October TBR Stack

Fall reading is some of my favorite reading. As for so many others, fall is my favorite season so I'm usually feeling very positive and open to whatever my reading brings. That's always enhanced by the warm fuzzies I get from the fireplace, cool air, warm spicy drinks, sweaters, chunky hand-knitted socks and my favorite blankets. And I don't really get into Halloween, aside from the giddy excitement of my kids for dressing up in costumes and trick-or-treating, but I do love reading some spooky and macabre stuff to celebrate in my own bookish way. For this October I think I had a pretty good mix of heavy, fun and monstrous stuff.  So far I am a little behind in completing all of these thanks to some personal struggles at the beginning of the month but I'm happy with where I'm at nonetheless.

My ginger boy really wants to knock this stack over.

I selected The Air You Breathe by Frances de Pontes Peebles and Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. Both of these titles I chose for honoring National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept 15 - Oct 15). I've always read books by people of color and people from different countries and cultural or ethnic backgrounds, but one of my readerly goals is to increase the frequency with which I do that and diversify my bookshelves even more by reading at least one every single month. I have already finished The Air You Breathe and will soon post my thoughts about it.

I have also finished Time's Convert by Deborah Harkness, which is the fourth book in the All Souls Universe series. I was excited to read this as I loved the first three books beginning with A Discovery of Witches. I'll talk more about it in my end-of-the-month wrap-up but I included it because it's witches and vampires and 'tis the season, am I right?

I love to read Poe every year around Halloween and that's a tradition that continues this year because it's just perfect macabre reading that suits the mood of the season. At the bottom of this stack is European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss. It's a chunker for sure, but so far I find that it reads quickly. It's the sequel to The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, part of The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series. I really enjoyed the first book, which I wrote a brief review about here on here on Goodreads and I'm digging the second one as well. It's not particularly spooky or scary but it deals with monsters, after a fashion, so I thought it would fit in well with my fall reading.

I'm not sure I'll finish Fruit of the Drunken Tree, though not through any fault of the book. It's a lovely book, I'll likely just run out of time. The same goes for Transcription by Kate Atkinson. These will be finished at some point in the future, they just won't make the October wrap-up, I'm afraid. We shall see.