Steel Springs, or, My August 2025 in Media
My book and film consumption for the month of August was surprisingly bog and trench heavy. Does this have anything to do with the fact that August marked my first colonoscopy? Impossible to say.
Before we talk media, some housekeeping: I’ve decided to stop crossposting my newsletters to Substack, so have imported all my followers over here to Buttondown. The main difference this makes for substack subscribers is that I’ll now appear in your email inbox instead of your Substack app. If that’s a drama, feel free to unsubscribe and add my archive page to your RSS feed or bookmarks instead.
BOOKS READ:
Selfish Girls by Abigail Bergstrom (2025)
Format: Paperback (Hodder & Stoughton)
I’d heard absolutely nothing about this book before spotting its excellently eye-grabbing (and thematically resonant!) cover on the new release table of my local bookshop, and I didn’t search up a single review upon learning of its existence. I simply read the back cover, liked it enough to read through the first few pages, then took it home and read the whole thing. A positively archaic experience that has, admittedly, bitten me in the arse many a time, but this time it worked out nicely.
Selfish Girls is the story of Emma, Dylan and Ines: three Welsh sisters who are thrown back into each other’s intimate orbits when Ines’s fiancee (and Dylan’s childhood best friend) insists on moving back to Wales after she experiences a traumatic miscarriage for an unwanted pregnancy. Old wounds reopen, alliances between the sisters (and their mother and partners) shift, and relationships are forever changed. It’s soapy as all hell, and yet Bergstrom keeps everything nicely grounded in real, human emotion. The women in this family aren’t inherently likeable — they make mistakes constantly, several of them the life-changing kind — and yet their every action felt doomed (complimentary) by Bergstrom’s strong characterisation. I had a fantastic time with this one, and if you’re in any form of book club I’m going to suggest it as a future pick. Not because it’s a must read, but because the actions of these sisters are going to lead to arguments. And is that not why we really go to book clubs?
Mere by Danielle Giles (2025)
Format: Paperback (Mantle)
This book came highly recommended by a friend who a) loves bogs and b) is around bogs often enough to have strong opinions about them, and so, being of a mind to read something boggy, I followed her in.
Mere is set in Norfolk in the year 990. Our protagonist is Hilda, middle-aged nun and infirmarian to a convent surrounded by — you guessed it — bog. When the priest’s new servant boy goes missing in said bog, he seems to reawaken an ancient curse to which only Hilda and the alluring new, possibly prophetic nun Wulfrun may hold the key to defeating.
This was such a great time. Lushly written and cleverly orchestrated, Giles delivers a character piece rich in interesting women, Catholic mysticism and English folklore. All that with a healthy serving of gay nuns! Fantastic. No notes.
The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (2025)
Format: Hardcover (Henry Holt)
Another historical fiction featuring Catholic panic, this time set in 18th century Oxfordshire. Through the eyes of five people in their orbit, we see a small-town rumour about five reclusive girls living with their wealthy grandfather form and grow, with disastrous consequences. Despite being ostensibly about young girls, this is a really interesting exploration of masculinity in a world teetering between the mysticism of the past and the rationality of the future.
I won’t say too much more about it as it is quite a short book, but I really appreciated Purvis’s approach to this story. She creates a living, breathing community, sets some scandalous gossip loose, and largely leaves the reader to make up their own mind as to whether or not it’s true. Once again, I loved spending time with this book. August really was a banger of a reading month, and the cherry on top was…
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden (2024)
Format: Audiobook, performed by January LaVoy and Michael Crouch (Random House Audio)
I first read The Warm Hands of Ghosts last year and loved it to bits, and have been meaning to reread it ever since. Thanks to some research I’ve been doing into the first world war for a personal project, the urge to follow Katherine Arden back to the trenches finally became irresistible.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a split narrative that follows two Canadian siblings on the Western Front. Freddy, an infantry soldier, inadvertently makes a traitor of himself as he tries to survive the horrors of the push on Passchendaele Ridge. Five months later, Laura, an honourably discharged and heavily haunted nurse (in both the literal and emotional sense), returns to Belgium to search for news on her brother who has been declared missing, presumed dead. Their stories unfold parallel, and Arden does an excellent job parsing out information and spinning the mystery between the two.
