Hello!

Another month has whizzed by (I swear they’re getting faster) and we’re here again in one of my favourite parts of the month – choosing what books I’m going to read next month!

As a certified planner reader (and official hater of having to make any decision at all) I have a format that works really well for choosing my TBR each month – I have a selection of categories, in one I use a spinner to choose what I read, in another I have a small TBR jar and all round, I get to play fun little games to find out what I’ll be reading and I love it.

So we start with…

The Wedding Library

Quick recap; when my husband and I got married we asked our guests to gift us a copy of their favourite book so we’d have a library of our favourite people’s favourite books. In an endeavour to read them all I’ve been choosing one a month for the last two and a half years and I now have all the titles in a spinner which is getting satisfyingly smaller!

This month chose the book my monther-in-law gave us, Warlock: To The Magic Born by Christopher Stasheff, which seems to be so under the radar that it doesn’t even have an audiobook… so I’m going to have to read all 700 pages with just my eyeballs (and I’m only a little bit intimidated about it).

I’ve not read the summary and I’m tempted to keep it that way so I can go in completely blind, but I’m hoping this will lean more into the cosy fantasy than the complex high fantasy realm. If I read the summary I’d probably find out, but here’s to the surprise I guess!

New Releases

The first pre-ordered new release for this month is A Beautiful Evil by Bea Fitzgerald, the third of her Greek mythology re-imaginings and I’m really excited.

Granted, I’ve only read one of the two that are already out, but I rated Girl, Goddess, Queen 5 stars and Waterstones do the most beautiful special editions so I had to pre-order it to make sure I continue to have the matching set… obviously…

It’s something to do with the myth of Pandora’s box which I’m not particularly familiar with beyond the obvious so I’m excited to learn something and read a fun romance book at the same time!

This one also works in my ‘Continue a Series’ category, but we have the last and final instalment in the Tomes and Tea series Alchemy and a Cup of Tea by Rebecca Thorn – honestly this series has kind of been 3 stars average for me from the beginning. I just find I can’t quite engage with the characters completely but it’s nice to check in with them and see how they’re doing – it feels like I’m watching a low-commitment TV show but I have pre-ordered all four books in this series so, somewhere the math is not mathing.

I originally pre-ordered the first book in this series, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea, without knowing anything about it because (again) the Waterstones special edition is stunning, so at this point I do think I’m buying them more to have the matching set than to read the books themselves but you know what? We’ve all got our vices and as long as I read it and it doesn’t sit on my TBR forever, I’d consider it a win!

25 in 2025

I used to follow this author when she made YouTube videos with her sister, so when I found her book in an indie bookshop a couple of years ago I was excited but I definitely bought it because of the author and not because of the story. But now is the time to find out if it’s actually any good!

I believe Every Colour of You by Amelia Mandeville is (I believe) a YA romance book and I put it on my Summer TBR pretty much exclusively because the cover gives me summer vibes, now we’ll find out if it actually fits those vibes! Despite not being wildly popular, this book does have an Audiobook so I think I’ll listen to this one.

The next book I pulled from my 25 in 2025 TBR jar was The Cornish Village School: Second Chances by Kitty Wilson – I picked this up really cheap in a garden centre years ago but didn’t realise until later that it was actually the second book in a series. So when I originally pulled this title from my actual TBR jar (that’s how I chose the 25 books), I decided that when this title got pulled I would use that as the anchor to buy the first book in the series.

I then found that it’s included in Audible’s Premium package, at least until August 9th so I’m going to prioritise reading it at the beginning of the month and feel really smug that I didn’t have to actually spend any money (unless I fall in love with it and need to buy a physical trophy, of course).

For my monthly TBR though…

That does mean I have two books to read for one category, but the audiobook is only just over 7 hours long and I tend to read at 1.5x speed so it should only take me about 5 hours? Which I think is doable? It does look like a very seasonally appropriate book too!

Bonus category: My Husband Picks

One of my video ideas for July was to go through all the reading challenges in my book journal and figure out books to fill all of the gaps – one of the squares on my bucket list/bingo board/however you want to describe it is ‘Lucas picks!’ (Lucas = Husband), so for the sake of a fun TikTok and getting that square ticked off, he picked a book for me to read.

He chose Godkiller by Hannah Kaner, which is a book that was on my radar but he actually picked up and bought on a spontaneous trip to The Works – he then became somewhat obsessed with the series while he was on a work trip to Germany and ended up buying a hardback-sized paperback of the sequel, Sunbringer, before the paperback was even available in the UK (he called it his illegal book) and he then bought the Illumicrate edition of the final book in the trilogy, Faithbreaker… which he hasn’t read yet.

So I’m hoping that me reading the first book, perhaps even going on to read the rest of the series may motivate him to read it to, even if it’s just to say he read it first! (works for me!)

And those are the 7 books I will be attempting to read in August – I’m not as confident as usual because I’ve had a really good reading month in July and that’s usually followed by a quieter month, and I inadvertently have a lot of social plans which either interferes with or helps my reading (depends how far I have to drive). Plus the 700 page paperback that I have to read with my own eyeballs!

But as ever I’m just going to try my best and remind myself that reading is for fun and not statistics (no matter how fun I find statistics).

Thank you so much for reading,

Sophie xx