October in Review
I honestly don't know where October went. I had big plans for this month but I feel like I looked up and it was November.
This was a pretty good month for reading. I completed 17 books and DNFed one, and managed to finish off the majority of the Booker longlist (and all of the shortlist) and make a start on the Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. I also finally got around to reading some J.M. Coetzee, who I've been intending to try for years, and discovered that I like him - though thus far haven't read something by him that I love. I like him enough to keep exploring his work, though, so that's nice.
Everything I read this month was pretty solid. I don't use star ratings on this blog but I do keep track of how I rate things on Goodreads/Storygraph, and only two of the books I finished this month were rated below 6/10. One of them was a book I first started reading in July that I put down in order to read the Le Guin prize and never picked up again that I felt obligated to finish and in hindsight should probably have DNFed; the other was a Booker shortlist book that I was really looking forward to and which I loved for about 50 pages before it completely lost me.
This month has really been dominated by literary fiction (with a lot of crime and thrillers mixed in there), which is surprising given that it's October and I'd usually try to read a lot of horror. Maybe I'll dedicate November to horror instead.
Favourite reads this month:
- Choice by Neel Mukherjee
- It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over by Anne de Marcken
- Only If You're Lucky by Stacy Willingham
I didn't read any short fiction this month. As much as I enjoyed the idea of Magazine Of The Month - and as much as I'm still going to try and make time to read shorts - obliging myself to read a magazine each month immediately made it feel like work. That's not something I want, so if I get to it I get to it and if I don't I don't.
At the beginning of the month I also started another blog to write about music. I haven't kept up with it as much as I'd like to but frankly there's only so much time in the day and this is all meant to be fun for me, so I'm not particularly upset about that. I've discovered a few albums that I love, though, so even if I let it slide it's not been a failure. As always, my monthly playlist can be found here.