Here we are again. The end of another month. But this time it’s also the end of the summer. It has been a long and hot summer, and from an agricultural perspective, I’m certainly happy to see the back of it. From a reading perspective, it was a wonderful three months of reading and book hauls.

I spent the best part of August trying to get up to date on my TBR. Literally, because I was reading from the oldest book to the newest. I managed to get as far as 1991 before a small book haul reopened the 1980s section of my TBR. It would likely take me another month to get up to the start of the current millennium, but I’m still deciding what my TBR plan for September should look like.

I also managed to finally complete all of the Star Trek novels on my TBR, allowing me to perform a full retrospective of all the Trek on my shelves. hopefully, I’ll be able to do the same with my Warhammer reading in the not-too-distant future.

One thing I experimented with in August was combining multiple reviews into single articles. This seems to have gone down quite well, and certainly lessens my workload. I expect to continue this technique any time I end up with a lot of similar books that I don’t have much to say about. So you can expect a Military SF roundup sooner rather than later.

Finally, my slow endeavour to reread any old books I never assigned a formal rating too led to a very fun buddy read of China Mieville’s Embassytown. I didn’t enjoy the book itself, but the buddy reading experience went much more smoothly than others I’ve done in the past, and I already have another one lined up for the start of next month. There’s a good chance of a buddy read most months, though some of them might not be science fiction, so don’t hold your breath.

In non-reading, I have mostly completed my mission to spreadsheet all of the major SF awards and their shortlists. I only have the Dragon Awards (for which the 2025 award is being announced as I write this), and the Locus Award, for which the shortlist is proving frustratingly difficult to locate.

These past few days I’ve also managed to get back into the habit of writing fiction. Nothing elaborate as of yet, but a combination of a friendly alarm and some chocolate limes is proving to be a great motivator. It’s just nice to feel like I’m getting back into the swing of things.

Partly because of all the time spent in the spreadsheets, this has been a fairly quiet month for the blog. Nevertheless, things are all going well, and so I’ll cut this roundup off here. See you tomorrow with an update on all of my reading plans for September.