I had a great reading month!

I read 22 books.  That’s a huge amount for me but it helped that several were romances so I finished those in a day each.

The authors were:

  • 8 male authors and 12 female authors (one read more than once)
  • 8 authors were POC
  • 4 were LGBT

The books were:

  • 15 fiction and 7 nonfiction
  • 2 were audiobooks

They were set in:

  • England – 6
  • Guatemala
  • Italy
  • Myanmar
  • France – 2
  • Fantasy Africa – 2
  • All over Africa (Afro SF)
  • South Africa
  • US – California (2), Iowa, New York (2), Tennessee

Diverseathon

I participated in Diverseathon on Twitter for one week this month.  This was an event started by mostly Booktubers on Twitter to discuss diversity in books.  There were Twitter chats every day and I met lots of new people to follow.  While it was nice to see new people getting excited about the topic it was a bit frustrating to hear “Why has no one ever talked about this before” and variations on that theme over and over.  Um, hi!  This topic has been around forever.  This wasn’t the first event of its kind.  The question might better be phrased as, “Where have ya’ll been all this time?”

I’m also too old to get all worked up about what everyone else is doing.  There were a few people majorly focused on calling out popular booktubers for not supporting more diversity.  Because everyone knows the best way to open hearts and minds is to publicly denounce the person whose mind you want to change. Lord save me from teenage enthusiasm and self-righteousness.

Litsy

I’m giving Litsy another try.  It won’t replace Goodreads for my tracking needs but I’m using it for more casual snapshots of my reading day.  I’m dvmheather over there too if you are on.

Quote for day 21 of #booktemberGR #RealTimeReadingADOW #vampire #ADiscoveryofWitches

A photo posted by @dvmheather on

Real Time Readathon

I decided to try doing the real time readathon of A Discovery of Witches.  I love that book and reread it about once a year.  I figured this would be fun.  The story starts in September and runs until Halloween.  You read the action that takes place on that date.  It was hard to have to stop after one or two chapters but I did it.  Then there was a period where you didn’t read anything for 4 days and I broke.  I read the rest of the book.  I’m not even sorry.  There is a lot of fun stuff online though like pictures of the locations in the book.  Since a lot of it takes place in libraries at Oxford it is fun to see the pictures.

Swaps

I did some swaps this month.

In October I’m doing the Ninja Book Swap and continuing OTSP Secret Sister.

NaNoWriMo

I did NaNoWriMo last November and it was so much fun I’m going to do it again.  In case you don’t know, you write 50,000 words of a book in November.  My book last year was fantasy.  I haven’t done anything with it because I was totally making it up as a went along and it has plot holes in it big enough to drive a truck through.  This year I’m going to write a book that I actually started before.  I wrote a lot of it (but it is locked forever in an old computer) and then I got stuck because I had to do some research to move forward.  I still like the idea.  It is based on reading way too many Regency Romances in my life and thinking that I could do that too.  I need to spend October doing the research that got me hung up so I’m ready to go in November.

TV

I don’t usually watch TV because we don’t have cable but there are a few shows I’ve gotten into this fall.

Queen Sugar

If you’ve read the book, you just need to set everything you know aside when you watch this show. I know, that’s hard. It hurt. Basically, it has some characters of the same name as the book but some are different sexes and races. It is still in Louisiana. There is a sugar cane farm. That’s all they kept from the book. But the TV show is so good that I was able to get past it. It is good enough that I even bought the season on Amazon to be able to watch it. I also love reading the #queensugar hashtag on Twitter because people lose their minds over this show.

The Good Place

The idea is that there is an afterlife made just for really good people (defined by a mathematical formula).  Eleanor is here by accident and now the whole afterlife is falling apart.

Speechless

Minnie Driver is the protective mother of a teenage boy with cerebral palsy so needs to learn to let go a bit when he gets a new aide in school.

What are you all watching?