Words of August || Wrap-up

Augusts are usually busy months for me.

It's the first month of the second half of the year and it feels like everyone's suddenly realized that the year is passing by and starts doing things at 1.5x energy/time. It's the month when, somehow, multiple things happen at the same time. At the end, it feels like August was a very busy and long month but if you asked me what I did I'd not be able to pick out a few things because everything is lose in my mind.

So, let's just take this wrap-up one topic at a time and hopefully I'll remember what I did as we go.

reading

Busier days = more reading to unwind. August was the best reading month of 2025 so far. I picked up so many books and was reading almost every day. Since I was mostly reading for comfort and unwinding, I reached for books that are easy and quick to read. Romance made a comeback—it's how I was able to read a lot.

I read 17 books in August. ALL were digital. 2 were above 500 pages. 3 were novellas. 2 others were short books. 1 was a reread. 15 were romance. All were fiction.

I decided to try one more werewolf romance after my exploratory reads last month. I picked up A Wolf in the Garden by Allegra Hall because it was on Kindle Unlimited. I did not realize how huge it was until I was 70% in and it didn't seem to be ending. The book is set in New Zealand at a time when the world is co-inhabited by shifters and humans. One MC is a hybrid wolf with two wolves and the other MC is a European and Māori descent. It's an interesting setting because there is so much going on—one MC dealing with identity issues, another MC dealing with family issues, and the world in an uncertain place. I liked the plot but I was tired of the romance by the end. At one point the plot did not progress at all because the MCs were having a sex marathon for days. The book did not need to be 500+ pages.

After that huge book, I switched to another huge book. It was time to finally finish reading The Plated Prisoner series, years after I started it. I picked up the last book Goldfinch by Raven Kennedy hoping for a good ending. Maybe I outgrew the series or my standards rose in the years since I started the series because I disliked this book. There were too many POVs just to help the plot along but it wasn't organic considering how the series was so far. Things were randomly happening for no reason. The writing was still super easy to read—600+ pages didn't feel too long—but I didn't like the story. I'm glad I'm done with the series and I'll probably forget about it soon.

I was browsing on Kindle Unlimited when I saw Bearly Mated by Lola Glass pop up as a recommendation. Amazon picked up on my werewolf romance reading and this sounded nice enough. It's only 108 pages so I read it in about 2 hours. It wasn't great but it wasn't bad. I was glad that it didn't waste time on unnecessary things like the previous two books I read. One thing that stood out: the men in this book questioned an existing "fact" about their species which labelled them as unreliable husbands and refused to believe it.

I read the second book, Bearly Taken by Lola Glass too because the second couple's story was hinted at in the first book. This was short, quick, and nice. I liked this better than the first book, maybe because the dude absolutely grovels for forgiveness and does his best to turn things around.

After the above 2, I perused Lola Glass's books but most of them did not seem like my thing except one which sounded different. All's Fair in Love and Magic by Lola Glass is a romance between a blood witch and a dragon shifter. This is my first foray into shifter romances of other kinds so it was... interesting. I was glad for the explanations in the book because I needed them. The story is set in a Supernatural Resort which was a new concept (but I later found out that it's a trope in shifter romances/omegaverse?). I actually quite liked this book which I did not expect. I liked the character development. I liked the romance even though I didn't like the instant attraction and mate-induces-heat concept. (The latter seems super inconvenient and it doesn't allow for much of a choice?!! How am I supposed to believe that they'd choose each other?!)

I decided to try one more Lola Glass book because the ones I read so far were omegaverse-beginner-friendly, easy to read, and entertaining. Love Bites by Lola Glass is a romance between a Vampire King and a Siren. The only romance-ish book with a siren that I've read before was The Siren by Kiera Cass and I was quite surprised to see a different description of sirens in this book. I'm still not sold on sires (or their perceived importance in this book's world) but it was cute and entertaining! I was glad to see that there wasn't any mate-induced-heat that forced them together but general life circumstances which is more understandable.

