Well, we have finally reached November. On the up-side, we only have two more months and then we can bid this awful year farewell. On the down-side, we are rapidly approaching the singularity beyond which I can make no plans of any kind. If you haven’t voted yet, please make sure to vote tomorrow. I really don’t like talking politics here, but this is an extremely important election, and your vote matters. Please vote.
But before we dive into the election hole, let’s talk about books.
I only read four books in October. This is about half my usual monthly reading amount, and three of these books were really short. I’m actually in the middle of three more books but managed to finish none of them before the end of the month. This was partly because things got a lot busier at work in the last few weeks, so I was more tired at night. I was also focusing pretty heavily on writing this month: I finished revising my novel at the beginning of October; wrote, rewrote, and revised a whole short story; discussed more revisions to my novel with my agent; and planned out my NaNoWriMo project. And I do feel like I hit a bit of a reading slump about halfway through October. I started this book a lot of my friends really liked, but I was really struggling with it, and I didn’t finish it before my library copy expired, so I’m waiting to get off the waitlist again. My friends have good taste in books so I’m sure it gets better. But in the meantime, I struggled to get into other books for the rest of the month. But then I spent the last weekend of October in New Jersey with my writing group for a Halloween writing retreat (we all quarantined for two weeks and got negative covid tests before we went, so I felt very safe), and it was wonderful, but I didn’t get much reading done. So October was a good month for me personally, but not a lot of reading, and that’s okay.
I didn’t read any Braille books this month, but I got ahead last month so I’m okay with that. Of the four books I read, two were middle grade fantasy, one was a contemporary middle grade, and the other was nonfiction. Let’s dive right in.
First, I read Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly. This is a memoir of Scott Kelly’s year in space aboard the International Space Station, with flashbacks to his life and the path that got him there. This was a fascinating read. I absolutely loved learning about what it’s really like to live aboard the ISS, because I’m a nerd like that. I admit I got a little mixed up in the beginning because Scott Kelly is the twin of Mark Kelly, Gabby Gifford’s husband and hopefully a soon-to-be U.S. senator, and I got the Scott and Mark mixed up a bunch. But my confusion was more because of how the book was described to me than any problem with the book itself. I was a huge fan of this book and would absolutely recommend it.
After that, I read the fourth Upside-Down Magic book, Dragon Overnight by Sarah Mlynowski, Emily Jenkins, and Lauren Myracle. The Upside-Down Magic class is going for an overnight at the dragon sanctuary. They thought they were going to be the only school group there, but it turns out that Nory’s father is there too with a group from his school. Nory navigates making new friends who don’t like her father as a headmaster along with her own complicated feelings about her father, all while learning about dragons. Meanwhile, Andres is discovering that his upside-down magic, which so far has mostly been a pain, could actually be a real and useful talent. This book follows the last book so well, and it’s another fun installment in Nory and her friends’ adventures. Only one thing disappointed me with this book: after all her growth in the last book, Pepper can’t come to the dragon sanctuary because her magic is still out of control, so she’s basically not in the book at all. I like the idea that even after she’s overcome the biggest obstacles in controlling her upside-down magic, she still has things to work on, but these books are so short that there isn’t room to explore that, and it ended up feeling like Pepper’s growth in the third book was invalidated by her inability to participate in the adventures of the fourth book. But I still definitely enjoyed this installment and I’m looking forward to what comes next.
Next, I read the third Artemis Fowl book, The Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer. Artemis has built a super-computer using the fairy technology he stole from the LEP in the first book, and he’s planning to show it to an evil American businessman. Nothing can possibly go wrong, can it? Yes, if you say that out loud, everything will go wrong. There was a lot that I liked about this book, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the first two books, partly because I just couldn’t get behind the premise. Artemis is a genius, and I just didn’t buy that he would do something so stupid. I’m dubious about the ending as well, but I’m holding out judgment until I read the fourth book later this month.
And finally I read 96 Miles by J. L. Esplin. This is a contemporary middle grade novel, which I don’t tend to enjoy as much as middle grade fantasy, but I enjoyed this one immensely. John and Stewart Lockwood have been trained all their lives by their father to survive anything. Their dad is a hardcore survivalist, and he’s stockpiled their isolated Nevada ranch with enough food and water and medical supplies to last for months. But then there’s a massive blackout while their dad is out of town on a business trip, and when the boys are robbed at gunpoint, they have to travel 96 miles to get help. I really enjoyed this book. It was really tense, and very well-written, and I was super invested in these characters. There’s one thing that I’m not a fan of in this book. Something major is revealed close to the end of the book, and it casts everything we’ve read so far in a different light and makes the need to get the rest of the way to safety even more important. The problem is, the thing that’s revealed is something that there isn’t a reason why we the readers wouldn’t know it already except that the author wanted to hide it from us, especially because the book is in first person. So it feels unnatural that we only learn this information when we do as opposed to earlier in the story. I have a lot to say about this, and I’m actually thinking of doing another book review and writing topic post about this later on. This was a good book, but I’m on the fence about whether I would recommend it because of this problem.
And that’s it for October. If you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to talk about them in the comments. And in the meantime, vote. Please, please, please vote!