my august '26
On my bookstagram account I started doing monthly dumps/recaps at the end of each month. I like thinking about everything I did each month, everything I read, listened to or watched. Everything I thought about and how I felt. I don't know why but I like to take a moment to reflect on everything that happened in a month so I can move on to the next month.
On Instagram I always felt like I needed to cut myself short on these posts. I mean who would actually read all that? But on here I'm gonna put every single thought down. That's literally what this blog is about. I don't know how long this will be and it will probably be a bit messy, so bear with me.
M. and I started August with a little trip to Berlin. It was a very fun, short trip and I'm really happy we got to go away, even just for three days. I got to go to quite a few bookstores and I visited an all romance bookstore which was a big highlight for me!! Every single wall and shelf was pink and they had a cardboard cutout off Connor Storrie!!! FUN!! M. wrote his own blog post about this trip (it's in German though).
Not so fun was the fact that I really noticed my Crohn's disease on this trip. I was EXHAUSTED and I did almost have an accident... not just once. The rest of the week before I had to go back to work I decided to just recover and rest a bit.
One of my co-workers used to be a tattoo artist and she loves to randomly ask me if I'm free after work so I can get a few of the tattoos I've got planned. Obviously I say yes every single time (I've gotten 5 new tattos and touched up 3 since she started working with me and that's only been two months). I finally got a tattoo for Sleep Tokens song 'Euclid' and I also got "there is no linear time" in heptapod from the movie Arrival around my elbow.
M. and I watched Project Hail Mary on a random Saturday and that was the start of my intense hyperfixation on space and astronomy. Everything about the communication between Ryan Gosling and the alien in that movie VEXXED me. I studied English at uni and I'm very interested in linguistics so that movie was incredibly frustrating for me. To make up for that and to calm me down, we watched Arrival straight after. I had watched Arrival before but it's been a while and I had apparently forgotten how phenomenal that movie is. It completely made up for how infuriating I found Project Hail Mary.
However, Project Hail Mary reminded me that I've always had this very deep respect and fascination for the universe and I craved more of that. We watched Interstellar the very next day and that was it. I wanted to quit my job and start studying physics so I could get a master in astrophysics (mind you, I've always hated maths but suddenly I was very eager to learn and learn I did). M. and I started watching different astrophysics videos on Youtube every single day. I learned so many things about star constellations, gravity, different planets, black holes, spacetime and honestly so many more things. I spent my break at work researching. There is so so so much more to learn, I haven't even touched the surface.
My mum lives in a small town so there's not as much light pollution there, we visited her one weekend and just spotted star constellations one night. We also saw a few shooting stars from the perseids. The sun eclipse couldn't have come at a better time! I could go on and on, I think I probably will in a different blog post. Thinking about space and the universe makes me feel some type of way, I can barely describe it. I think I have to stop talking about this now or I fear I never will.
I read 17 books in August, 5 of which were audiobooks (AUDIOBOOKS COUNT AS READING!!! Thinking otherwise is mean at best and ableist at worst). I like to use StoryGraph to track what I'm reading so feel free to befriend me on there if you're interested in seeing the different books I read my StoryGraph account
After the start of my astronomy obsession, I wasn't really interested in reading about anything else. But I'm also someone, and this might sound silly to some people, I just NEED some sort of romance in my books. Otherwise I literally can't concentrate on it, there are very few exceptions to this (mainly when I decide to read a thriller).
I decided to start re-reading some books by Ali Hazelwood (also because the The Love Hypothesis movie will be out soon and I wanted to do a re-read anyway). Love on the Brain and Love, Theoretically kind of scratched that space itch, but not really. I found a reddit post with recommendations for romance books that have space or astronomy themes. My absolute highlight was Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I only finished it yesterday, but my god!!!! That book completely tore me apart. I will post a full review of this at a later date.
I also decided to read Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu as I really enjoyed the Netflix show. I don't think I would have enjoyed the book as much if I hadn't watched the show and knew what would happen but I also didn't NOT enjoy this book by any means. M. wants me to read the second book before the second season comes out so I probably will read that as well. We will see.
For now I'll be spending every free minute finding more romance books set in space or space related fields.
If anyone's read until the end, I appreciate you, I hope you have a lovely september <3