Another month done. How time flies! How has life been? I hope 2025 has treated you well and continues to do so. I hope everyone is treated with kindness. If not, I hope that the coming months will be brimming with positive changes, growth, development, life-changing lessons, and blessings. I hope 2025 will go well for everyone. I hope everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered. But before I could wave goodbye to August, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. Like the past two months, my August purchases are limited. The past three months were about holding myself up. This aligns with my New Year’s resolution to read more and buy less. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in August.

Title: The Idiot
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Translator (from Russian): David McDuff
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2004 (1868)
No. of Pages: 718

Synopsis: 

Returning to St. Petersburg from a sanatorium, the gentle Prince Myshki – known as ‘the idiot’ – pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utternly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal and, finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of ‘a truly beautiful soul’ and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world.

Title: The Peasants
Author: Władysław Reymont
Translator (from Polish): Anna Zaranko
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2024 (1904-1909)
No. of Pages: 893

Synopsis: 

In the Polish village of Lipce, scandal, romance and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village’s wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride – but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over the course of four seasons – Autumn to Summer – the tangled skein of their story unravels, watched eagerly by the other peasants: the gossip Jagustynka, pious Roch, hot-blooded Mateusz, gentle Witek. At once richly lyrical and realistic, comic, tragic and reflective, Władysław Reymont’s epic novel is a love song to the land, and to the eternal, timeless matters of the heart.

Title: My Friends
Author: Fredrik Backman
Translator (from Swedish): Neil Smith
Publisher: Atria Books
Publishing Date: 2025
No. of Pages: 434

Synopsis: 

Most people don’t even notice them – three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of a wide expanse of sea. But Louisa, soon to be eighteen years old and an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise. She is determined to find out the story behind these three enigmatic figures.

More than two decades before, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up every morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that, after a chance encounter in an alleyway, will unexpectedly be placed into Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to discover how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more anxious she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa’s complicated life is proof that happy endings are sometimes possible, but they don’t always take the form we expect them to.

Fredrik Backman’s signature charm, humor, and attention to the poignant details of everyday life are on full display in this funny, moving novel. His most heartfelt and personal tale yet, My Friends is a stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of art and friendship.