Books acquired: none.

Books read: “The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister,” Chris Nichols; “L.A. in the ’30s,” David Gebhard and Harriette von Breton; “On Reading,” Andre Kertesz; “The Bronze Rule,” Mary Sisney; “Shakespeare Wrote for Money,” Nick Hornby; “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” “Through the Looking-Glass,” Lewis Carroll; “Gullible’s Travels, Etc.,” Ring Lardner; “The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories,” Ernest Hemingway; “The Chandler Apartments,” Owen Hill; “Urban Tumbleweed,” Harryette Mullen.

Remember when I read 22 very short books in one month (March 2013)? I’d been wanting to repeat the experiment during another staycation but that kept getting delayed, as enticing column topics or commitments kept presenting themselves. Finally, I took off a week in mid-August.

What with one thing or another, such as modest travel that week, and moviegoing, I was unable to knock off a book a day, and in fact became mired in some books for day after day. But I read 11, counting a combo volume of the two “Alice” books as two, and that’s double my usual total. Felt good to get some relatively easy books out of the way too.

In the order presented above, I read two books on vintage L.A. architecture, a book of L.A. poems composed in rambles around town, a mystery involving a Berkeley bookhunter-sleuth, a memoir by a retired Cal Poly Pomona English prof, photos taken over 50 years of people reading in public, more of Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns (the model for these blog posts), the “Alice” books, humorous stories from the 1910s and 1920s, and some random stories by Hemingway.

I won’t discuss all these books but will say I liked them all to one degree or another, and that my favorites were Hornby, Hill, Mullen, the first Carroll (some think “Looking-Glass” is better, but it struck me as markedly inferior, if still of interest) and Lardner. The latter consists of five stories about a lower middle-class couple in NYC with pretensions of social-climbing; the narrator is the husband, whose colloquialisms, misstatements and dry wit are hilarious. Highly recommended.

As for when I acquired these books, the Lardner is the oldest, likely going back 20 or 25 years. And it’s possibly my favorite of the month. The others are all five years old or less, and usually from the last year. I’ll also point out that Mullen’s was only published last year and Sisney’s this year. Shockingly modern. Also, that two of my books were by women named Harriet, only with complex spellings. I guess that was a minor theme this month.

What were you reading in August, and have you happened to read any of mine before? The “Alice” books and “Kilimanjaro” have surely been read by some of you.

Next month: I’ve read a month of “I” titles; here’s a month of “eye” titles.