Taking a break from reading new romance books about new concepts, I continued by backlist reading with Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young. Similar to The Unmaking of June Farrow and A Sea of Unspoken Things, this has an eerie vibe with a dash of magical realism in an otherwise regular world. The mystery aspect was cool and kept me guessing. I was nowhere close to the answer which was revealed near the end. I hated the ending, though. So anticlimactic and abrupt.

While working on another blog post, I noticed that a novella sequel to I Hope This Doesn't Find You was released called I Hope This Finds You by Ann Liang. I cleared a block of my evening to read this and it was so! cute! It's pure fluff and fan service. It has zero plot, just vibes and cuteness. If you loved I Hope This Doesn't Find You, you should read this novella.

I checked Abby Jimenez's books because it's been a while and found a couple of books which I hadn't known about. I picked up The Fall Risk by Abby Jimenez first. This was short and cute. I liked the main characters' growth in the book. Most of it was off-page before the story starts on-page but it was nice to see her be strong at the end. It's a very short novella so it's not surprising that the romance is a bit insta-lovey. Overall, meh.

The Situationship by Abby Jimenez was next. This is a spin-off novella set starring 2 supporting characters from different books who were mentioned as a couple in the epilogue of Just For The Summer. It's 37 pages so I didn't expect much from the book and I was right. It barely had anything and I didn't like it at all. I didn't like both the main characters were basically caricatures in this. Boo.

Then, I picked up the latest release Say You'll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez. Reading the title immediately reminded me of Taylor Swift's Wildest Dreams which has the chorus "say you'll remember me, standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset". I wondered if the book was inspired by the lyric/song but it didn't seem like it. This was a very painful book for pretty much no reason. Like. The story is filled with pain. I could tell that the author had a point to say but did it have to be in a romance and did the romance have to be so painful aside from the other pain? I do not recommend. You can't even cry to this book unless you really relate to the plot.

I had borrowed another book from Kindle Unlimited so I picked that up next. I knew that Knot Your Sugar by Eve Wolfe was out of my comfort zone but it sounded cosy and cute so I wanted to try it. Well. I was just confused the entire time. I was ok when the MC started liking the first dude but as soon as the other 2 dudes came into the picture, I became confused. I didn't understand why she had a fling with all 3 and thought it's ok. I didn't understand why they were ok with it. Is it some omegaverse thing? The book did explain a bunch but three alphas liking the same girl being ok with it didn't make sense to me. I was wondering "why" the entire time. This was not my thing.

Battle of the Bookstores by Ali Brady has been on my TBR for a while because the online-and-offline trope is one of my favourites. I decided to tackle my TBR instead of picking up random books on KU so I started with this. I liked the running-a-bookstore aspects of the book but I didn't like the romance itself. The characters were nice enough but I just.. didn't care enough. It was weird. The two have been talking online for ages but it didn't seem like they had much chemistry. It wasn't as good as I wanted it to be.

The Glass Gate by Hanna Sandvig is another pick from the TBR. I added this because it is a Cinderella retelling and I am always intrigued by Cinderella retellings. This book was really good. I did not expect it to retell the Cinderella story without making the main character a damsel-in-distress but it did. The main character took charge of her life and followed her passions. The book did almost everything brilliantly—the romance, the found family aspect, the self-growth. I wasn't a huge fan of the ending because it was underwhelming.

Her Lessons in Persuasion by Megan Frampton has been on my TBR for years. It was time to knock it off. I think I was a different person when I added the book to my TBR because it wasn't my thing when I read it. It was nice enough but I didn't find it any new or different from other historical romances. Meh.

Forged by Magic by Jenna Wolfhart was on my TBR and available on KU so I picked it up next. This was good! I've read one other romance starring an orc (Legends & Lattes) but this was still new. The world was new and the characters were fun. The plot was interesting too. The romance was nice too. A solid all-rounder book. I have minor complaints so I won't call this a favourite but it was a great read. I stayed up until 2 am reading this.

