I’ve been thinking about changing how I do my wrapups for a while, and this month is the month I do it! Over the last two months of doing the #goodreaddance challenge, I realized there were so many improvements I could be making to my blog. Some will help me keep consistent, and others are features that I just want to try. The last couple of months brought a lot of changes into my life, and I anticipate that there’s more to come. I realize that there are some organizational changes I can be making so I can keep doing what I love. So you may start to see some changes like these! Eventually, I’d love to try a re-brand of this site using all of the new skills I’ve learned in the past year, but for now, I’ll take things little by little. 

So without further ado, here’s my (new) wrapup!

November in General

These past few months have been a major period of growth for me as I learn to live with a new mental health diagnosis. But in that time, I’ve been learning a lot about how much I’ve been holding myself back, and instead embracing the limitations I’ve given myself. And even though one of my goals is to embrace slow living as opposed to the hectic schedules I gave myself before, I found myself wanting to take on more as a sort of way for making up all of the time I lost to my condition. 

In bookish news, I started a seasonal position at Barnes & Noble. And while working during the holidays can be hectic, it’s really nice to have a destination to work at when most of my career has been remote. My co-workers are all such kind people and I love working with books in a different context than what I do as a reviewer online. 

And in other bookish news, between the new job, book boxes, belated birthday presents, and early Christmas presents – I now have a ton of books. And as hard as it is to not buy books at work, I am putting myself on a partial buying ban – I’m allowed one book for every five on my physical TBR that I read. 

This month in itself was hectic, so I actually didn’t read that much – or so I thought! I read two pretty big books this month, so it didn’t feel like I was reading a lot at first. I was away for the first week, and the week of Thanksgiving my brother and his family were here to visit – and despite all of the holiday activities, it seems like things were fairy productive! I also recently started to eliminate planning TBRs to see how I liked it (aside from ARCs). And as much as I love planning things, I like mood reading much more. I feel less pressure (especially for something I should be enjoying) and it really helps me when I want to just enjoy those longer books. 

November In Stats

BOOKS BREAKDOWN

November In Books

Under A Starlit Sky
E.M. Castellan
⭐⭐.75

Goodreads | Bookshop

Spring 1662. In the wake of Fouquet’s defeat, Henriette is keeping her promise to the Sun King and helping him build the enchanted Palace of Versailles he’s always dreamed of. But when her poor health worsens, her magic wanes and her husband Philippe fears for her well being to such an extent that he forbids her to remain Louis’ Source.
Forced to step aside, Henriette witnesses the swift rise of a new player at the French court: the handsome and self-assured Chevalier de Lorraine quickly becomes both Louis’s new Source of magic — and Philippe’s latest lover. With her ladies Louise and Athénaïs now both vying for the king’s attention, Henriette is more isolated than ever, and her place at Versailles has never felt more in jeopardy.
So when she starts to experience a new surge in power and makes unlikely allies out of old enemies, will she use her magic to help the House of Bourbon stay in power— or to secure her own place at the center of the court?

Thank you to FierceReads and NetGalley for the e-ARC! This sequel felt more or less similar to the first book in terms of worldbuilding and character/plot development, so those who enjoyed the first book will likely enjoy the second as well. While the writing style conveyed the mood and atmosphere so well, I felt like I needed more from the story and the characters still felt flat to me.

Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr
⭐⭐⭐.75

Goodreads | Bookshop

Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

I was sold on this one when I started at Barnes & Noble – several other booksellers were reading it and I loved All the Light We Cannot See, so I decided to give it a go! It’s beautifully written like his previous works, and I did like seeing how all of these perspectives tied together. However, the earlier POVs were not as interesting to read, and the ending was just okay! This book was definitely more about the journey than the destination. 

Leaving the OCD Circus
Kirsten Pagacz
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Goodreads | Bookshop

“It’s like the meanest, wildest monkey running around my head, constantly looking for ways to bite me.” That was how Kirsten Pagacz described her OCD to her therapist on their first session when she was well into her 30s–she’d been following orders from this mean taskmaster for 20 years, without understanding why.

Initially the tapping and counting and cleaning and ordering brought her comfort and structure, two things lacking in her family life. But it never lasted; the loathsome self-talk only intensified, and the rituals she had to perform got more bizarre. By high school she was anorexic and a substance abuser–common “shadow syndromes” of OCD. By adulthood, she could barely hide her problems and held on to jobs and friends through sheer grit. Help finally came in the form of a miraculously well-timed public service announcement on NPR about OCD–at last her illness had an identity.

