I would say, ‘where did August go?’, but 1) I know exactly where it went– August went to Iceland– and 2) I prefer autumn to summer, so I’m not sad to see August go.

Quick review of last month:

Iceland: Waterfalls! A cute hotel! Bookshops with gorgeous books in languages I don’t understand! Interesting new foods I can’t pronounce the names of! Close encounters with volcanoes! Unintentional encounters with the ocean!

And then,

A total solar eclipse I didn’t have to go out of my way to see!

August was pretty chill. And stellar.

Annnyway.

I got a lot more reading done that I thought I would, thanks to long airplane rides where I didn’t get nearly enough sleep and the extended hours of Icelandic twilight. Seriously, 17 hours of daylight does weird things to your circadian rhythms.

The books I read:

1. Raven Black by Ann Cleeves
2. The Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
3. H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald
4. The Martian by Andy Weir
5. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
6. Paris in Love by Eloisa James
7. The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch
8. Uprooted by Naomi Novik
9. Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

I’m currently in the middle of The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe by Ann Morgan and Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sara Moss. In September, I plan to read the following:

1. Njal’s Saga by Anonymous
2. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
3. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
4. All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
5. The Gift by Hafiz

I had planned to read Northanger Abbey in August, but that didn’t happen. That’s alright, though. It seems a little more suited to September anyway. I picked up Njal’s Saga at Mál og Menning in Reykjavik, and I’ll probably hold off reading it until later this month as, again, it seems more suited to cooler, darker times. Who knows? Maybe I’ll just hold onto it for December. We’ll see.

Except for All the Birds in the Sky, my choices for September are older, ranging from the 1200s with Njal’s Saga to the 1300s with the poetry of Hafiz, a Persian poet, to Austen’s Northanger Abbey, written in the early 1800s. The Illustrated Man is certainly newer than the rest, but having been published in 1951, it’s still older than most of the books I’ve been reading lately. I took a look at my Goodreads stats and, aside from a few dots from earlier times (The Táin, from the 1000s, and Pride and Prejudice from 1813), there is a rather large cluster of titles from the 21st century. I’m not saying that books from the 2000s are bad, just that I feel like I should branch out more, timewise. I’ve enjoyed many books from across the centuries and since I have a bunch of them getting older and dustier on my shelves, I should probably read them.

 

It occurs to me that September marks the beginning of pumpkin spice season, and apparently the onslaught of Pumpkin Spice Everything is going to be worse than ever. I like a good pumpkin pie as much as the next person, but does everything have to have it? There are some things nutmeg just doesn’t belong in.