Favourite July Reads – Sunday Stack #15

Hello Lovelies! Happy August! I’m sure like me you are absolutely baffled that we are in August. This year is simultaneously the slowest and the quickest year I feel like there has ever been. July was definitely a much trickier month for me, reading and life-wise, so I’m quite happy to see the end of it. August promises to bring better things, with me moving into a new house, a whole month of holidays (gosh I love being a teacher), and just an opportunity to breathe. I’m not sure what my blog content is going to be like this month (with the move etc) but I am desperate to try an maintain my schedule of Thursday and Sunday for posting on my blog. I may deviate from the usual bookish content a bit as I decorate the house and explore my new area, but I’m hoping that I will catch a bit more of a reading bug this month as, like I said, I definitely struggled in July.

I only managed 6 books this month, and a lot of those books I sadly just did not enjoy reading, despite many that I really looked forward to. In true ‘babblesnbooks’ fashion, I’m not going to dwell on the books that I didn’t enjoy, but instead focus on those I did. Reading is so subjective that I always hate the idea of putting negetive views against something someone has worked so hard on if they are only based on what I do or do not like. I am only one person after all!

What I read this month:

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer – ****

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes – ****

Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic by Daisy Butcher – *****

Crushed by Kate Hamer – **

Upright Women Wanted by Sarah Gailey – ***

Emma by Jane Austen- ***

Evil Roots: Killer tales of the Botanical Gothic by Daisy Butcher

I picked up this read for my A Level planning and it completely blew me away. I was only really looking for a copy of ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne but every one of the tales within these collections is fantastics. What I particularly liked about this short story collection is that each story is prefaced with a description about the tale, the writer, and the context in which it is written. My one criticism with short story collections is that I can sometimes find it quite off-putting to jump from one writing style to the next. The great advantage of the prefaces was that is helped bridge that shift, meaning you weren’t plunged into a new writing style but introduced to it slowly. I have just bought the next two books in this series and I cannot wait to dive into them.