As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from July.

Can You Solve the Murder? (Antony Johnston): Let me start by saying that I read this when I got my shingles vaccine, so my enjoyment may have been tempered by the fact that I felt terrible. It was also high-involvement: You track the clues and what you’ve learned. It got a little tedious near the end – two hours of reading time would have been the perfect amount because you’d be more inclined to try again if you didn’t solve the crime. But very clever format and a fun read.

A Novel Murder (E.C. Nevin): Another possible literary victim of my shingles-vaccine induced mood. I thought this was going to be more of a quirky cozy (Richard Osman) but it was a solid cozy cozy. So if you’re looking for a cozy mystery, this is a good one. Lots of drinking in the pub, friends helping friends, police who include writers in solving the crime.

Bitter Sweet (Hattie Williams): This was amazing. I immediately handed it off to ChickieNob who agreed. This book will stay with me for a long time. I started crying trying to talk about it. It is a book that will profoundly impact your heart and brain, a similar effect to All Our Wrong Today’s or The Other Side of Night, but with the familiar growing pains of The Rachel Incident. So achingly beautiful and infuriating and moving. It is quite literally bitter sweet.

What a Way To Go (Bella Mackie): No one writes terrible people as well as Bella Mackie, and these are the worst. Is it a little rough in places? Yes. There were a few times that whole paragraphs repeated on two different pages (e.g., look at p. 131 and 338, and the description of Tanners), which I noted because I thought it was a clue. And there were chapters that came out of order near the end. (That was weird and also not a clue.) But even with those things, it’s a 5-star read. You’ll snicker through the book trying to figure out the ending.

Culpability (Bruce Holsinger): A solid story that asks a lot of questions. It feels like it would be a great book club book, lending itself to discussion. I’m a little surprised that the environmental impact of AI never comes up, especially because the majority of the book takes place on an enormous body of water. But it is less a story about AI and more a story about family dynamics.

The Sentence Is Death (Anthony Horowitz): This was a re-read. I love this series so much, and slipping into a re-read of it is like hanging out with old friends.

Bring the House Down (Charlotte Runcie): An amazing five star read about art and our relationship to it and to each other. About awful behaviour and the way we thoughtlessly and purposefully impact each other’s lives. I was blown away by how much this book made me think. How much the complex characters got under my skin. Cannot wait to see what else this author writes in the future. I loved every messy page.

What did you read last month?

I just read a book about reality television while watching reality television. Not at the same time; the activities were one after the other. But you get the point.

I’m not a big reality television person. We started watching Traitors this winter, and we finished 3 UK seasons and 1.5 US seasons. We definitely prefer the UK and everyone entering as strangers.

I saw 2 seasons of the Real World about 30 years ago. I’ve seen a few reality cooking competitions. I don’t know where that puts me on the watching reality television continuum. Probably somewhere near the middle? Maybe closer to the not watching reality television side? I have no clue how many people watch, but based on the number of shows, I would guess I am leaning toward the minority in reality television consumption.

I make this point because there was a line in the book (The Compound by Aisling Rawle) that captured something we talk about all the time as we watch Traitors: (1) What makes a person go on a show where they know they will be manipulated or voted out? (2) What makes a person watch someone else get manipulated or voted out?

One character says about the possible reason they went on the show:

I think probably all of us must have been very unhappy, otherwise why would we have done that to ourselves? I know we told ourselves that we wanted to live peacefully, but I think we were looking for new ways to make ourselves miserable.

Do happy people go on reality television shows? You have better odds of winning the prize than you do winning the lottery, but it’s still more likely than not that you will walk away with just the experience. Maybe with a travel show, the experience would be the greater prize than a monetary prize, but for so many of these shows — like Traitors — the end prize IS the point. And the friends you make along the way?

And then the other side — why do we watch reality television competitions? Sometimes when we’re watching Traitors, I feel terrible. I feel gutted for people who are certain someone has their back, only to discover they were lying the whole time. My stomach hurts when I hear them confidently state that another contestant is telling the truth when I know that they’re lying. What does that say about me?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Josh and I both have ongoing mixtapes on our phones where we capture new songs we like or old songs we remember. We mostly listen to his mix, but every once in a while, we play mine instead.

I’ve been adding to the list for years, and my current list (because I had one before this that reached 2.5 hours of music before I started over) ran almost 12 hours. 12 hours!

I cleaned it up this weekend, moving all of the songs I normally skipped over to a new “things I used to like” list. I didn’t want to forget them entirely, but I wanted to bring the list down to things I would be happy to hear. It ended up at a trim 8.5 hours of music.

It feels wrong to delete songs off a mixtape. I never did that in the past; they were a time capsule of what interested me at the moment. But the current list feels better. I may even cut it back a little more.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

I got super into Yoga Nidra when the kids were little. I remember it because I convinced the ChickieNob’s girl scout troop that it would be an excellent idea to Yoga Nidra session together as part of some health and wellness badge, and the girls shrieked with laughter through the whole thing because the person’s voice on my app did sort of sound like an animated corpse.

I stopped doing it soon after, and then saw it mentioned in an article recently, rebranded as a 20-minute no sleep deep rest or NSDR. If you go on YouTube, you can find hundreds of videos for this.

I don’t know where I would fit it in — I don’t really have the sort of day that lends itself to a 20-minute naplike session — but I’m curious about the idea of resting and recharging without sleeping.

ChickieNob and I found someone promising, and we lay down on the living room floor to take our 20-minute sleepless nap. Except YouTube kept interrupting the video with ads, and we’d startled and shriek every time it happened. So not successful so far, but we’ll keep trying.

I have a new pair of glasses coming in the mail soon. It’s a weird idea to get glasses delivered instead of returning to the store, but they told me that it would be faster to do it that way, and they are the experts in their own product.

The more I think about it, the more I don’t know how I feel about it. I’m accustomed to the person handing over the glasses, looking at them on my face, adjusting them, making sure they fit properly. And now it’s all down to me; me and my complete lack of knowledge about how I should judge fit. It’s a brave new world.

I chose something completely different from the frames I’ve been wearing for many many many years. I don’t know if that was a mistake, or if I’m cultivating Melissa 2.0. Too soon to know.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “A Simple Life” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “The Dreaded Box” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Jess and Mali!

Okay, now my choices this week.

All & Sundry gives a life update. She is in the middle of a divorce, so it is a time of endings and beginnings. It’s hard to be in this space, but she points out another truth: “I feel certain it will continue to be raw and fluctuating for a good long while and maybe forever in some ways but eventually everything will start to heal and even out and we will both be in much better places.” And I may just take her words as a new motto: “It’s time to be strong, and it’s going to be okay.” It will.

Lastly, Scientist on the Roof gives an update on Helsinki, but it made me think about all of the things you love and don’t love about traveling. Sometimes you don’t realize the things you feel neutral about at home until you realize, “Oh, this is what it is like to not have or to have this thing.” She writes: “I am not sure how to feel about people being very direct in letting you know you were doing something wrong. I thought I missed that… But it sometimes made me feel defensive.” I think it would make me feel defensive, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: New glasses… in the mail. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 1 – 8) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.