August-September Books
Sep. 21st, 2025 05:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babbling_bookendsI suppose I could wait until the end of the month to post this and make it an August & September reading roundup, but I want to post it now and I make the rules, so!
Non-Fiction Books
Graphic Novels / Comics / Webcomics
Goodreads Seasonal Challenge Books (July 1 - September 14)
I fully confess to cheating at this challenge; I was almost but not quite finished with The Eights on the last day and marked it read so that I would get the achievement and still get to bed at an appropriate time, and finished it the next day. Shame on me for procrastinating! (It will happen again).
I've been poking aroung Storygraph a bit more, in an effort to use it. I'm enjoying the stats page very much! The breakdowns are very fun, and I'm not surprised to see that comics take the lead in the genre breakdown (though I would argue that comics is not a genre, but a medium, and I would be more interested to see the breakdown of superhero comics vs say, horror comics, but that's getting very granular for the average reader). I was happy to discover that StoryGraph has challenges as well, and I'm going to try doing the StoryGraph's Genre Challenge 2025. It's a list of 10 prompts split across nonfiction and fiction, so if anyone has any suggestions for books that fit these prompts, let me know! I've already filled a few of them; someone else had added Bee Journal to the challenge and I read it on the Internet Archive, I had already checked out Super Visible from my local library and thought it fit the prompt so I added it and am currently reading it, and I found Home in a Lunchbox through my e-library.
The StoryGraph's Genre Challenge 2025
Because anyone can add any book to a prompt, I noticed a lot of books that didn't seem to fit the prompt, which was a little annoying when I was looking through them to find something to read in a genre I didn't usually venture into. However, it's very much the opposite problem from my thoughts on the Goodreads challenges which seem to prioritize big-name books for their lists, which is nice for keeping up with what's popular but lacks niche books. Pros and cons to each, I suppose!
I also (finally) set my StoryGraph 2025 Reading Goals to a potentially ambitious 100 books. In 2024, I set my Goodreads reading goal to 40 books and only barely acheived it in December, so for 2025 I set it to 40 books again, only to meet that goal sometime in March/April, and I'm currently sitting at 75 books mid-September. I was tempted to move the goal higher, but in the interest of curbing my perfectionist tendency to move the goalposts to unacheivable levels, I resisted. (Easily meeting a goal doesn't mean you set the goal too low and you don't have to devalue the accomplishment just because it was easily acheived!) However, I decided that I might as well set the StoryGraph goal higher, since I knew I'd already read 75 books.
The Goodreads Fall Challenge is out, running from September 15ht to December 31st, but only two of the acheivements have been revealed (aside from the three "read this many books" challenges). Community Picks is dark academia-themed, and I've casually glanced through the list but haven't picked one yet. The other revealed list is Hispanic Heritage, and for that one I picked up Beasts of Carnaval by Rosália Rodrigo.
Non-Fiction Books
- The Life and Times of Betty Boop by Peter Benjaminson
Graphic Novels / Comics / Webcomics
- Aurora (up to Ch. 18) by Red of Overly Sarcastic Productions
- Nightwing: Knight Terrors by Scott Lobdell, Fabian Nicieza, & Benjamin Percy
- Nightwing: Burnback by Dan Jurgens, Zack Kaplan, & Scott Lobdell
- Spider-Man/Human Torch: I'm With Stupid by Dan Slott
Goodreads Seasonal Challenge Books (July 1 - September 14)
- Challenge Faves: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
- Poolside Puzzlers: The Maid
- Chart Toppers: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
- Acclaimed Titles: Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
- Debut Darlings: The Eights by Joanna Miller
- Lightning Round: Volatile Memory by Seth Haddon
I fully confess to cheating at this challenge; I was almost but not quite finished with The Eights on the last day and marked it read so that I would get the achievement and still get to bed at an appropriate time, and finished it the next day. Shame on me for procrastinating! (It will happen again).
I've been poking aroung Storygraph a bit more, in an effort to use it. I'm enjoying the stats page very much! The breakdowns are very fun, and I'm not surprised to see that comics take the lead in the genre breakdown (though I would argue that comics is not a genre, but a medium, and I would be more interested to see the breakdown of superhero comics vs say, horror comics, but that's getting very granular for the average reader). I was happy to discover that StoryGraph has challenges as well, and I'm going to try doing the StoryGraph's Genre Challenge 2025. It's a list of 10 prompts split across nonfiction and fiction, so if anyone has any suggestions for books that fit these prompts, let me know! I've already filled a few of them; someone else had added Bee Journal to the challenge and I read it on the Internet Archive, I had already checked out Super Visible from my local library and thought it fit the prompt so I added it and am currently reading it, and I found Home in a Lunchbox through my e-library.
The StoryGraph's Genre Challenge 2025
- Nonfiction about visual art or an artist: Super Visible: The Story of the Women of Marvel Comics by Margaret Stohl with Jeanine Schaeffer and Judith Stephens
- Historical fiction set outside of the UK, US, or Canada
- An essay collection by a disabled author
- A children's book published after 2020 by an author of colour: Home in a Lunchbox by Cherry Mo
- A nonfiction book by or about a sports personality
- A graphic novel by a woman or nonbinary person A poetry collection centred around nature: Bee Journal
- A literary or contemporary novel in translation
- A book about video games
- Queer horror
Because anyone can add any book to a prompt, I noticed a lot of books that didn't seem to fit the prompt, which was a little annoying when I was looking through them to find something to read in a genre I didn't usually venture into. However, it's very much the opposite problem from my thoughts on the Goodreads challenges which seem to prioritize big-name books for their lists, which is nice for keeping up with what's popular but lacks niche books. Pros and cons to each, I suppose!
I also (finally) set my StoryGraph 2025 Reading Goals to a potentially ambitious 100 books. In 2024, I set my Goodreads reading goal to 40 books and only barely acheived it in December, so for 2025 I set it to 40 books again, only to meet that goal sometime in March/April, and I'm currently sitting at 75 books mid-September. I was tempted to move the goal higher, but in the interest of curbing my perfectionist tendency to move the goalposts to unacheivable levels, I resisted. (Easily meeting a goal doesn't mean you set the goal too low and you don't have to devalue the accomplishment just because it was easily acheived!) However, I decided that I might as well set the StoryGraph goal higher, since I knew I'd already read 75 books.
The Goodreads Fall Challenge is out, running from September 15ht to December 31st, but only two of the acheivements have been revealed (aside from the three "read this many books" challenges). Community Picks is dark academia-themed, and I've casually glanced through the list but haven't picked one yet. The other revealed list is Hispanic Heritage, and for that one I picked up Beasts of Carnaval by Rosália Rodrigo.
