Wonderfully, November turned out to be a very productive reading month for me! I read seven books, and have almost completed my Beat the Backlist challenge – a lot of the books I read this month were YA, and so I have plenty to recommend from my November reads!
The first thing I read was Unboxed by Non Pratt, which had been on my Beat the Backlist Challenge all year round – as I mentioned in the mini review I did last month, I loved this book! It was a really quick read, but I thought the plot and the characters were developed beautifully, and I was truly moved by the ending of the story. If you’re deciding which books you want to read by the end of the year, I would definitely recommend making Unboxed one of them! After that, I read All My Sons by Arthur Miller, having studied A View From the Bridge last year and really enjoyed it! I have discovered that I really love American plays from this period – I think the themes that I covered in them are always super interesting (a lot to do with masculinity, the American Dream, etc.), and it was actually a really quick read!I then read Waterline by Ross Raisin, which is a story about a man who spirals into homelessness after his wife died. The main character in this book is Scottish, and so it was written with in the Scottish dialect; when I first noticed this, I honestly thought it was a spelling error, but once I’d adapted I actually thought it was really interesting and immersive!
Another book from my Beat the Backlist Challenge that I read in November was Lying About Last Summer by Sue Wallman – I really enjoyed this book, and thought the story moved really well. There was also a lot twist at the end that I wasn’t expecting, and it was just generally a very exciting read! Next I read Blame by Simon Mayo – I love the idea behind this book, and it sounds like the basis for a really good, gritty futuristic story. And actually, I loved the contemporary setting of the book, and how the world-building seemed eerily plausible. However, at the same time the events in the story were quite far-fetched, and I thought the plot perhaps had too many elements to it, making it unnecessarily complicated. Altogether, though, I did enjoy this book, and I immediately gave it to my brother to read once I’d finished it!
The Smell of Other People’s Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock was my sixth book of the month, and another one I’ve been wanting to read all year; this is set in Alaska in 1970, which already made it very different from other YA I have read. At first, I was a little thrown by the multiple POVs and storylines, but once I’d grasped the plot, I really loved how the lives of all of the characters intertwined. The ending of this book is truly moving, and I found myself feeling quite emotional at the end of it! Finally, I read The Museum of Heartbreak by Meg Leder; it’s been a while since I read a cute romance with a dose of normal teenage angst – that’s exactly what this book has, and I enjoyed reading it a lot!
I am trying my best to make it to 100 books before the end of the year, and as of the time I have written this, I have 13 to go! I think I will be able to make it, but I will be very busy with my reading throughout the rest of December. Do please comment below, or Tweet me with any recommendations of books you have read recently.
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