August Reading Rodeo
The books I read, loved, and didn't love this August
Let’s dig into the five books I finished this month. Since the beginning of 2022, I’ve been keeping track of what I read, and while I haven’t shared monthly roundups before on Substack, I’ve been sharing them every month on my Instagram.
Why keep track? I’m just curious to see how much and what I read naturally without trying to meet any particular reading goals. In the past, I’ve done the 52-Book Challenge, and ended up actually reading 61 books, but I was really pushing myself and it felt like too many books.
How many books do you read normally a month? Do you have an average? Do you keep track? The monthly roundups are also a good way for me to see what I actually retained from each book.
Anyway, let’s get into the books, presented in the order I read them.
1. Health at Every Size
First up, the most controversial: Health at Every Size by Dr. Lindo Bacon. (YES you can write a diet book and also have the last name Bacon.)
In a bad romance with food for many years, in 2019, I vowed to never read another diet book again. However, a well-read friend highly recommended this book, so I broke my vow.
Mistake.
I read Health at Every Size with another friend in book-club fashion where we discussed the chapters as we went along. We chatted endlessly about this book on Voxer, and it frustrated, inspired, and enraged us.
Health at Every Size is so popular that it has its own abbreviation — HAES.
Popular and controversial.
I low-key regret even reading it…
After reading the book, I posted about it on IG, and writer witch Sabrina Scott saw the post and brought to my attention that this author has been totally CANCELLED.
Apparently, the author said they used to be fat in the book, but were actually never fat… yikes. So the Twitter mob came for them. Folks also criticized them for being thin and white, but talking about the weight of women of color.
Controversy aside, I hated this book, but I give it props for generating so much useful discussion and being semi-unforgettable. It was also apparently well-researched. And the scientific studies cited in the book are valid and reputable.
The main points of the book are:
Your weight is mostly determined by genetics.
Yo-Yo dieting is worse for your health than being overweight.
Being fat isn’t that bad.
Some people are skinny and some are fat, and 99% of people can’t really change their build, so the diet-industrial-complex is an evil capitalistic lie designed to get you to spend money.
If these topics interest you, grab the book.
But if you want to keep any shred of hope that you can diet your way into a smaller body… don’t read this.
2. Fruiting Bodies
Speaking of bodies… Next up, Fruiting Bodies: Stories by Kathryn Harlan.
If you like literary fiction, eco-fiction, and short stories, absolutely get this book, it was freaking brilliant. BEAUTIFUL, STUNNING, DRIPPING, DAMP. Five Stars.
I randomly saw this book cover on Twitter and read a free sample and knew I had to buy it.
Here is my breakdown of these lovely, ecological and naturalistic, often lesbian stories:
The Stories:
Agal Bloom — Coming of age story about angsty girls, one is attracted to the other. They’re told not to swim in a poisonous lake, but of course they do. Slimy, smelly, pubescent, you’ll remember your first kiss at summer camp kind of story.
Words:
“I rolled over so that my face was in Vienna’s short hair. She still smelled like the lake, that light blue-green smell, like disappearing under water.”
Hunting the Viper King — A prodigious girl and her mentally ill father hunt for the viper king amongst the forgotten RV people of America. The viper king will turn them from humans to God.
Words:
“She tips her head to listen to the snake coiling up her white throat, whispering in her ear.”
“Nothing happened for any reason.”
“The sun flares out dangerously around the hole the moon eats in the sky.”
“Dorothy kneels by the corpse, and wonders if it will be ringed inside, like a tree, lined with the centuries of life.”
The Changeling — A bad friend convinces an adopted girl to steal her mother’s new biological baby.
Words:
“She beamed like a pillar of quartz.”
“It had a fireplace like a yawning mouth.”
“Nothing magical is safe; nothing safe is magical.”
“Being a parent, do you think you invented that? Do you think that’s something you can copy?”
Take Only What Belongs to You — A lesbian searches for lesbian meaning at the library.
Words:
“Esther feels like someone has sucked her blood.”
“I did not want to go to school. I wanted to crawl under the porch stairs, lie down, forget language, let my teeth fall out, and become a soft, sleeping animal.”
Fiddler, Fool Pair — A girl travels underground to play a card game with demons and frat boys longing to trade parts of their bodies for power.
Words:
“The small victory is sweet for its own taste.”
“Her notebook swells with observations of a secret people.”
“His anger is righteous and brittle as candy.”
“She laid Naomi bare like a moth pinned to paper.”
