The Terror of Knowing

Welcome one, welcome all, to my September Wrap Up! As you may be able to tell from the dismal amount of blog posts on here and the books I read below, September was not the greatest of months. I can’t really pinpoint why this might be, it just was a bit… flat for me. I was on holiday for the first week or so of the month (which is actually when I read the books I did read in September) with my parents and that was chill and mostly fun but then when I got back to Liverpool, I just didn’t really want to blog or read. It coincided with me rediscovering the joy that is forum roleplaying, so any words I was consuming or writing was mostly in that arena.

Then, at the very end of September, Liz and I met up with our good friends from university in London as we went to see a couple of shows I had really been looking forward to – Waitress and the Les Miserables Staged Concert. Both were INCREDIBLE, for very different reasons, and I now have both of their soundtracks stuck in my head pretty much constantly. Let me tell you, having both I Dreamed a Dream and Bad Idea rolling around in your head makes for the weirdest of mashups ever. (I also now have a huge crush on the Dr Pomatter we saw, David Hunter, who reminded me of John Krasinski a little. No one is surprised by this crush, least of all me.) Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the weekend but now that I’m back, the fact that it’s October (WTF?!) is sinking in, slowly but surely. Expect all the panicky ‘it’s almost the end of the year!’ posts to follow in due course… But, for now, let’s see what I read in September, shall we? (It won’t take long to recap!)

In September, I read a total of 2 books – 2 fiction and 0 non-fiction – and 0 were re-reads (marked by *). This amounted to 736 pages in total.

In terms of format: 2 were eARCs. As for genre, 2 were historical fantasy. (This might be the simplest set of stats I have ever had to put together. Maybe I should have reading slumps more often? I jest, please do not repeat.)

Onto the books themselves…

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Rating: 3.5/5
Genre: fantasy; historical fiction; mythology
Format: eARC
Pages: 352
Read: 5th August – 1st September
Review: “I’m very happy to say that this book delivered everything it promised and did one thing I also didn’t expect – not only was it inspired by Mexican folklore, I felt like it read like one too, its tone and narrative structure seemed to mirror the sort of Latin American magical realism seen in the 20th century in the works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. This felt like it belonged alongside such tales.” (Full Review)

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Rating: 4.5/5
Genre: fantasy; historical fiction
Format: eARC
Pages: 384
Read: 2nd – 5th September
Review: This book is a beautiful, flowery love letter to the power of doors and exploration. Anyone fascinated with liminal spaces and the idea of travelling between worlds will simply adore this novel. The fact I haven’t written out my review for it yet isn’t through lack of trying, it’s because I struggle to put into words why I found this book so compelling and magical. Simply put: it was completely enthralling. (Full Review)

How did your September reading go?
What was your favourite book you read this month?
Please do share in the comments below and let’s chat books!

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