Hello!

Considering I made my November TBR relatively early in October because I wanted to make a YouTube video where I created it, I somehow convinced myself that I had made a post about it, but here we are over a week into the month and I haven’t shared the books I intend to read!

Writing that out made me feel silly and narcissistic but I love talking about books I’m excited about reading so I’m pretending that it’s not silly narcissistic 😂

This is my shortest TBR this year – I’ve been slowly working on refining my TBR and making it more achievable and I was so optimistic about this month’s TBR knowing that I was really enjoying what I was reading at the end of October. The TBR gods seemed to sense this and when using my spinner to choose a few books from my 24 in 2024 list, it picked a book that is not only the longest book on my 24 list, but one of the longest books on my physical TBR. But we’ll get to that.

The way I made my monthly TBR is that I have a bunch of categories and there’s a book for each category. Earlier in the year I had way more categories, including Kindle Unlimited (which I cancelled because I wasn’t reading enough to justify it), Audible (which I already use, I didn’t need a separate category for it), and Illumicrate and Afterlight subscription boxes (I cancelled them because they weren’t worth the money for me). But for this month I have four categories, one of which I have three books in so there are six books total.

Usually I start with my book club and an explanation of it – when my husband and I got married (which was two years ago this week! How time flies) we asked our guests to gift us a copy of their favourite books then in an endeavour to read them all, I started a book club where we take it in turns to choose a book and generally I read it and he doesn’t. But last year when Iron Flame came out in November, we decided that in our anniversary month we would buy a new book for the collection and read them together.

All that to say, when I made my TBR I said that we wouldn’t be choosing the new book for this months book club until my husband and I went on holiday together for our anniversary. Due to the convenience of somewhat forgetting to talk about my monthly TBR here, we are currently on our holiday and we went book shopping yesterday and bought The Dallergut Dream Department Store by Mi-Ye Lee and translated by Sandy Joosun Lee. I’m literally about to start reading it as I post this so I will hopefully have a review up soon on my Instagram!

Then as a subsidiary of the book club, my mum gave us a box set of Famous Five books and rather than reading the 10 books back to back, I’ve been (trying) to read one book a month. To be fair, I’ve been relatively successful and I’m only one month behind so in November I will be reading the 10th and final book in the Famous Five box set, Five On A Hike Together by Enid Blyton.

Are there 21 books in the series that I’ve seen? Yes. Will I be reading them? Absolutely not. The only circumstance where I continue this series is if I have a child who wants to read them. Sorry Mum.

The next category on my monthly TBR would usually be any new releases I’d preordered, but this month I don’t have any.

(that’s immediately a lie – I’m getting the special edition of Icebreaker by Hannah Grace in hardback, but as I’ve already read it so I’m not putting it on my tbr)

So the next pick is a bit of a ‘bonus’ one – it is on my 24 in 2024 list, but the reason I’m adding it is because I had a sneaky suspicion that we might pick up it’s prequel as our book club pick. I’ve been meaning to read Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree since I bought it well over a year ago and even though we didn’t pick up Bookshops and Bonedust for book club, I’d already added it to my TBR. I’ve since learnt that the audiobook is less than 7 and a half hours long and is available on Spotify so I’m hoping to start this very soon too!

Then for the last three picks, I left my fate to the spinner to choose from my remaining 24 in 2024 books. Usually I would pick two, which was a great idea at the beginning of the year when if I had in fact read two books a month I would have comfortably read the whole list by the end of the year. But I didn’t do that and I’ve been managing to read six books a month relatively comfortably, so I figured spinning three times and taking my total to six would make sense.

It didn’t take me long to regret the decision.

The first spin gave me The Worst of Me by Kate Le Vann – this is a book that I’ve never seen anyone talk about and I only vaguely remember buying when I was a teenager. It only made it onto my 24 list because I picked the title out of my TBR jar but I figure at this point I’ve had it for so long that I might as well see what it’s about. It’s YA, it looks like it’s a contemporary (ish) romance, I’m hoping it’ll be a nice fast-paced palate cleanser.

When doing the second spin, I genuinely said out loud whilst filming the video: “I’m nervous, I don’t know why I’m nervous… that’s why I’m nervous.” as the spinner landed on House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J Maas, the first book in the Crescent City series.

I’ve not read any Sarah J Maas before and from what I’ve seen in the very popular court of public opinion, of her three beloved series, this isn’t the one that most people would start with. But it’s the first one I owned, I put it on my 24 in 2024 list and the spinner said ‘you want a smaller monthly tbr? Then you must have a longer book!’.

I’ve used an Audible credit on the audiobook because I will absolutely need the support (it’s approximately 27 hours long and I don’t have any long drives planned for this month…) and I’m seriously considering getting a third edition on my Kindle so I can read the ebook rather than the brick that is the paperback. I’ve just realised the ebook is available at my library so I’ve put a hold on that and hopefully it’ll come in this month.

I am nervous about this book. I have no scale with which to gauge whether I’ll like it but I’m going in with a fierce determination – I really want to finish it before December.

At this point I seriously considered not adding a 6th book because an 800-page fantasy is more than enough of a challenge, but I said I’d pick three and the spinner is so much fun that I went again anyway.

Then the spinner gave me The Fine Print by Lauren Asher. At the beginning of the year I’d have been thrilled with this choice – a popular contemporary romance is right up my street, but I have actually read a little bit of this before. When I had Kindle Unlimited earlier this year, I had a moment where I was bored somewhere and didn’t have my current read to hand, so I started reading this on my phone. I only got a couple of pages in, I didn’t read enough to add it to my ‘currently reading’ shelf on Storygraph, but I hated the writing style – it felt really fake and gave me the same vibes as Twisted Love by Ana Huang, which was one of my only 1 star reviews from 2023.

So whilst the concept of a longer contemporary romance isn’t the worst thing to get from my 24 in 2024 spinner, I can’t say I’m excited about reading it. I will try, but I can’t promise I’ll do it with enthusiasm.

And that’s my monthly TBR – what started as an optimistic 6 books that I might actually be able to achieve, quickly became something intimidating that I’m not excited about. I’m still a little bit optimistic though, so at least there’s that.

Let me know what you’re hoping to read in October!

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx