble with the book is with its title: I don’t think woke has ended. Maybe it has peaked and is now in its decline, but authoritarianism is still at hand and the capture of the institutions is endemic. I look forward to Doyle’s next book if he decides to write one.
👍🏻Liked
📖 A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor, 1953
Fiction, Short Story, eBook
After reading The Duma Key by Stephen King, I listened to the Kingslingers episodes on the novel. They had a guest on to discuss it, Kim C. She runs her own Stephen King podcast and I sought it out and listened to her conversation with horror Author, John Langan. They were discussing King’s newest short story collection, You Like it Darker. One of the stories, On Slide Road Inn, is heavily inspired by O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, so I thought I’d give it a read. And boy was it dark! I’d never heard of O’Connor before and may well find a story collection. Oh, and I should probably get You Like it Darker as well.
📖 Dragon Keeper, Robin Hobb, 2009
Non-fiction, Physical Book
This was my first time reading the Rainwild Chronicles, the fourth series in the overarching Realm of the Elderlings series. I was expecting to follow the same characters that featured in the Liveship Traders trilogy, but Dragon Keeper has all new characters and only small cameos for the Liveship characters. Hobb’s writing style is an engaging as ever and this was a fun and easy read. The concept of disabled dragons is a clever plot idea. Where it falls down for me is that it feels a lot more ‘young adult’ than the other books I’ve read in the Realm of the Elderlings, and it’s also leaning towards ‘romantasy’, a subgenre that I really don’t care for. I have no beef with YA; in fact I enjoy a lot of YA and children’s literature. I just wan’t expecting it. But the whole romantasy element has me wondering whether I’ll continue with the Rainwild Chronicles, as I’ve read in some Goodreads reviews that the next book in the series is even more in that direction than this one.
📖 The Testaments, Margaret Atwood, 2019
Fiction, eBook (Libby), Audiobook (Narr. Bryce Dallas Howard, Ann Dowd, Mae Whitman)
This novel gets a lot of shade on Goodreads and I’m not sure why. I didn’t love it as much as I did A Handmaid’s Tale, but I still enjoyed it. I thought it wrapped up the story of Gilead in a satisfactory way. I read this after having finished the whole TV show, which I also enjoyed. It’s got me feeling like reading more Atwood, perhaps returning to Oryx and Crake and then following up on that series.
The premise is that we’re now 15 years after the end of Handmaid and we’re reading the testimonies of three characters: Aunt Lydia, Baby Nicole and Hannah (Offred’s two daughters). Baby Nicole is in Canada and being hidden by the underground organisation Mayday, and Hannah is being brought up to be a Gilead Wife. These three testimonies bring the characters together is a reasonably interesting, if somewhat contrived way, and it’s the contrivance that bothers me a little. But if the characters didn’t come together, we wouldn’t really have got the satisfying ending, so I still enjoyed it.
😬DNFs
📖 ADHD 2.0, Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey, 2021
I struggled with this, which surprised me because I enjoyed their previous ADHD book, Driven to Distraction. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad book; it has more to do with my expectations’ not being met. The book presents a surface-level analysis of ADHD and anyone who has done any reading around the condition won’t find anything new in this book. If, however, you haven’t done much reading, then this would be a good book to start with.
Fiction vs Non-fiction
Non-fiction
August Reading Plans
Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
Reading with Henry Eliot
The Karamazov Brothers, Dostoyevsky
- still hasn’t come back to her Substack since April, so I’m picking up this novel again and hope to finish it in August. It’s proving to be a very rewarding experience. And if you’re seeing this Dana, we miss you!
The City and its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami
Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction, Andrea Barrett
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King
I hope you all had a good reading month and are looking forward to August as much as I am!
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I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
I recommend Mary Oliver’s “Devotions.” You’ve inspired me to take down my copy of “A Poetry Handbook” and to finally read it.