Is This You? — A woman’s mother keeps writing books about her and it’s driving the woman/daughter insane.
Words:
“There may be common knowledges between people who love sick people.”
“Sometimes a severed arm is as close as you can get to feeling real, the imagined thrill of pain. The sensation of being meat.”
“Furious as the smell of blood on a bbq.”
Fruiting Bodies— A woman slices mushrooms growing from her lover’s body and protects their home from male intruders.
Words:
“We all have ways of eating our lovers.”
“These things make you afraid, love and proximity to the unknown.”
“How readily knowledge came to her lips, like she licked answers off the backs of her teeth.”
“He looked like a dirty old coat tossed over the back of our couch.”
Endangered Animals— A road trip in fire season between two girls who don’t really love each other.
Words:
“Fire was the only season we had.”
“I’m getting gravel down my pants.”
“On these empty roads, she drove like a teenager who wanted to die.”
I could go on and on… I rarely highlight lines in fiction books, but I highlighted tons in this book because the writing was so damn good.
Several Short Sentences About Writing
Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg was recommended to me by author Daniel Pinchbeck in a writing workshop. It’s a short, but interesting audiobook that introduces some unique writing concepts. I’ve read a lot of writing craft books over the years and yet still learned something new from this one, so I’d recommend it to all writers.
The book sets out to debunk bad writing advice and really encourages writing not for yourself, but for the reader. Be clear, and succinct; eliminate “volunteer sentences.”
Volunteer Sentences are phrases that come to mind TOO easily because they’ve been overused, like “the sunlight peaked through the blinds.” Not exactly cliché, but we’ve heard it before. Or another, “her heart clenched.” Get rid of these volunteers and write new stuff.
This was a tough-love writing book, and it’s so short that there’s no excuse not to read it if you’re a writer of any kind.
From Strength to Strength
The fourth book of August: From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, by Arthur C. Brooks.
There are reasons why this is a #1 New York Times Bestseller; it’s full of useful information and it’s entertaining and well-written.
I LOVED this book. Audible recommended it to me and I liked it so much that when I finished listening, I ordered the hard copy and I plan to read it again.
From Strength to Strength focuses on finding happiness as you age and experience a decline in your fluid reasoning abilities. The beginning lays out hard facts about cognitive decline and research on when people “peak” and have the most success in different professions. It posits that the happiest people are those who use fluid reasoning in their youth and switch to focus on careers that require “crystallized intelligence,” AKA wisdom/ knowledge of facts in the second half of their life.
This rang true to me as I thought about my grandfather who was a veritable encyclopedia of history, and also about people like Werner Herzog, Joe Rogan, and Margaret Atwood, who use mostly crystalized intelligence in their careers and are still wildly successful at ages when many are exiting their professional prime-life.
It made me think that maybe there is value in having a very old President, though I’m not fully convinced that being president wouldn’t also require sharp fluid reasoning skills… I wish the author had actually explored this question more directly.
The book also goes into multiple religions and discusses the importance of spirituality, finding peace with death, and also details how to cultivate lifelong friendships, which he calls “Aspen groves.” It’s worth reading this book for the section on friendship alone.
I really enjoyed the mix of science, personal stories, history, and religion. Five stars.
Stringers
Stringers by Chris Panatier was the fifth book I finished this month. I was totally psyched for this book because the reviews reported it to be “the funniest horror sci-fi of all time.” And I love sci-fi, horror, and humor. What a total letdown. Overwritten, and not funny or scary. A more accurate description of the genre would be Contemporary Steampunk + Sci-Fi. Which, frankly, I don’t love steampunk books because they often involve lengthy descriptions of gear, equipment, procedures, and technical machine stuff, which this book also had…
The premise was good— an insect-obsessed nerd gets catfished and abducted by an alien, but it went downhill from there. The book was a “braid” that eventually tied together, following two characters who were both “Stringers” — beings who could see into their past lives. Plus, there was an additional third setting/character with very short chapters written in an artsy style.
I could only bring myself to care about the main, nerd character, and so found myself wanting to skip all the other chapters.
The only thing I liked about this book was its use of footnotes to explain facts about insects and hence I also got to learn about insects.
Basically, I don’t recommend this book. It was hard to even finish, and I never laughed at all. Sorry. I’m sure someone else will like it, but I didn’t.
What did you read this month? Which of these books would you pick up?
If I had to pick a favorite of the month, I’d probably say From Strength to Strength with Fruiting Bodies as a close second.