I love this book for so many reasons, which makes distilling it down to a few paragraphs tricky. To me, Arden has written a perfect novel: Well crafted, well researched, well written, emotional but not laboured, strong in her purpose and yet trusting the reader to meet her halfway. Every character breathes with life (I adore both of the Iven siblings, as well as everyone in their orbit), and the dialogue sparkles while working in constant service of the narrative. Nothing is wasted here, nor is it rushed. Arden deploys the supernatural elements with a deft hand, presenting the cold, muddy mire of the Western Front as an apocalyptic hellscape through which ghosts walk freely and the devil himself lurks in the shadows. But the fantastical elements don’t minimise the very real horrors of war. The Warm Hands of Ghosts is an anti-war story through and through, and the devil takes no credit for the decisions of powerful men. He’s just profiting off the side. The true villains of the piece are officers sitting in fine chateaus miles behind the line, ordering the kind of push that sees Freddy trapped in an overturned pillbox with a German soldier, or Laura’s field hospital placed directly beside a munitions store.
It’s a heavy book. Any book portraying such a subject should be. But it’s not a hopeless one. Arden finds the light in the thing all of those men and women signed up to walk into hell to fight for: each other. The Warm Hands of Ghosts is ultimately a love story: between siblings, between lovers, between friends, between a mother and her child. Love might not be enough to save the world or end a war, but Arden explores whether it might be enough to save a few souls teetering on the edge of oblivion. And in that, she absolutely triumphs.
MEDIA WATCHED:
The Diplomat (Seasons 1 & 2, 2023 and 2024)
Streamed on Netflix
For some reason I had it in my head that season three of The Diplomat was premiering at the end of August (October 16th, alas) and so did my rewatch too goddamn early. This was, I have to admit, my third full watch of both seasons and I simply cannot rule out a fourth watch before October.
If you’re not aware of what it’s about, Keri Russell plays seasoned US diplomat Kate Wyler who usually works very serious postings in the Middle East, but is pulled against her will into the usually fluffy position of British Ambassador to smooth over an international incident. Luckily for her, the incident turns out to be absolutely BRIMMING with intrigue, and she has to figure out who the heck has attack a British warship and why before World War 3 breaks out. All of this is complicated by the fact that the President of the USA is currently searching for a new Vice President to replace the one that will soon be resigning in disgrace and this position is essentially her audition for the role; her diplomat husband is the modern day lovechild of Machiavelli and Lady Macbeth, the UK Prime Minister is a charismatic manchild, and the Foreign Secretary is extremely yummy.
This is TELEVISION, my friends. The seasons are unfortunately very short, but so tightly written, gorgeously shot and brilliantly cast. Allison Janney appears at the end of season two and it’s like staring into the face of God. Don’t let the Netflix label deter you. This is ye olde HBO quality. Join me on this juicy journey and then come back and talk to me about it.
Weird! The Al Yankovic Story (Dir. Eric Appel, 2022)
Rented on AppleTV
My partner was in a funk, so I put on this movie to get him out of it and lo! it worked! I’ve never been a huge consumer of Weird Al’s work (though his riff on American Pie is my preferred way to consume The Phantom Menace) but the fact that the Weird Al movie is a parody of both his life and the general concept of musical biopics is… flawless. It was very fun to watch, and I just love to see Daniel Radcliffe and Evan Rachel Wood having a good time.
Gallipoli (Dir. Peter Weir, 1981)
Rented on Youtube
All the WW1 research and reading naturally led me back to Peter Weir’s iconic anti-war movie, which I realised I hadn’t actually seen since I was in high school, and which I remembered through the slightly odd filter of the novelisation, which we had to study in Year 10 English for reasons unremembered. So I popped it on and, two hours later, was bawling my eyes out.
