November has been a very weird month for me. I had to take time off sick due to complete exhaustion at the beginning of the month, which paradoxically means I had time to be bored and read more stuff, especially audiobooks.
I did find it hard to stick with my challenge of reading all/most of the Hugo nominated works, but I did enjoy what I read. Because this post about the Lodestar YA nominations covers a lot of what I read, I’m not gonna go too much into it here.
I will just add though that I now have a Bookshop.org page, and if you buy through it I will get a small %, which is nice considering this month was tough. But no obligations of course!
Other memorable non-Hugo books I’ve read:
- The Wife in the Attic, by Rose Lerner, a sapphic, Jewish retelling of Jane Eyre which I’d been looking forward to for a while now! I won an audiobook in the author’s halloween giveaway and got to it very quick. I read it through in one weekend (one has to sleep sometimes, unfortunately) and I loved it! I’ll likely write a longer review soon.
- Black God’s Drums by P. Djeli Clark, cemented my idea that there’s nothing of them I can dislike. Alternative history, post-Civil War New Orleans in a short novella that just made me want more of the main characters’ adventures!
- Claudette Colvin, Twice towards Justice, by Phillip Hoose, a nonfiction for teens centering Claudette Colvin as a figure of the Montgomery bus boycott. It’s based on and includes large extracts of interviews with her
- A Killing Frost, by Seanan McGuire. Can’t believe how strong this series is still going, what, 14 books in? I need to get my hands on the last one. This still sparks so much joy!
I’ve also started Soulstar in audiobook, and The Galaxy and the Ground Within in paper, which I’m hoping maybe I can finish before the month is fully over. (at least one would be nice)
Assuming I don’t, though, that’ll be:
14 books for this month, 115 for the year!
1 DNF (an ARC that really got on my nerves at like 5 typos a page)
over 4600 pages read!
I think I read a lot more in ebook format this month than in, like, ever! Which is great for me because I don’t realise how many pages I get through until I’m done. But it also tires me a lot more :/
I don’t normally assign myself a reading list in advance, but December is going to be a bit different. The obvious reason is that it’s the last month of the year so there is stuff I need to get to.
The less obvious reason is that I’m going home from the 15th-28th. And I’m trying to keep my luggage as empty as possible on the way out. So the way I’m looking at it is, there’s the big books I want to read but that gotta stay home (and the library books that I won’t dare bring with me for fear of forgetting them):
And there’s the smaller books that I want to take with me:
Now it’s a very hopeful TBR and I won’t be mad at myself if I don’t get to all of them, I’ll likely just push them into January. I do also have another few ebooks and audiobooks I want to get to but I often read them alongside a paper one anyways. But whittling it down to just these was super hard already, so I’d like to read as many as possible!
What are your reading plans for December? Anything you wanna cross off the list before the year is out?