what are you reading in August? here's my August reading list

novels, memoirs, essays

I happen to still be reading Edward P. Jones The Known World. It is my July ‘26 novel of the month. With just a few days left to the end of the month, I have been tempted to speed up the reading, just so that I would get it off the list before the clock chimes midnight and we usher in the most awaited girlfriend’s day. The monthly deadline is a very good idea because it helps with a more disciplined and committed reading. For one thing, I have had to pick a book and continue the reading even when I didn’t feel like it. Yet it isn’t as if someone’s going to spunk me for not getting every book checked off the list. Here’s some pretty sobering counsel from Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer:

With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint. I realize it may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how easily we lose sight of the fact that words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted... Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.

Lists not withstanding, all of us should still read at whim. Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons came at such a good time for me when I had lost my momentum with most of my July reads. Reading it felt refreshing. Once I got the story going, I couldn’t read anything else until I had finished the last word. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is August’s novel of the month. The novel is annotated, don’t know by who, but I am excited to have the company of someone else’s thoughts while I read. Perhaps that’s one of the perks of buying used novels? It just might have gotten onto the hands of a very good and attentive reader who wrote in it. I have read that people lent Samuel Taylor Coleridge their books with the hope that he would write in them. It’s so amusing what G. K. Chesterton was able to do with his friend’s book. His annotated copy of Holbrook Jackson’s book Platitudes in the Making, would go on to be published as another book: Platitudes Undone.

When I started reading, it was mostly Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene, Jordan Peterson, or James Clear. I am so glad that I have grown so much in my reading that I am able appreciate good fiction, and, now, memoirs and biographies too. We all should consider having a memoir/biography that we are working through at any given time of the month. I think it’s Thomas Carlyle who says that ‘history is the biographies of great men’. Yet it won’t always be great men that we read. It usually will be people who were able to do something way better than we are doing it, and the kind of inspirations we gain from them might just place us on the right road, and still, nudge us farther on it. I knew nothing more of Wangari Maathai except that she loved trees and had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Reading her memoir, Unbowed, sort of opened me up to see and appreciate the intricacies of the rest of her life; her struggles, her frustrations, her efforts, and her unceasing relentlessness in the face of adversity and government persecution. The Bible, in Hebrews 13:7 says: ‘Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.’

This August, it will be Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness. I cannot yet say how her life story will hold up to the light. I don’t expect something so remarkable and perfect, but I am certain that I will have more than a dozen lessons to learn. I look forward to being inspired and encouraged. Alongside Day will be Anne Lamott’s Travelling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. I know already what Lamott is like, and I look forward to some really great and humorous sentences. Still, I am interested to see what the journey of faith looks and has looked like for a woman such as her.

Also, this weekend, I am reading Vldamir Nabokov’s Mary courtesy of Daniel Moran’s recommendation.

There’ll also be Essayism by Brian Dillon. From his book, I hope to learn how to properly appreciate and enjoy the essay, just like I do the novel, or, the memoir/biography. It definitely will make the experience of reading Montaigne and Emerson much much better. At least I hope so.

Please feel free to share with me, or in the comments, your thoughts about the selections. Especially if you have read any of the titles and you have a word or two of counsel or encouragement. Also let me know if you mean to read, or will be reading, any of the titles alongside me. It’s always so great to have companions.

In summary then, this my August reading list:

1. The Known World by Edward P. Jones

2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

3. The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day (The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist)

4. Mary by Vladimir Nabokov

5. Travelling Mercies by Anne Lamott (Some Thoughts on Faith)

6. Essayism by Brian Dillon (On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction)

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Books I have finished reading so far, and

the reading lists for the previous three months—

July:

June:

May:

And a bonus: