So on my last book post, I mentioned that I was not an avid reader… but in July I read seven books haha… so maybe that qualifies as being an avid reader?? I honestly think this is the most books I’ve ever read in one month!
You know, I made a few personal changes this month… I drastically cut back my time on social media and unfollowed about 40 accounts on Instagram in efforts to reduce the time I spent scrolling there. In exchange, I started reading more… (as well as just had more time for other things too, and was way less distracted!) Any time I sat down to nurse or rock Jenson, I would open the kindle app on my phone and read. Instead of watching tv I would read on my kindle paper white… and I told my husband that I kind of felt like the more I read, the faster I became, so just was able to move through more books than I normally do! But anyway, not that y’all care about that hah!
Here are the books I read for the month of July. Go here if you want to see my previous book review post from the first part of the year and go here if you want to catch up with me on Goodreads! Hope you see something that interests you!
This was my first Nancy Thayer book, called Summer House. I really liked this read! It was interesting and so quick and easy to get through… a few bad words but not too many. It was a story about a family, set in Nantucket, and really just a story about one of the daughters finding her way and finding love, and then also just a story of how the whole family gets along with one another. In my last book post, I read a few novels set during the WW2 time period, so I was looking for something g different this time around… but as my luck would have it, one of the back stories about the grandmother in this book is during WW2. I literally laughed out loud because apparently I cannot get away from that genre.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was next up… and friends this story was hard at times. It took me a little bit to get into but then I had a hard time putting it down…but about half way through the book the language and scenes picked up and I kind of skimmed quickly through the rest because the content was so rough. There are a lot of disturbing scenes in this book that make it hard to recommend. This book is set in Sweden and is about sexual assault cases and how many go unsolved…the book follows a few different characters and how they meet up and end up working together to solve the mystery of a missing girl, and how her family is intertwined in numerous unsolved sexual assault cases. It also follows a personal story of a girl who is a victim of sexual assault. This was just really a hard one for me to read personally, so just warning you all of you are considering it. And again, as my luck would have it, the family that I referenced also had a back story connected to WW2! I seriously cannot get away from it! hah!
After my last read, I was looking for something less intense and something distracting from the harsher realities of life… so I downloaded Divergent from the library by Veronica Roth. I love the Libby app, it makes it so easy to download free books to my kindle! We have watched the movie Divergent a ton of times, but I wanted to see what the book was about. I enjoyed this book a lot, it has a Hunger Games/Maze Runner feel to it, about a society with different groupings and how they interact with one another. It was interesting reading about the society in this book and the different factions, as well as following along the personal story lines with the characters and how they go through their faction initiations and trainings. I was pleasantly surprised at how similar the movie was to the book. Obviously not a perfect match but closer than I expected.
Once I finished Divergent, I immediately went into the second book in the series, called Insurgent. This book focuses mainly on the uprisings within the city, how one faction starts to try and take over others, destroying the governing system set up within the society…there is a lot of planning and talking in this book, a lot of fighting and combat…so it was definitely a different feel from her first. I didn’t enjoy reading this one quite as much, but it was still good furthering the story.
Then to finish out the story, I went straight into Allegiant. Have I said how obsessed I am with the library app called Libby?!!!? I can toggle between the Clear Lake Library and the Bryan College Station Library system, so there is almost always the book available that I’m looking for! That way I didn’t have to wait to get into the sequels! This was the last book of the trilogy, which focused on kind of the aftermath of the fighting, and how the factions were going to survive and interact with each other from this point forward. From the information that came out in the second book about the world outside their walls, a group decides to leave the walls of their city and explore what lies beyond the walls they have been guarding for so many years. This part was a little strange to me, just not really what I was expecting, and almost too practical in a sense. So the remainder of this book covers what happens outside the walls, and how the people outside are trying to control the people within the city. It was all very interesting, but I wasn’t in love with the ending.
I was ready for a genre change again, something light hearted, and One True Loves fit the bill. I loved this book. It was a story about a couple, where the husband supposedly dies in a helicopter crash but is actually lost at sea for a few years and then suddenly returns. The wife had moved on and found someone else, so the story follows the couple and how she handles the situation. I asked Jacob what he would do if this happened to us and he was like you’re crazy hahaha…
I had a hold on this book, and it became available when I was reading “One True Loves,” so I went straight into it after I finished the other. I had read Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris last year and liked it, so I thought I would give The Breakdown a try. Her books are crazy creepy but not over the top, so I can read them quickly without feeling like I need to lock myself in my closet for a time. This book made me anxious though, but that makes sense because it’s all about a woman having a nervous breakdown from passing another woman’s car in the night, trying to stop to help, and then finding out that the woman in the car was murdered shortly after she pulled over. There were nights I had to stop reading and ended up kind of sprinting to the end on this one because it was just creeping me out at times! But I like her books, and I liked how this one came together in the end, I don’t think I can take much more than her level of creepy!
I hope you found something that interested you, I feel like I read a lot of different types of books this month and really enjoyed them all! Happy reading friends!