October in Review

So, October was my least productive reading month of the year. In the end, I only read 12 books. It was just a busy month and I never seemed to be able to find the time to read! Hopefully November and December are a bit better.

I started off the month with my favourite read of the month, The Wolf of the Plains by Conn Iggulden. It was a really good book, one of my favourite of the year. If you get a chance to read it, you should.

Then I moved on to China Mieville's new book, Un Lun Dun. It came out earlier this year. I have not reviewed it yet, but I did think it was a cute book. He also illustrated it, so it had fun pictures.

I read three Giller-nominated books. Two that made the short list: Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay and A Secret Between Us by Daniel Poliquin. Then, I read Soucouyant by David Chariandy. This book made the long-list of the Giller, but it is also in the short-list for the Governor General's Award. It was a good book, but I really think there were other books that should have made the short list. If A Secret Between Us won the Giller, I would be happier about that than if Late Nights on Air did. If Soucouyant wins, I will be left wondering why. It is a good book, but not great.

The rest of the books I read are:

Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje. I have had this book for a while, but I was never fond of In the Skin of a Lion, so I kept putting the reading of anymore books by him off. Then, I read Diversidero because it is nominated for a Giller, and I found that I liked him after all.

Swing Low: A Life by Miriam Toews. I bought this after reading A Complicated Kindness, but just did not get to it before now. It is a book about what life must have been like for her elderly father who was forgetting and suffering from manic depression. It was a very interesting read.

I read a biography of Shakespeare, which I have never done before. It was Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson. I had also never read Bill Bryson before, but had always meant to. It was very interesting. Most of I had heard before because we really do not know very much about Shakespeare, but it was an interesting read nonetheless.

Christmas came early in book form. I read Christine Kringle by Lynn Brittany. It was a very enjoyable and cute book! I will be reviewing it soon, and as soon as I have the time to do so, I will be interviewing the author on my blog.

I am clearing out my Shannon Hale to-be-read pile. I only have River Secrets left because I read Princess Academy this month. I think if I read River Secrets by the end of the year I will have read all of Shannon Hale's young adult books in one year.

I read one of the Canada Reads nominees that I had been trying to read this year: Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis. It was good, about an immigrant family living in Canada. I also read Set the Seas on Fire, which is a science fiction novel set during the Napoleonic Wars. It was a good read.

The best thing about only reading 12 books is that I liked them all, there are none that I could say were really bad.