My Bookish Month of October 2020

Hi and welcome to another monthly overview!

What a crazy CRAZY month October was! Posting at least once a day for an entire month, whilst also trying to keep up with other #Orentober posts and keeping up my usual blog hopping as well, I feel a semi-permanent cramp in my hand from holding my phone, and I’m starting to loathe my laptop! I am 100% knackered but also 100% happy cos it was a truly excellent month!

November, though, will be a lot slower! Dust bunnies and tumbleweeds most days! I need a bit of a break from blogging and y’all need a break from me, I’m sure 😂

Despite spending a lot of time blogging, I also managed to read a lot. I had a number of Orenda books on my October TBR, and a few spooky reads, and I got through them all and then some. Working part-time from home and spending many an hour in the garden to cull weeds and clean out the vegetable patch did wonders for my Audible stats and I broke my audiobook record. For my Spanish challenge I picked up Carrie by Stephen King, which I first read many more moons ago than I care to count and I enjoyed it much more now than I did back then. I also had my first buddy read and I loved it, both the book (The Nesting) and the buddy-reading. October definitely was a great bookish month!

In figures October looks like this:

October
Novels: 5315 pages over 16 full novels, 1 novella & 2 short stories
Audiobooks: 77 hours over 9 audiobooks

And here’s what I did last month, and some of what I’ll be posting next month:

What I read:
My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix
Path of Night, Sarah Rees Brennan
Tall Oaks, Chris Whitaker
Greyfriar’s Reformatory, Frazer Lee
The Deathless Girls, Kiran Millwood Hargrave 
After Sundown, edited by Mark Morris
Fable, Adrienne Young
Voodoo Heart, John Everson
Carrie, Stephen King
The Ghost Tree, Christina Henry
Good Samaritans, Will Carver
Street Cat Blues, Alison O’Leary (review to come)
We Will Be Watching, Ruth Ware
The Nesting, C.J. Cooke
The Blue Salt Road, Joanne M. Harris
Children of the Dark, Jonathan Janz
Hermit, S.R. White (review to come)
The Deal, Jonathan Whitelaw
Fifty-Fifty (Eddie Flynn #5), Steve Cavanagh 

What I listened to:
Deadly Game, Matt Johnson
Hydra, Matt Wesolowski
84K, Claire North
Wolves in the Dark, Gunnar Staalesen
Lair of Dreams, Libba Bray
End Game, Matt Johnson
I Am Dust, Louise Beech
Blood & Sugar, Laura Shepherd-Robinson
Believe Me, JP Delaney

What I read earlier but reviewed in October:
We Were the Salt of the Sea, Roxanne Bouchard
Epiphany Jones, Michael Grothaus
Welcome to the Heady Heights, David F. Ross
The Seven Doors, Agnes Ravatn
The Coral Bride, Roxanne Bouchard
Betrayal, Lilja Sigurðardóttir

I also unboxed the FairyLoot September box. I announced and wrapped up #Orentober. I had five First Lines Fridays (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and I introduced #ScandiSaturday, talked about Varm Veum, Henning Juul and the Oslo Detectives. I had Q&A Sundays with Jane Slavin, Rachel Ward, Will Carver and Vanda Symon, I talked to Eve Smith about bringing out a book about a pandemic in the middle of another pandemic, and to Momma Orenda Karen Sullivan about bookish serendipity. I also revisited last year’s Q&A with jacket designer Mark Swan and my Hinton Hollow Death Trip review. I had Music Mondays with Matt Johnson and Doug Johnstone, I waited on Wednesday for Deity and Smoke Screen, I shared a poem by Michael J. Malone, The Wishbone, and I revealed the (drop dead gorgeous) cover of Simone Buchholz’s Hotel Cartagena.

Yeah… No wonder I am knackered 😂

Let’s have a look at the books that landed on my lap in October:

2 Red Dog Press e-ARCs:

3 NetGalley books, one for which I received a widget, one for a blog tour and one for which I did not expect to be approved (totally squealed like a piglet when I got the mail 😂):

3 Flame Tree Press blog tour proofs:

A paperback (I’m totally addicted to Chris Whitaker at this point) and 3 hardbacks:

6 audiobooks: one I’d read before but wanted to listen to for #Orentober, two additions to series I’d been dying to continue and a few daily deals:

7 eBooks, all 99p, I couldn’t resist! Two of these I found through Jill’s Book Cafe, thanks Jill!

Do you think this might be getting out of hand? 🤔🤔🤔

I hope you had a good month and that you are safe and well! Thanks for joining me today and happy reading xxx