Yes, I know it’s mid-August and I’m more than a month behind on these posts. The bar happened, but I’m working on it.
June was a crazy month. It was also kind of an awful month. I was neck deep in bar studying, nine to ten hours a week, seven days a week, and by mid-June I’d been doing that for six weeks and still had six weeks to go. I was exhausted and terrified, and I didn’t think my brain could possibly hold any more information but there was so much more information that my brain had to hold. And then I was so focused on the law that I lost all of my coordination, fell down the stairs, and sprained my ankle so badly that I actually went to urgent care and was walking with a cane for a month. Two months later my ankle is still kind of swollen and twingy. So yeah, it was a bad month.
So we’re not going to talk any more about what I was up to in June, because those are some deeply unpleasant memories. Except for the books.
But hey! The books!
I read ten books in June, and I really liked most of them. I also really hope I passed the bar otherwise I’m going to feel really bad about those ten books.
Six of the books in June were rereads for me, and four were totally new. Two were nonfiction (both World War II), and two were more novellas than novels. I read one entire series, and I continued on with another series, but three of the books I read were stand-alones. All of these books were audiobooks. I’m working on getting back to reading in Braille I swear.
So let’s dive in.
First, I read Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson. This was the second book in his Stormlight Archives series. It was just as massive as the first book, but also just as worth it. I loved how the stories came together, and while the beginning of the book was kind of slow, I pretty much flew through this book in a week. Remember what I said about really hoping I passed the bar? That particularly applies to this book, which took up forty-five plus hours of my life in one week when I should have been studying civ pro or con law or something. My full review for Words of Radiance is right over here. I also read Edgedancer, the novella that comes in between Words of Radiance and the next book, Oathbringer. I absolutely loved Edgedancer, because I absolutely love the main character, Lift, who we meet in Words of Radiance. It may be possible to read Edgedancer without having read the other books in the series too, so if you’re daunted by the size of the other Stormlight books—and I don’t blame you, I was very daunted—Edgedancer is a fun and fast introduction to the world. My full review for Edgedancer is over here.
Next, I reread The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The Book Thief has been one of my all-time favorites since I first read it in 2012. This month I reread it not just because I was in the middle of my great bar prep rereadathon but also because I was leading the discussion for the book club I’m in. I’ve read so much since I first read The Book Thief that I was a bit more picky about it than I have been in the past, but I still love it a lot and still definitely recommend it. This is one of those books that everyone should read. My full review is over here.
I reread the entire Lunar Chronicles series in June. It was so much fun to go adventuring with Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, Winter and the rest of the gang, and it was a wonderful distraction from the bar exam hole I was living in. I also reread Fairest, the prequel novella about the evil Queen Levana, which I liked but also kind of regretted rereading because it’s not a pleasant book to read and right then I needed pleasant books. For a lot more elaboration and a good bit of squealing, go check out my full reviews for Cinder, Scarlet, Cress, Fairest, and Winter.
Next, I read The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman. This is a nonfiction book about a woman in Poland who hid Jews in her family’s abandoned zoo while her husband worked in the Polish resistance. My full review is right over here, but the long and short of it is that I was really interested in the story but the book could have been better.
Finally, the other WWII nonfiction book I read in June was Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy. This book was just fascinating. I had no idea that women worked as code breakers in World War II, and I loved reading about their contributions and accomplishments. I felt like the book was juggling the stories of too many women, to be honest, but as a chronicle of the role of women code breakers during the war as a whole, it was great. This is definitely one for the favorites list, and if you’re interested in World War II and spies, I definitely recommend. You can check out my full review over here for more details too.
And that’s it for June. We’ll dive into the books I read in July next, and hopefully I can get reasonably caught up on these reviews soon. In the meantime, have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?