After finishing Forged by Magic on 23rd, I didn't read anything because I knew that I wouldn't have time to write about them in this wrap up 😂

As you can tell, I've been venturing out of my comfort zone quite a bit. Mainly in the romance genre. It's been... interestimg. I'm not entirely sold on the omegaverse and I don't think I still understand it fully. I'm not sure if I'll continue reading them, we'll see. For now, I want to get through my TBR a bit.

blogging

This has not been a great month for blogging. It felt like I was playing catch up the entire month and failing. I wanted to be a bit more ahead in blog posts because of two upcoming trips and lots of life admin things but I wasn't able to do it. A lot of the life admin stuff got preponed to August, actually, because of certain timelines that I found out later. That took more time than expected and so I lost time I could've spent on blogging.

I'm way too behind on responding to comments. I think I have comments from a whole month ago waiting to be responded to. (If your comment is one of them, I'll get to them, I promise.) Somehow I did not have enough energy to spend on anything blog-related and hence I retreated to reading a lot of books.

I'm also a bit bored of the content that I've been writing for the past few years. My blog posts have branched out to other topics this year and I feel like branching out even more. I still like writing book reviews but I'm bored of the way I write them and I'm bored of how restricted they are. I have a few new post ideas that will take time to write just because they're new and I need to figure out how to write them but I'm excited to try new things.

In the upcoming weeks/months, you should be seeing a few kinds of posts that I've not written in a long time or haven't tried before. They're a bit of hit-or-miss because I'm not sure if I'll enjoy writing them (won't know till I try!) and whether y'all will like them. We'll see! The point is to stop being bored. I want to try new and challenging things.

Here are the posts that went up in August, in case you missed them:

• Deep Work by Cal Newport || Book Review — writing this review made me realize how much I try to make my book reviews not straightforward or simple but it eventually becomes that way because the topic is that book alone.
• Tracking Reading || What, where, and why — slowly bringing back the discussion posts!
• Listen to Music With Me || A Musical Blog — a totally new type of post that I really enjoyed writing 🎶

I moved my newsletter back to Kit! I had enough of Substack. I spent an evening moving the right subscribers over and doing some comparisons. The counts look off though so I'm guessing something messed up somewhere. I sent an announcement email with the news and what to do to fix things. My first email back went to everyone's spam folder and I was so upset about it. I spent 3 hours making a domain email and setting it up with Kit and resent the email with that. I made another small mistake in the resending but it's fine. At least people saw it!

Before I moved to Substack, my newsletter with almost 500 subscribers was having 60-70% open rate which is actually HUGE for newsletters. That dropped significantly in Substack. I couldn't even track the number properly because Substack works on number of views and I found that the numbers between views, open %, and subscribers did not match at all. My first email back on Kit with the resend is at 50% open rate which is quite a drop from where the newsletter used to be. I need to build back credibility and readership.

If you haven't subscribed to my newsletter yet, subscribe below! I send newsletters with behind-the-scenes updates, positivity, and encouragement at the beginning of every month so that they start on a good note 🙂

Last month, there was an uptick in blog stats. Since then, stats have reduced a bit but they're still more than they used to be. I'm not seeing a lot of trends to understand why because it feels like all of my posts started getting slightly more traffic (compared to a few months ago) which collectively raised the numbers.

Number of views is around 400 everyday which I'm surprised by every time I look at it. I'm not doing anything for search engine traffic and I'm not promoting my posts anywhere so I'm a bit surprised. I'm intrigued to find out if it continues or drops again which would mean there was some trend that my blog was a part of. I'll let you know my thoughts.

While waiting for most posts from me, do check out the below ones if you have time!

• 13 Blogging Tools That Help Me Blog Better
• How I Made My First YouTube Vlog

content consumed

Honestly, not much because I've been super busy. I'm very behind on new posts from blogs I follow. Hopefully, I'll catch up in September. Meanwhile, here are some that I managed to read and liked.

