November Wrap-Up and December TBR

Hey all, Dani here.

It is the first of December. One last month to go and then we are finished with 2019. That’s crazy to think about. I have like ten more months until I get married. 2020 is going to be a pretty darn great year; I’m really looking forward to all the books I’m going to read, the adventures I’m going to go on, and of course seeing how this blog develops in the new year.

Okay, so welcome to my monthly wrap up post. Now before I jump into my wrap up of books, let’s first look at my overall goals for the year and see how I’m doing with all of those (answer: pretty good, yay).

• Reading: It was a bit of a slow reading month in November, partly because of NaNoWriMo, and partly because of my training for my new job, and I guess partly because of the new Pokemon game being released. It definitely all scattered my focus a bit too much. Still, I read 7 books, which I think is still pretty darn good for the month. That takes me up to 196 books read so far in 2019. I don’t know the last time I read this many books in a year; it was definitely in my pre-Goodreads years.
• Blogging: So, clearly I was not able to prep ahead a bunch of posts to hold me over in November. In fact, I actually ended up taking about half of the month off of blogging. It was just adding too much stress to my life this month and so I had to step back. Of course that ended up making me feel guilty for not even trying to post, and so I started writing up posts again. I guess that happens sometimes, but I’m going to try and get back to my usual schedule now, which will definitely happen by the beginning of the year. I’m excited to get 2020 started.
• Writing: I participated in NaNoWriMo in November, and I’m sad to say that I didn’t end up reaching the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. I did write about 10,000, which is more than I had written on the story before. But I realized that I didn’t have enough of the story somewhat plotted out. It was just a bunch of random scenes and details that had been developing in my brain the past couple years. So I need to actually draft up a loose plot and then I can really get to work on writing. I’m not going to give up. I want to tell this story, and so I’m going to do it.
• Conventions: We didn’t really do any planning or thinking on conventions in this month. Obviously we do know that we’ll be at Cincinnati Comic Expo in Sept 2020, but we need to sit down and try and think of a couple other conventions to try for. And of course we do have our honeymoon to set up, which sort of feels like going to a convention since we plan to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Okay, let’s jump into the wrap-up portion of today’s post. As always, if I have a review posted I will include the link in case you want to check it out.

Black Clover, Volume 18 by Yuki Tabata — 5 stars

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern — 5 stars

The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White — 4 stars

The Wicked + The Divine, Volume 9 by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson, and Clayton Cowles — 4.5 stars

Horizontal Collaboration by Mademoiselle Navie and Carole Maurel — 4 stars

Twice in a Blue Moon by Christina Lauren — 4 stars

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman — 3.5 stars

All right, next up is my book haul and OwlCrate unboxing section…which I’m actually also going to include a book unhaul photo. Because, true to my new restrictions on buying books, I wanted to go book browse shopping for Black Friday, so I went through my shelves and unhauled books I realized I probably wasn’t going to read, or books I didn’t feel like I was going to read again or finish reading.

Okay, so here’s the haul. I started the month off by cashing in on a B&N gift card I got from work, so I only ended up buying 3 of those books myself; the rest was covered by the card, and then I did so good until it was time for Black Friday. So yeah, I still have a pretty decent book haul this month.

Then there’s the OwlCrate unboxing. I’m actually pretty excited about this blanket; it is so soft and comfortable. I’m going to enjoy snuggling up under it to read. And I can’t wait to try another Shea Ernshaw novel. I enjoyed her last one but it was just an okay read overall. We’ll see what happens with this one. I’m really excited because of the OwlCrate exclusive cover and the sprayed pages.

And of course, here is where I should post my big ol’ book unhaul. I need to be better about being honest with myself about keeping and/or reading some of my books. I own quite a few bookcases already, and I honestly don’t think that I have space to add another one, so when my shelves get so full that I’m stacking books in odd places, it’s probably time to do a weeding and unhaul.

Finally, there’s my TBR for December. Now I sort of already talked about this in my post about my end of year plans…but I’ve added a few more books to that stack thanks to my little shopping spree. So…here’s my current TBR for December. It’s a bit of a doozy. Honestly if I made it through all of these books that would be a miracle. So I’m just going to do my best and hope that I do a decent dent in this stack. Some of these books will be read as part of Diverse December, and some will be devoured from Dec 21-31 as part of the Short-a-Thon (I play very loose with this reading challenge–you’re supposed to tackle the 10 shortest books on your TBR, but that would just likely be manga for me, so I’d read them all in one day. Plus I’m really ahead on my reading challenge, so I don’t need the boost that this reading challenge is supposed to give. I’m going with short as in quick, and since I read fairly quickly, any of these books qualify in my mind). Look, I just want to read with my bookish friends around the world.

Yep, okay, see that stack? It’s massive, right? Yeah, this is going to be a fun month of reading. I have 12 more days of work left in this year, and then I’m free until January. Actually my first day back to work is January 6th, so yeah, I’m definitely hoping to get a lot of reading done between Dec 20-Jan 5. Damian and I have already determined that we will be hermits this holiday season, so we plan on lots of movie watching, book reading, and video game playing. It’s going to be a good time.

Anyway, that’s all from me for today. I’m going to start diving into this TBR pile, so I’ll be back soon with more bookish content.