June started the 2025 20 Books campaign off brilliantly and July continued the trend. Emma and I have been delighted with your wonderful response, and we hope you’ve enjoyed visiting some of the posts too. It was lovely to see so many linking in with #parisinjuly2025 too.
August brings another chance to join in two tags at once with #WITMonth – Women in Translation – which has its own website. Hosted by Meytal since 2014!
If you need to pick up the logos for the different numbers of books, or the bingo card, do visit the original post HERE. Happy Reading to everyone joining in, and Emma will be along with another fun progress post in a couple of days – we enjoyed everyone’s bookish ice-cream flavours last month!
Now here’s the place for your AUGUST reads. The post will stay open for a week or so into September to catch up on reviews of August reads.
I’m looking forward to finishing my final 6 this month.
I’ve got two more reviews next week, and hopefully another one the week after! Thanks for the new link party.
Oh dear, I’ve completely failed to post my links up for July as well as June! I have been diligently reading and hashtagging and linking to my description of the project and links to you two, though. I am a third of a way through Book 13, which was the last one I set myself for July, and my State of the TBR post later today will showcase my final seven for this month, which are quite challenging, I must admit! Hope everyone is doing OK with the challenge and enjoying themselves!
Thank you so much for hosting ladies. I really enjoyed this challenge. 3 more books to go for me in August.
Arrgh I’ve added a July review in the August links! Please delete while I add my last July reading in the appropriate place …
It doesn’t matter Chris. Just trying to keep the volumes manageable by splitting them up. I have 3 July read reviews still to post.
Oh dear whatever – is it August already? I am nowhere near reading even 10 books, thought I am still going to give it a go – I have 2 I need to finish so I might do 5. I’m still winning though!
As long as you are enjoying reading them, you’re winning. Don’t worry.
Thank you for this useful challenge. I think I have already read 20 books, not all from my original list. But, I am very happy, and hope to finish a few more from my list. Happy August reading.
I made it to 10 though still have to write reviews for several of them. Hoping to make it to 12, thus beating my non existent goal!
Book 8 of my 10 is also my first for Women in Translation Month – Nina Bouraoui’s Satisfaction, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins https://thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2025/08/15/satisfaction/
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s review is an addition to my planned 10 Books of Summer. Looking for Luddites is a 32 page zine-style exploration of 14 sites in the Lancashire-Yorkshire industrial belt around Saddleworth. Each site has a link to the Luddite uprisings of 1812 and is beautifully illustrated and contextualised by artist and author John Hewitt. https://thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2025/08/16/looking-for-luddites/
I’ve finished reading all 20 of my books. Don’t know that I’ll get all 20 of them reviewed by the end of the month.
Well done you! I’m on my 20th now. We will hold the linky open for reviews into September.
I seem to have got through 23 books so far since June. The one I managed to access from the Booker Prize list was One Boat (Fitzcarraldo). I hadn’t come across Jonathan Buckley before despite his having 13 novels to his name. It was “interesting”, not much happens, the narrator is female so a male writing in a female voice always gets my attention if done well enough, except that this particular female wasn’t that interesting. The ‘plot’ such as it is revisits the same set of small town beach front Greece over two separate visits with 9 years in between. I can’t imagine that it is £50,000 worth of prize money, 50,000 divided by166 pages = £301.20 per page. Would have made a tighter short story, no disrespect. Also living in a holiday village myself, the local / visitor, insider / outsider perspective is the stuff of everyday conversation. For example, we cleaned the pavement ourselves today as there was a load of melted chocolate ice-cream that looked like something else, just unpleasant. Wouldn’t make a good novel but is good for community spirit. See what makes the short list.
Just wanted to add that the book I have enjoyed the most was AJ Pearce’s Dear Miss Lake. I have got lots of people reading it and they all want to go back to the beginning and read the first three in the series. Absolute thumbs up to AJ and very timely for us as we did a lot for VJ Day this year.
same set of characters meant to write, apols
Book nine off my initial list is Alia Trabucco Zerán’s When Women Kill, translated by Sophie Hughes. I struggled to get into this Creative Non Fiction retelling of four crimes that shook 20th century Santiago, Chile. I’m glad I stuck with it, though. Zerán takes an interesting approach to each crime, applying her legal and creative writing training to make the case that even women deemed deviant by society need to be included in feminist discourse and their stories reclaimed so that all women are included in the struggle for equality, not just the heroines.
It’s my second book for Women in Translation Month.
Including the last book I read, I’ve technically reached my ten book goal, but I have the last of my original ten on the go and will hopefully finish it by the end of the month.
I don’t know if it’s my internet/not, but I can’t find the linky widget. So, here’s my review of The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, which I also read for #WITMonth: https://klasikfanda.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-housekeeper-and-professor-2005-by.html
All August reviews added now!
Book 10 from my list finished on a train journey today! Stay With Me was a heart rending, gut wrenching, thought provoking read for me. https://thinkaboutreading.wordpress.com/2025/08/26/stay-with-me-2/
I’ve just entered my 15 so far, I may get time for another one or two by August 31st, we’ll see!
BYW I didn’t realise I needed to add the name of the book in the first field for the first couple, so No 51 is By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah and No 52 is The book of guilt by Catherine Chidgey.
Thanks for hosting:)
Just adding the remainder of my August reviews today: Jansson, Ahlberg, Austen and Eliot, Rushdie, Sagan, Tawada, Woolf and, soon, Robertson Davies.
Oops, I think I’ve been putting my links in the wrong place. But… can you hold this open for the first week in September? Because… I have ONE more review of a book I already finished, but can’t get the review up before September 2.
I’ve managed to squeeze another book in, thanks to being away for a few days with more time to read. Natural Enemies of Books is a feminist history of women in the printing industry and I learnt a lot from it. My total for this year’s challenge is 12 – two more than I’d planned on reading!
I still haven’t cracked the art of filling in the name of my post in the Linky link, but at least I’ve managed to post before it closed, albeit an overview post about my plans to finish my 2025 books in September. Plus a few photos of my jungly garden as a pre-loaded excuse in case I still don’t succeed with an extra month’s reading time. 😬
Thank you so much to you and Emma for hosting. Here’s the direct link to my overview post, which includes mini reviews to the books I’ve read since halfway through July:
https://marketgardenreader.wordpress.com/2025/09/08/20-books-of-summer-extended-september-plans/
No worries! We’ve got you. 😀
My wrap-up post is here: https://anzlitlovers.com/2025/09/09/20booksofwinter-wrap-up/
Thanks for hosting!