5 Great Books I Read in August '21

Things are starting to open up. However, COVID-19 has yet to die down. I think that the best thing to do still is to only go out when you need to - including restarting some aspects of social life. I make a thing to go out socially at least once every two weeks or so to keep myself sane and to keep my agoraphobia down (fearing that if I were to leave it too long, I will start taking steps backwards in my recovery). Supermarket trips are minimal and of course, post office trips are a necessity only if they are necessary.

I have honestly been doing pretty well with the reopening of shops, bars and restaurants myself - frequenting pubs and bars is something I enjoy. But, honestly bringing my alcohol intake down is something I have also started to enjoy. Reading is something though, that takes my mind off it all and so, with my August reading I have tried to be a little bit out of the box and read things that would be unusual to me - just to match these unusual times we are in right now.

Some of you may be going through difficulty with the reopening of the world and I understand that. I can recommend books of other worldliness though - as they too, have a whole new concept to understand within them and nothing there can hurt you. Once you come out of these books, you feel almost as if the world around you reopening is easier to understand. From personal experience, I can say that most of the time - yes, it works.

Here are five books from August and our reopening then, that I have enjoyed reading the most (and my gosh, was this difficult to choose!)

These books are in no particular order.

5 Great Books I Read in August '21

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Stories They Wouldn’t Let Me Do on TV

A collection of short stories collated together by the great Sir Alfred Hitchcock, these are the stories that were too violent or too disgusting for him to make into TV or cinema. One of the stories consists of a murderer narrating the text and we actually witness the way in which he commits the murder and tries to cover it up. If you want to be transported to a world so far removed from what we know in our day to day lives whilst also having the pants scared off you, then I honestly recommend this one.

Check out my full review of the book here.

Untouched by Human Hands by Robert Sheckley

Oh how I adored this book of Sci-Fi short stories. These are the only Sci-Fi short stories I have read that can possibly span across many different genres - including the ambiguous 'Speculative' genre. Dark, eerie and often satirical, these stories are about how technology and beliefs can shape the entire world; this could be from the belief that women are inherently evil to the technology of button pushing in order to gain access to a wide variety of things. Written in the 50s but so close to our own time, this is actually terrifying to read now that we live some of the very stories in the book.

If you want to know what I thought of the book - you can find out here.

To Cook a Bear by Mikael Niemi

A man taken out of the feral nature he once was and given to a priest to tame and shape, they together now try to solve the mystery of a milkmaid who has vanished and then turned up murdered. Believing it was a bear, the two of them try to locate the animal as the town around them is brought to its knees as people keep vanishing. A dark and often strange tale, this book is marketed as crime and thriller but may as well be a folk horror for all of its eerie and ritualistic contents.

My review contains some spoilers to the storyline and so, I will not be including it in my review.

Machiavelli: His Life and Times by Alexander Lee

Alexander Lee has written what is quite possibly one of the greatest books on any figure of the Renaissance ever. Machiavelli: His Life and Times, is about the Italian Political Philosopher and his travels through his home country in the times of war, famine, the arts and much more. From the fall of the Borgias to the rise of the Medici, all the way through to Machiavelli's own demise and onward, this book is a great example of what is an excellently researched and brilliantly written biography of a man and his land when his land was under fire. It may have given him the push he needed to write one of the greatest political and philosophical texts of all time - "The Prince".

My full review for this book is not yet completed and so I will not be including it here.

Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim

This book will definitely take you away to another place. Princess Shiori is rescued from the water by a dragon but nobody will believe her, and when she tries to tell her father her father reprimands her, putting her to work with her stepmother. Shiori and her stepmother get along alright until things start to get a little shifty. When Shiori encounters the dragon once more, she is forced into a world she cannot control and one day, she is exiled. She wakes up on a land without her family or anyone she knows. She must find her brothers, find the dragon and break what is an unspeakable curse placed upon her by a demon. I know, that sounds cool doesn't it?

My review for this book contains some spoilers to the storyline and so, I will not be including it here.

Conclusion

I am definitely going to be reading any sort of series that comes out of "Six Crimson Cranes" by Elizabeth Lim and really, I still cannot get my head around how good that book was. If you want to get lost in a book, you have to look for three things: is it from a different time and place? has it got characters far removed from yourself? is it big and chunky so you can lose yourself for ages and ages? If the answer to all three is 'yes' then you have found a great book to disappear into. And when I say disappear, you may want to put an alarm on just to remember the real world exists because with that Machiavelli biography, I was sitting there for six hours all night reading that because it swallowed me up.