August Reading Wrap-Up

Posted September 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 12 Comments

A picture of a line of cupcakes with teal icing and sprinkles

August was my birthday month and featured a little holiday getaway to see family and chill in a hotel room, so it’s a month well-worth lingering on! Let’s dig in.

August in general:

The first half of August was pretty busy; I was making sure to work ahead and square things up so the deck was clear, so I’d have an easy time jumping back in. But the start of my holiday came soon enough, and we had a couple days at home before setting off — meaning on my actual birthday my wife baked me Welsh cakes, and before we left we had dinner with my parents as well from our favourite Chinese takeout.

After that, it was off down to Bristol, where we had a lovely stay; the room was huge, and the food options nearby were pretty great. We didn’t even have to order room service or takeout to the hotel, because there were appealing options really close by every night. I had a great time visiting bookshops and venturing into Wales to see my old haunts and catch up with my aunt, and we went to St Fagans, which is a great open-air museum.

We planned the trip with a lot of reading time, but it took a few days for me to realise that I wasn’t getting anywhere much because I wasn’t feeling inspired by the lists/challenges I was still trying to complete. Once I let go of that and just picked a couple of random classic crime books, I got my mojo back somewhat… though not before deciding to relax my various reading goals and catch a bit of chill.

I didn’t take my crochet with me, but nonetheless I’ve made a good amount of progress, including doing a tricky panel with some unorthodox stitches (top middle shelf, the ikebana). I quite like how it came out!

Photo of my mosaic overlay crochet blanket. It looks like a bookshelf, with four shelves so far. On the lowest shelf is a cat sat on a book, while most of the other shelves are covered in books. There's an ikebana on the top shelf.

Credit where it’s due, the original charts are from this pattern, though I’ve been adapting them and going ‘freestyle’ for a lot of it.

As far as gaming goes, it was a somewhat quiet month since I stayed off the PC more while we were away, but my raid group in FFXIV came tantalisingly close to beating the second part of M12S (the last fight of the current set), and I did play a few small/relaxing games. I’m deep into Whisper of the House, which is a cute Unpacking-type game, and Leaf It Alone, a game which involves collecting leaves to tidy up a garden… and I raced through the hidden object games Nippets, Find My Frogs and Find My Frogs: Branches. I also zoomed through two new-to-me incremental games, Snap the Cat (super cute, your objective is to take good pictures of cats until the whole world has seen them!) and Lyca (which involves a magical wolf restoring a barren wasteland).

I’ve also got a new productivity “game”, On-Together, which is really cute — and of course, I snagged the Magical Library DLC for Spirit City.

Reading stats:

StoryGraph reading stats for August 2026: 21 books, 6,162 pages, average rating of 3.05. My top rated reads included The Poet Empress, After The Disabled God of War Became My Concubine (vol 3) and Cryptic. The number of pages I read per day was pretty variable, with big peaks here and there (usually weekends) and more consistent reading at the end of the month during my holiday. More reading stats for August 2026: I read 67% fiction, 33% non-fiction, and 48% of my books were under 300 pages long, with 52% between 300 and 500 pages. I read 81% in print and 19% in digital editions, and my top genres were fantasy (8), romance (7), LGBTQIA+ (7), crime (4) and history (4).

Total books read: 21
Total pages read: 6,162
Rereads: 0
ARCs: 2
Series finished/up to date: 3
Books owned pre-2026: 0
Books owned from 2026: 15
Borrowed books: 6

Fiction: 13
Non-fiction: 6
Poetry: 2
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 3

I read less than I’d hoped, even with my holiday, but I’m okay with that. I know I was having a bit of a struggle settling down and enjoying reading, and with crochet and gaming as well to keep me occupied, sometimes my time is more limited at the moment — especially while my group continue to try to beat the raid in FFXIV.

The name of the game in the next month or so will be trying to focus on just reading whatever takes my fancy and having fun.

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books: 216/300 (15 books ahead)
Overall pages read: 51,634/75,000 (1,497 pages ahead)
Books read from backlog: 32/50 (1 book behind)
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 40/40 (temporary increase allowed)

20 Books of Summer: 12/20 (2/5 bonus)

As I mentioned above, during my holiday I realised that my challenges and lists were actively hindering reading, because I didn’t want to read my “assigned” books. Once I got my head out of that space, I read more and enjoyed it more, which is a sign to take it easy on lists and challenges for a while!

That means I gave up on finishing my 20 Books of Summer (though I definitely read more than 20 books over the course of the summer!). That said, that doesn’t mean I won’t join in any other lists and challenges in future. Sometimes it’s motivating and fun for me and sometimes it isn’t, and right now it isn’t — and that’s okay, but I know it’s a temporary state. I know for others it’s a more permanent burnout, but for me I know I get a lot out of a little structure sometimes.

I also relaxed my yearly reading goals, lowering the books/pages goals and cutting the backlog books goal in half. I allowed myself a temporary increase to 40 books owned and not yet read, as well, in order to allow for my birthday book spree. I’m hoping to whittle that back down, but we’ll see — in general, these goals haven’t been working as well for me this year as last, and that might require some adjustment, or maybe just a fresh start next year.

Blogging stats:

Screenshot of my blog stats showing consistent high visitor counts, with a dip between 20th and 27th August.

Views: 14.3k (down)
Visitors: 13.2k (down)
Likes: 468 (up)
Comments: 521 (up)
Reviews: 30
Other posts: 24

It’s been a bit of a weird month for stats; I can see a dip on my graph while my wife and I were away, even though I kept on posting and kept up a reasonable level of engagement! But then the number of likes and comments being up suggests I had good quality engagement in August, even if the hits were lower… so that’s really nice.

Honestly, I think maybe my time off just coincided with some lower bot activity which exaggerated the effect, though I’ve got no way of distinguishing bot traffic from real people.

Most viewed posts:

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

As ever, it was tricky to narrow down my favourite posts by other people, especially since I’ve steadily been following more and more sites of interest via my RSS reader! So many wonderful bloggers and writers. ♥

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12 responses to “August Reading Wrap-Up”

    • Nicky

      Thank you! The cat is part of the original designer’s extended pattern, so I didn’t design that — mostly I’ve just been designing the books as I go along, and/or tweaking sections from the original pattern.

      Reply
  3. Tammy

    It sounds like your birthday trip was a success, and now I’m hungry for Welsh cakes, although this is the first I’ve heard of them. They look like American pancakes but better! And despite wanting to read more, 21 books seems like a lot! I know what you mean about relaxing your goals so you enjoy your reading more. Have a great September!

    Reply
    • Nicky

      Probably I should’ve been more flexible a while ago, but I kept hoping my brain would get back with the program! Ah well.

      I did indeed enjoy the holiday, thanks!

      Reply
    • Nicky

      I need to work on finishing Whisper of the House, actually — I haven’t touched it in a bit! The Find My Frogs games are really cute, but not very long.

      Reply

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