Another month down, and July is usually my biggest reading month! We had two long road trips plus one family reunion with enough downtime to blow through a few books! I read 11 books in July, with 8 books being fiction and 3 books nonfiction. I had a pretty wide range of some books I loved, some were just ok and some were just not all that great. I have a huge TBR stack that I still wanted to get through over the summer, but I think that summer reading is just about over for me and it’s time to reset my library checkouts and take most of them back, since they are just kind of hanging over my head right now!
Here are the books that I read in July:
Don’t Make Me Pull Over
My Review: This book was a totally unexpected delight! The author writes nostalgically of growing up in the 70s and his epic family roadtrips. He goes off on tangents of the history of the US Highways, Motels, Cars, seat belts, and anything else related to road trips! Even though I wasn’t alive in this time period, I still thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who still drives around the country with their whole family packed into the backseat.
Beach Reads and Deadly Deeds
My Review: This one was just ok- it was half romance, half cozy murder mystery. I found it completely unbelievable that one random lady on vacation figured out an entire murder that no one else seemed to be able to solve, and I figured out the “plot twist” about halfway through- but overall, I still did enjoy reading this one! It was the perfect beach/pool read that required absolutely no additional thought from me!
The Correspondant
My Review: I heard about this one on From the Front Porch, and I tend to dislike the books that Annie loves (we have opposite book styles), so I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like this one. Well, I was WRONG! I loved it! This is the story of an elderly lady who prefers to correspond with people in her life via letters. She is a bit crotchety and stuck in her ways, but throughout the story we fall in love with her as we learn her story- the triumphs and tragedies that have led her to who she is today. There are very few books that I can confidently recommend to almost anyone, and this is one of them!
The Love Haters
My Review: Another perfect summer beach/pool read! I have heard some chatter that this one wasn’t great, but I actually really loved it! I liked the Enemies to Lovers trope, and I loved the Coast Guard information in this story. Of course, we had to suspend belief in several points of the story, but as far as a Katherine Center book goes, this one was great! I absolutely love her books.
Mansion Beach
My Review: I am sucker for the “rich people behaving badly” books, but this one was a miss. There were rich people, and they did behave badly, but they never had a “redemption arc” and that really bothered me. This book also featured a murder and throughout the whole story we were trying to figure out who was murdered and who did the murdering- but it wasn’t really mysterious or suspenseful. We were just moving along with the plot of the book knowing that a murder had happened. In my opinion, it didn’t really work. And I was annoyed that I had to wait until the last 3 pages of the book to find out who had died and who was responsible.
The Opt-Out Family
My Review: This book is VERY similar to The Anxious Generation. The basic premise is this: technology is harming us, and as parents we need to really think about a lot of different things before we allow our children to have technology. It’s a very sobering topic and one that I think needs to be talked about! However, I think that you can probably pick just one of these books- Opt-Out OR Anxious Generation and get all the info you need on the topic.
The Turn of the Key
My Review: I want to like thrillers, but so far I just don’t. This one was good- a girl becomes a nanny for a family but believes the house is haunted and strange things are happening and then someone dies and it’s a little bit twisty but not too scary. I finished the book thinking “huh, that was interesting” but didn’t feel like my mind had been bent or anything like that. It was a little bit dark (not scary, just macabre) but not terrifying.
Tangled Up in You
My Review: I adored this one. I love the clean, sweet story that is parallel to Disney’s Rapunzel. It was predictable but there were some moments that made me laugh out loud, and I truly felt bought into the romance. These is the second one of this series that I have read and adored, so I will absolutely be reading the rest of them!
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
My Review: Ah, another Newberry book. I read this one out loud to the kids and we listened to some of it on audio during our long road trips. This one was about a mouse named Mrs. Frisby who needs the rats to help her, and she in turn helps the rats. I really enjoyed the strong character qualities portrayed in this book, as well as the hard work ethic and “found family”. My kids did enjoy this one!
Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
My Review: Ok, I confess that I didn’t fully finish this one before it was due back at the library, but I finished enough to get a good taste and write a review! The basic premise of this book is that our medical system has gotten pretty good a solving for abrupt medical needs: broken bones, emergency trauma, surgery, etc. But what we have not figured out is how to PREVENT the long-term illnesses like cancer, dementia and diabetes. He proposes various ways to go about preventing these illnesses, which includes a lot of medical jargon and implementing a preventative lifestyle – sleep, nutrition, exercise, scans that identify the diseases at an early stage. Overall, this was an extremely informative book and I felt like I agreed with most of his basic premises (although the detailed medical jargon was a LOT).
Okay for Now
My Review: This was the June Everyday Reading book club pick, and it is a YA book chronicling the “coming of age” of a young boy in the 60s. He has a loving mother, an abusive father, a brother who is making poor choices, and a brother who has been severely wounded in Vietnam. He is living in a new town, and finds unlikely friends along the way. It’s a sweet story and not one I would have picked up on my own, so I’m glad the book club motivated me to read it!
And that is a wrap on July! I have a big stack of August books that I just know I’m not going to be getting through all of them, but one can try, right? Here are some of the ones on my radar:
Happy Wives
My Dear Hemlock
Julie Chan is Dead
The Mailman
The Page Turner
Ghost
How to Break Up with Your Phone
That sounds like a wonderful month of reading!