The Last Week of August

As I type this essay, I am sitting outside on the back patio. I’m staring at my little pink rose bush. It’s been dormant for most of the year, producing only one bloom in the month of June. I thought that there was something wrong with it; it would be reasonable, since I have yet to be able to transplant it to a larger pot. Perhaps, I thought, the roots have no space. Perhaps this is all that it’ll ever yield.

Yet as I sat outside, wondering what to write about here, I noticed that there is a new bud. It’s standing tall and proud, waiting to open and reward me with fragrant pink petals. The last rose of August—perhaps of the summer—has reminded me that sometimes beauty springs up at unlikely times. A person in a small space can grow, uninhibited by limitations. Plants adapt; so do humans.

This reminded me, as most things do, of books. When I say that I’ve read 81 novels in 2026, I know that there will be some people who scoff and say that there’s no way I can remember what all of them are about, and therefore it is a waste of time to be so voracious. These people exist: I have met them. So I would like to share my thoughts about the matter here.

It’s true that, when a person reads a great many books, we aren’t likely to remember them all. In fact, a good amount of them will settle as shadows in the back of our minds—or shall we say, as light? Because a book read and enjoyed, even if it is not later remembered, still changed our lives while we were immersed in it. Just because we cannot remember the entire plot doesn’t mean it hasn’t been good for us.

When we read a good book, we are embarking on a journey. Books can scoop us up and take us to Ancient Egypt or a space station or the bottom of the sea. Anyone who has ever been on vacation knows that, as much as they would like to, they could not recall all of the roads they took, sights they visited, or meals they ate. But these experiences shaped them all the same. The fact that not every incident lingers in memory doesn’t make the experiences worthless.

In my opinion, it is the same with books. Just because we cannot remember every plot twist, each character’s name, or a quote that we felt was beautiful in the moment doesn’t mean that we didn’t enjoy it or that it did not make our lives better. Each book feeds the mind; it strengthens the roots of our imagination. And one day, out of the blue, we might notice that a flower is growing from those roots—in the place we least expected.

Soon, August will end, and we’ll enter the cooler months. I am among the many who believe September and October to be the loveliest months of the year: we watch leaves fall and turn the grass into carpets of gold. However, with the approach of chillier weather, we face the bittersweet truth that flowers will be gone until spring returns.

Flowers might vanish temporarily, but books do not. For this reason, it’s important to cultivate the garden of our imaginations.

Here’s what I think it means to keep a well-watered reading life: give your books the attention they deserve. Make room for paperbacks and hardcovers, even when the rest of life feels crowded. Follow your own curiosity, not society’s idea of what a reader ought to be.

Finally, you must trust that every book you love is leaving something behind. It is strengthening your roots. Beauty will come from this.

I think again of my little rose bush. For months, I assumed that its one flower was all that it had to give. I could not see what was happening beneath the soil. Then, during the last week of August, when I was beginning to think of summer as something nearly finished, I noticed a new bud.

Our reading lives are like that, too. We do not always know what is taking root. We cannot predict which story will stay with us, which sentence will return years later, or what might bloom from the books we have read and nearly forgotten.

This does not mean that nothing is happening.

Sometimes, we simply have to keep watering the garden.

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