Woah. The -ber months are finally here. How time flies! We really are down to the last four months of the year. How has 2023 been so far? I hope that it has been kind to everyone. Otherwise, I hope the remaining months of the year will be filled with nothing but good news, happiness, and blessings. I hope that you will be able to complete everything that you have started at the start of the year. I hope that you will get repaid for everything you worked hard for during the year. More importantly, I hope that everyone will be healthy, in body, mind, and spirit.

But before I can turn in a new leaf, I am sharing my book haul for August. At the start of the year, I resolved to read more and buy less. I guess I can tick this resolution off already as a failure although I must say that I was (nearly) able to hold myself from buying even more books during the month. I was able to keep myself from buying more books. Without more ado, here are the books I obtained during the month. Happy reading!

Title: The Hills Beyond
Author: Thomas Wolfe
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Publishing Date: 2000 (1941)
No. of Pages: 348

Synopsis: The third and last book culled from the mountain of manuscript Thomas Wolfe left behind, The Hills Behind “contains some of his best, and certainly his most mature, work” (New York Times Book Review). The unfinished novel from which this collection of sketches, stories, and novellas takes its title was Wolfe’s final effort. It tells the story of the Joyner family, George Webber’s maternal ancestors, in pre-Civil War North Carolina and illustrates Wolfe’s fine sense of family traits rotted in a traceable past. “Chickamauga” is the superb Civil War tale that Wolfe received from his great-uncle; “The Lost Boy” renders a second, more tender treatment of the death of young Grover Gand; and “The Return of the Prodigal” describes Eugene Gant’s imagined and then actual revisit to Altamont when he is a famous author. Together the eleven pieces of The Hills Beyond confirm the passion, energy, and sensitivity that made Wolfe the most promising American writer of his generation.

Title: An Outcast of the Islands
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1975 (1896)
No. of Pages: 295

Synopsis: When Willems stepped off the straight and narrow path of his own peculiar honesty he thought it would be ‘a short episode – a sentence in brackets, so to speak – in the flowing tale of his life’. But Willems was wrong, for he was about to embark on a voyage to discovery and self-discovery that would change, if not destroy, the rest of his life. Marooned by his own people on the shore of a Malayan island, Willems is caught in the grip of his own vulnerability and corruption.

An Outcast of the Islands was only Conrad’s second novel, but in its theme, in its impressionistic use of scenery, and, above all, in the enormous richness and power of the writing, it predicts Conrad’s position as a literary artist of the highest rank.

Title: Chain-Gang All-Stars
Author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 359

Synopsis: Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE< or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in the Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, Thurwar considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games. But CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo, and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors, to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a “new and necessary American voice” (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).

Title: Buddenbrooks
Author: Thomas Mann
Translator (from German): H.T. Lowe-Porter
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: May 1984 (1901)
No. of Pages: 604

Synopsis: Originally published in Germany in 1901, Buddenbrooks is Thomas Mann’s first major novel, and one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

Buddenbrooks tells the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intric=nsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. And as the Buddenbrook family eventually succumbs to modern influences – influences which are at variance with their own traditions – its downfall becomes certain.