Weir’s film follows two fictional Western Australian runners (always love to see WA on film). Archie is a kind, beloved 18 year old with boundless potential and a deep desire to fight for his country; Frank is a charming grifter with a dream of opening a bike shop. The film follows them as they become mates and end up in the Australian Light Horse and deployed to ANZAC Cove in Gallipoli (by way of Egypt), and ends in the famous battle of the Nek.
The Egyptian portions of the film are certainly the most annoying to watch, as all of the well-documented violent behaviour of the Australian soldiers against the locals are written off as good fun, but Weir does a heartbreakingly wonderful thing in presenting us with two young men who are so easy to fall in love with, and straight up butchering one in the final frame of the film. This movie has no catharsis. It ends in arrest: Archie, cut down for nothing amongst hundreds (and what would be thousands) of young men, having just saved his best mate from this particular push, but with no guarantee that he won’t be in the next one. There are a number of similarities between Katherine Arden’s The Warm Hands of Ghosts, but unlike Arden, Weir didn’t want to leave his audience with hope. For Archie and Frank, and sixty thousand Australian volunteers by the end of 1918, there was no ‘after the war.’ It’s excuciatingly effective, and while you could certainly call it Aussie larrakin propaganda, it’s more than earned its place in Austalian cinematic history.
IN SHORT:
My partner and I continued our X-Files journey and completed season two. I can see why this show had such a chokehold on everyone back in the 90’s. The core storyline is fabulous, for all six episodes of it you get per season, and the rest of the episodes are just such fun, weird, wacky adventures. I’m loving it.
Alas, the other alien show I attempted this month was a flop. Despite going into it with moderate hopes and excitement, Alien: Earth made me roll my eyes exactly one minute into the pilot, and then countless times afterward. But I resisted the urge to turn it off in order to give the full episode a fair go and… Christ. I don’t think I’ve seen a worse first episode in a long time. Clunky writing, unbelievably stupid characters, bizarre logic, awful pacing. I hated every second of it. I’ve heard it gets better, but this is from people who thought the first episode was pretty good, so I fear I cannot trust them.
I officially finished Silicon Valley, and while I getting pretty ready for the show to be over, I did love it as a whole and I really liked the ending. Big fan of a tragedy about a guy doomed to fail in tech because he can’t let go of his ethics.
I got sick from standing in the rain for a few hours at a protest, so naturally I had to watch Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility for the hundredth time, for it is thee woman gets sick from being rained on movie. Also, it is just perfect.
And finally: I watched K-Pop Demon Hunters again. I can’t help it. I’d follow that stupid demon boy band straight into hell.
MISCELLANEOUS MEDIA I ENJOYED:
I’ve become a person who enjoys smooth café jazz, and Grapie Deltaco (a wonderful Booktok/Bookstagram/Booktube creator) has made a series of absolutely delightful ASMR/ambience videos in which you can pretend to be either a pigeon or a rat in a chill café. If that appeals to you, please join me and the cute vermin in a very calming space.
Focus Friend: Focus apps work wonderfully for me, until they don’t work at all. Hank Green’s new little bean thing is currently filling the void left by Forest Stay Focused and Finch. It’s… fine.
Tiny Bookshop: I’m not a huge fan of cozy games, but I really enjoyed the tutorial of Tiny Bookshop when I played it over a year ago, and was really happy to get my mitts on the full game this month. I cannot fathom how some people have already sunk 50+ hours into a game where all you do is restock books and recommend the same 20 titles to random townsfolk, but I do enjoy playing fifteen minutes of it at a time, once a week, with a cup of tea.
And that was August, 2025! Thank you for reading along! If you’d like to yap about any of the books, TV shows, movies or whatever else I’ve posted here, you can find me, as always, @feedthewriter on Instagram, Bluesky, and now once again on TikTok, though I’m intentionally keeping my time and posting there to a mental-health friendly minimum.