Leaving the OCD Circus reveals the story of Pagacz’s traumatic childhood and the escalation of her disorder–demonstrating how OCD works to misshape a life from a very young age–and explains the various tools she used for healing including meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, exposure therapy, and medication. Pieces of her art scattered throughout the book add depth and humor to her stories.

This was recommended to me by a friend on Instagram, and I’m so glad she introduced me to this book. Hearing this disorder from the perspective of someone else really gave me insights into my own experiences and has been helping me in my recovery. This was also the first time I became familiar with the concept of “shadow syndromes” and how all of that connects into this one centralized…thing? But overall, this was incredibly helpful to defining OCD – and I think this book would be really good for someone from the outside trying to help a loved one with this disorder.

The Grimrose Girls
Laura Pohl
⭐⭐⭐

Goodreads | Bookshop

After the mysterious death of their best friend, Ella, Yuki, and Rory are the talk of their elite school, Grimrose Académie. The police ruled it a suicide, but the trio are determined to find out what really happened.

When Nani Eszes arrives as their newest roommate, it sets into motion a series of events they couldn’t have imagined. As the girls retrace their friend’s last steps, they uncover dark secrets about themselves and their destinies, discovering they’re all cursed to repeat the brutal and gruesome endings to their stories until they can break the cycle.

This contemporary take on classic fairytales reimagines heroines as friends attending the same school. While investigating the murder of their best friend, they uncover connections to their ancient fairytale curses and attempt to forge their own fate before it’s too late.

My immediate feedback for this book is that fans of Pretty Little Liars would really like it. I found the pacing to be inconsistent at times (and I wasn’t the biggest fan of the fairytale execution), but regardless, I would love to continue the story. Not sure when book 2 is coming out but I’ll keep my eyes out for it!

The Death of Jane Lawrence
Caitlin Starling
⭐⭐⭐

Goodreads | Bookshop

Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed. Gone is the bold, courageous surgeon, and in his place is a terrified, paranoid man—one who cannot tell reality from nightmare, and fears Jane is an apparition, come to haunt him.

By morning, Augustine is himself again, but Jane knows something is deeply wrong at Lindridge Hall, and with the man she has so hastily bound her safety to. Set in a dark-mirror version of post-war England, Starling crafts a new kind of gothic horror from the bones of the beloved canon. This Crimson Peak-inspired story assembles, then upends, every expectation set in place by Shirley Jackson and Rebecca, and will leave readers shaken, desperate to begin again as soon as they are finished.

I thought this was a really interesting take for a gothic horror story and really enjoyed the inclusion of mathematics. However, I thought that the setting and characters could have been developed more. I wanted more from the setting of the house, and the development of Jane and Augustine’s relationship just wasn’t convincing enough for me.

We Keep the Dead Close
Becky Cooper
⭐⭐⭐.75

Goodreads | Bookshop

1969: the height of counterculture and the year universities would seek to curb the unruly spectacle of student protest; the winter that Harvard University would begin the tumultuous process of merging with Radcliffe, its all-female sister school; and the year that Jane Britton, an ambitious twenty-three-year-old graduate student in Harvard’s Anthropology Department and daughter of Radcliffe Vice President J. Boyd Britton, would be found bludgeoned to death in her Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment.   Forty years later, Becky Cooper a curious undergrad, will hear the first whispers of the story. In the first telling the body was nameless. The story was this: a Harvard student had had an affair with her professor, and the professor had murdered her in the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology because she’d threatened to talk about the affair. Though the rumor proves false, the story that unfolds, one that Cooper will follow for ten years, is even more complex: a tale of gender inequality in academia, a ‘cowboy culture’ among empowered male elites, the silencing effect of institutions, and our compulsion to rewrite the stories of female victims.
 

We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman’s past onto another’s present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.

I was really hesitant about reading this book at first since it combines an author’s memoir with true crime, and while there was a lot of rambling I think it was better done than similar books I’ve read. There was so much covered in this case and it’s written in such a way that jumps around in the timeline, but still manages to reveal important details in order. This was a very, very long read for me (over a month in the making), but I am happy I held out until the end.

December Hopefuls

While I’m doing away with TBRs for the moment, there are a few books I’d *like* to get to this December. Some ARCs, some on my TBR I’m interested in getting into soon, etc. Kind of like a no-pressure TBR, if you will. Here they are: 

How did your month go this November? What were your favorite reads? Let me know! I’d love to know if you’ve read any of these as well and what your thoughts were!

RELATED POSTS