October Reading Update

Books I Read This Month

1. Fearful Symmetries, Edited by Ellen Datlow ★★★★☆
2. The Dark: New Ghost Stories, Edited by Ellen Datlow ★★★☆☆ (#ToTathon2019)
3. Vicious by V.E. Schwab ★★★★☆ (#ToTathon2019)
4. Mongrels by Stephen Graham ★★★★☆ (#ToTathon2019)
5. Life Among Savages by Shirley Jackson ★★★★☆ (#ToTathon2019)
6. White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi★★★★★ (#Spook and ToT athons)
7. Summer of Night by Dan Simmons ★★★☆☆ (#Spook and ToT athons)
8. The Institute by Stephen King ★★★★☆ (#Spook and ToT athons)
9. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury ★★★★☆ (#Spook and ToT athons)
10. The Ancestors by Brandon Massey. L.A. Banks, and Tananarive Due ★★★☆☆ (#Spook and ToT athons)
11. Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield ★★★★☆
12. Middlegame by Seanan McGuire ★★★★★
13. Wizards of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin ★★★☆☆
14. Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire ★★★★★

I’ve linked to each review, but Wizard’s of Earthsea will be discussed in an Earthsea Cycle post at a later date. There were a couple things I didn’t get to finishing. That is, my physical reads outside of the readathon did not make much progress, but my audiobook progress was fantastic. I made it through these books much faster than I anticipated.

Update 11/8/19:

I was writing a book post and began to discuss my feelings about what and how much I read, but I felt like it fits better here in my reading update. I have been doing so well lately. Past years I have done as much rereading as I do new reading, and I never counted that toward my “yearly” reading numbers. It just felt like cheating. My desire to read more now isn’t that I can’t make time for rereads and new books exactly. It is more a fear that I won’t be able to keep up my reading pace and/or passion. It’s better to keep my momentum on new book experiences so that when I finally (and inevitably?) fall back into reading less new books, I’ll have larger selection of favorites to choose from. This is me getting in my head. It is frustrating, but it feels impossible to escape my own fear of “failure” as I have arbitrarily defined it.

November TBR

1. Circe by Madeline Miller ★★★★★
2. The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware
3. Wayward Children #2 by Seanan McGuire
4. Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao
5. If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio ★★★★★
6. Sadie by Courtney Summers
7. A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab ★★★☆☆
8. The Tombs of Atuan by Ursula K. Le Guin
9. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
10. Buzzwordathon Reading (6-7 books)

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I have a very ambitious TBR this month. Several of these are very short, to be fair, but I am not sure I will have time to read everything I want to read. The problem is, the longer these take, the longer I have to wait to read the ones I want to read in December!

I also have to face the fact that my Comprehensive exam is coming. My nights may grow long, and other than a couple hours each morning and night, I may not get much reading. I won’t let that hold me back though, at least not my goals. Aim high but be prepared to under achieve. For me, it’s enough to be excited about so many new books.

Booktube has introduced me to a wide range of books of different genres, so it will be a nice variety of readings. This month I am going to participate in Buzzwordathon. I will be reading books with numbers in the title. That post is pending! That will take a week, which means I need to read 3 books a week to keep up. I’m comfortably reading two a week, so we will see. Plus, three of these are very short.

Update 11/7/19: I’ve begun including series in my monthly reading to 1) pace myself and 2) get me to finish the series’. Another problem I have with books is my wanting to read science books and always pushing it off. I think I want to try a new approach of adding at least one science “classic” I’ve wanted to read every month. This month I am going to work in