Blog Posts

• The “Fast Fashion” of Books and How it Impacts Publishing
• How the literary community can be more welcoming to disabled readers
• A Week of Stories – On Paper and Off : Reading and Life log
• Why do I still love reading?
• 8 Books I Wouldn’t Have Read Without My Blog // Happy 8th Blogoversary
• my 2025 stationery faves (so far)
• Su From So || Before, During and After Movie Review

TV Shows

• I've been watching The Winning Try, a Kdrama on Netflix. Since I don't have time to binge TV shows anyway, I don't mind waiting for episodes to release each week. After years of watching Kdramas, I have now managed to hook my mom onto them as well 😄 She saw me watching this on TV and ended up paying attention to this one despite not caring about other dramas that I watched recently since getting the TV. I think she likes that it's based on rugby instead of just being a romance or slice-of-life. She's keeping tabs on episode releases too!
• One day after watching the latest episode of The Winning Try, my mom asked me to put on something else so I played whatever looked nice on Netflix. I picked Bon Appétit, Your Majesty which immediately hooked both of us. The story is interesting and funny. I really like the comedy aspects of it and the main character is interesting. Looking forward to slowly watch it (with my mom 👀) for the upcoming few weeks.
• Since I didn't read anything in the last week, I had time to watch stuff. I binge-watched The First Frost Cdrama in 2 days. I liked it! It reminded me about the painful romance books I used to read in high school like The Coincidence of Callie and Kayden. I liked the depth it had. I really liked how the guy reacted to the girl going through trauma, loved how he was cautious around her when she sleepwalked and didn't jar her out of it, instead trying to make sure she doesn't get hurt and trying to make her feel comfortable so that it doesn't happen again. I didn't care about the secondary romance AT ALL. I skipped all their scenes in the second half of the episodes.

life

The month was mostly taken up by life admin things. Things like taxes took up way too much time. A lot comes with being an adult and I ended up having to pack a lot of them in August. I was so busy and stressed. I procrastinated doing the work a lot too. I did them piece-by-piece over multiple days because they require being detail-oriented and I just did not have the energy to do them at once. I procrastinated too. So, it took time.

I was in Bangalore for a few days in the beginning of the month which was really nice. I was there to meet a close friend who was visiting from Germany and we had a lovely staycation. I packed in my dental appointment and meeting a few other friends too. I went to a karaoke place with friends from my old job and it was so fun!

At the end of the month, I went to a friend's wedding and it was so nice. A few of us danced at her sangeet too (my second ever sangeet dance). It was a bit emotional too because I've been friends with her since 8th grade and we happened to study together till college. In 10th grade, our group predicted that she'd be the first to get married and she was! Watching it happen made me remember all of those days. It's amazing that we remained such good friends for almost 15 years (over half our lives!).

The wedding was in her hometown which is quite far from where I am and there's no direct transport so I literally took 4 different transportations one way. Flight, train, another train, and a car. I was thinking how I wouldn't do this for many people because I'd have to be close to them and then I realised that I actually have quite a few good friends for whom I'd totally travel so much only for one wedding day. I'm blessed to have many good friends.

After crocheting a doll in August, I picked up another hobby. I haven't painted in several years and I miss it so I started a paint-by-numbers kit. I actually forgot how to even use a brush, let alone when to use different brushes, so painting was like learning it anew while also realising new things. I got one with a lot of details and colours. It's also a fairly huge one—bigger than any painting I've done before—so I will take quite some time to finish it.

I spent two afternoons over a weekend painting by the sunlight with soft music in the background and I loved it. I forgot my phone and forgot everything else. I'm looking forward to more days of painting! I'm predicting that it will take a few weeks, assuming I get consecutive free weekends. We'll see. I love the process enough to not want to rush to get to the finished product.

chat with me!

How was your August? What did you do? What did you read or watch? What's the season/weather like at your place?