You might remember that I’ve been participating in the Pondathon, a collaborative readathon hosted by CW @ The Quiet Pond. If you don’t follow them, YOU SHOULD. There are different characters that inhabit the pond, and each of them features different sorts of things!

Anyway, one of the features of this readalong is that there are side quests you can complete. In each quest you help the different members of The Quiet Pond with various tasks. For the most recent side quest, to get a bonus reward item we were asked to make a post about a book that helped us through a hard time. I talked about an important book to me on my Twitter, but there are so many that are dear to my heart. So I thought I’d make a blog post about it as well!

Hello friends! I said I was back to blogging and then didn’t post for weeks – classic. Haha well you know, life just gets busy sometimes! But since it is now December – dang!! – I thought I’d get back to it and share a wrap-up of my reads and etc from the past month.

Do you ever set monthly TBRs? I used to, but I kinda feel like that puts too much pressure on me to read certain things, so I don’t do it anymore. I’ve been working on reading all of my owned books, so really what I’ve been doing is trying to read books I have and not buy too many new ones. This proves difficult since I’m fortunate enough to have easy library access 😂so I cheat on my “owned books” goal with library books.

This month, I read 4 books that I owned and 3 books from the library! Over all of those, I read 2986 pages, and had an average rating of 4.1. I also have now read 101 books this year! I wasn’t expecting to hit that so early, since the past few years I’ve reached around 100ish right at the end of the year. So let’s get to the good stuff – the books themselves!

Fun fact: Garth Nix is one of my top 5 favorite authors. I have loved his Old Kingdom series and Keys to the Kingdom series for soooo long. I’ve talked a bit more in detail about his books in my Libraries in Literature post and Rainy Day Reads post, and have definitely mentioned him in a few others. When I heard he was publishing his first adult fantasy (Angel Mage) I was SO EXCITED. Like, this book has been on my TBR since it was announced basically.

So I preordered it, but naturally didn’t get to reading it until now, a month later. Which tbh is pretty good for my track record this year, seeing as how I preordered The Priory of the Orange Tree which came out in the beginning of February and I still haven’t read that… oops.

Back to Angel Mage…haha. It’s easy for me to get off track.

Every year, I always look forward to Frenzy Presents hosted by HCC Frenzy at the HarperCollins Toronto office. I don’t have a lot of bookish friends in my area so when you have a day dedicated to inviting a bunch of book bloggers, feeding them A+ snacks, and talking to them about upcoming releases? It’s like going to the bookstore with an infinite credit card. (Ok, I actually don’t know what that feels like but I can imagine)

I honestly don’t know where half the year has gone, but it’s that time of the year where Fall Releases are APPROACHING and I’m excited to tell you all about them. This batch in particular feels like there’s something for everyone so without further ado, here’s a list of upcoming books you can cozy up with a blanket as summer draws to a close:

Hey you know what are great? LIBRARIES. Books for free? Amazing. Spaces to read? Amazing. Media beyond just books, like DVDs and CDs and magazines? Amazing. LIBRARIES ARE AMAZING. And they have amazing people who work there to spread the love of books, so basically it’s a heaven on earth. I am so sorry for my copious use of the word “amazing”.

AAAAnyway, I’ve recently read a few books which heavily feature libraries in them and that got me thinking! How do libraries in literature compare to modern day/real life libraries? Okay, so we have the obvious point – a lot of what I read is fantasy, so clearly real life libraries don’t deal with anything magical. But what are the ideas behind literary libraries? The functions, the themes, etc. Do they match up with how we think of real life libraries? So I’m just gonna talk about a handful of books (that I happen to love) that feature libraries, and then discuss my thoughts a little bit!