August Wrap-Up and September TBR

I didn't have a very productive reading month. This was partly intentional, as I explained in my August TBR post, but a couple of other factors got in the way of more reading too. Firstly, I spent ten days away at a festival (not a lot of reading time), and secondly I split up from my boyfriend of two years (trash tv being a much easier distraction than literature, and my own writing being much better therapy).

The first book I finished this month was We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, and you can see my review of it here if you haven't checked it out already.

The next book I read was If You Find Me by Emily Murdoch. This is about two young sisters who live in the woods with their drug taking, mostly absent, mother. One day, a strange man and women find them, and it is revealed that the man is the girls father who has come to take them home. I was mostly disappointed in this book, and felt it could have gone into a lot more depth of the lead characters trauma. YA books are normally very good at exploring trauma in a young person without it being too in your face, but this book almost brushed off the trauma completely, making the traumatic passage at the end feel very heavy handed.

The final book I finished this month was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. This book is centered around the rape and murder of a young girl, and is told from her point of view as she watches over her family and friends after her death. For me, this book almost had the opposite problem to If You Find Me. The traumatic scene is right at the beginning of this book, and is very well written but the story looses its momentum as soon as the reader is made aware that the family are going to be okay. The last fifty of so pages felt almost redundant, although the rest of the story is excellently written.

I also started reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I am just under 400 pages through and mostly enjoying it so far. I've also started watching the film, and I'm planning on doing a combined book/movie review once I've finished both.

This month, other than finishing Cloud Atlas I have very few concrete reading plans. I've borrowed How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid from the library, so I'll have to read that before the month is out. My term starts on the 22nd of this month too, so I'll have to start reading Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer too. Other than that, I need to do further work on my dissertation plans and do more preparatory reading for my Traumatergies module.

If you are interested in any of the academic reading I'll be doing at uni, let me know and I can make a post about what sort of things I'll be reading. To get in contact, you can either leave a comment below or tweet me @VickiMaitland