Looking Back at October 2021

Ah yes, once again the steady march of time somehow comes to bite me in the ass and surprise me. I don’t know how that happens every month. You’d think I would know better by now. ANYWAY. I read 13 books this month! Half were sci-fi/fantasy, and the other half were romcoms haha. I just needed some light happiness in my life, yknow? I also wrote some fun posts that I’ll wrap up for you, in case you missed them.

Also, wanna hear a random thing that happened? I had a tweet go viral. Yeah. It was very weird haha. I thought it was very normal, just a photo of my library!! But here it is if you want to see it lol.

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What Did I Read?

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RomComs

I’m gonna start with the romcoms that I read. One of them actually involved magic, so I guess that one could go in either category haha. But at it’s heart it’s a romance, so romcom category it is. So here’s the list:

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• The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling
• A Pho Love Story by Loan Le
• Elementary Romantic Calculus by Susannah Nix
• The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood
• Tokyo Ever After by Emiko Jean
• Not Here to Be Liked by Michelle Quach
• My Cone and Only by Susannah Nix

I enjoyed all of them a lot! Susannah Nix has written a series of romcoms with main characters who are women in STEM, and I really have fun reading them. I also do want to say something about The Love Hypothesis. It’s become quite the phenomenon, super super popular. For the most part I enjoyed it, but I feel really off about even enjoying it, because it features a romance between a grad student and a professor. As a grad student myself, I do NOT like the power dynamics that are at play there, and I think it’s a bad idea to promote that. I guess you can say that’s just my opinion, but there’s just a lot about academia and how it’s structured that makes me uncomfortable thinking about it.

Sci-fi and Fantasy

ANYWAY I’ll stop being grim, and get to the fantasy and sci-fi books that I read this month!

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• Alien: Echo by Mira Grant
• Naiya and the Foxdragon by Naomi VanDoren
• The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid
• Jade Fire Gold by June C.L. Tan (read my review here!)
• The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart
• The Devil Makes Three by Tori Bovalino

The standout for me here was definitely The Bone Shard Daughter. The magic system is fascinating, and a bit grim. Okay it’s a lot grim haha. But so cool! There is also an animal companion who is the SWEETEST. I would like him to be real!! Two of these were semi-spooky (Alien: Echo and The Devil Makes Three) to fit the October mood. They were definitely spooky in different ways though haha. One was scary aliens and the other was scary devil magic. But both created such a tense and horrifying atmosphere!! Don’t worry if you’re a scaredy cat though, because I am too, and I was able to handle these!

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What Did I Post?

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I started off the month with a bang, with a two part post that featured book recs based on a given emoji! Over on Instagram I asked folks to give me an emoji, and I proceeded to pair each with a book rec. These two posts (one and two) are the fantasy edition of the emoji recs. I’m currently working on the sci-fi edition, which is proving to be a bit more work haha.

Next up, I discussed my favorite book settings in this Top Ten Tuesday post. Sneak preview if you haven’t read it: I mention a world underneath NYC with giant animals, a world where all the cities are in trees, and many more awesome places.

I was also lucky enough to take part in a book tour for the book Jade Fire Gold! My tour post (a review) can be found here. I also included some of my favorite quotes from the book!

Normally browsing Twitter is not a productive activity lol, but when it brings you new blog posts that give you inspiration, then it is actually productive! I found the “How I Choose My Books” book tag from someone on Twitter, and it sounded fun so I did it myself. You can find my answers to the tag questions here, which are all about why you pick up the books that you do.

And finally, we had the October edition of The Happy Place 5. This month we chose our topic to be pretty general, i.e. “fall vibes.” I narrowed this down to focus on witchy books! I picked 5 that I have read, and 5 that I haven’t, and you can find which ones those are here.

Towards the end of the month I definitely slowed down on blogging, but I went out of town for a wedding for about a week. So that cut down my blogging time! I’m looking forward to writing about more fun stuff this coming month.

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What was your favorite read of the month? And did you do anything fun? Bloggers, feel free to share one of your favorite posts of the month in the comments!