November Monthly Recap
It’s time for our monthly recap! Find out which books were favorites, which were duds, and which ones we plan to read the following month. We’ll end our wrap up with a calendar of book-related events/facts from the month of November and we’ll highlight our December content. We’ve also added a list of upcoming book releases for December (scroll to the end for the list).
One randomly selected follower (email or wordpress follower) will win a $10 amazon gift card. Scroll down to see if you are the winner. The prize is only awarded if you contact us with your email address so make sure to check these monthly recaps each month to see if you won! We also want to hear from you so let us know what you read in November and what you look forward to reading in December.
Jen: I had a great reading month in November with quite a few wonderful reads.
Favorite book read in November: My favorite November read was a tie between Ghostwritten by David Mitchell and A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry (review to follow). Honorable Mentions: Broken April by Ismail Kadare (you can read my review here) and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (review to follow).
Least favorite book read in November: I surprisingly didn’t read any books I truly disliked in November. I did dislike the same book the Book Worm mentions below but I read that on the last day of October. If I had to pick, my least favorite was Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi. I gave it three stars so I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t love it.
December Goals: So, I still plan read and finish Billy Clegg’s Did you Ever have a Family. It keeps getting pushed back to the bottom of the pile so I scheduled the review (Book Work has already completed her review of it) in the hopes that with a deadline I’ll stop bumping it back.
Book Worm:
Favourite Book read in November: The Gap of Time
Least favorite book read in November: The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
December Goals: Yet again I have failed to read Life After Life and December will not be the month to do it as I have too many commitments to finish by the end of the year. They include: 4 of the music of time books to complete, Nicholas Nickleby and Hopscotch to finish, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood to start and finish. I think that will pretty much keep me out of mischief until the New Year.
Here’s a look back at literary events in November:
What can you look forward to on our blog in December? Our Winter Reading challenge. This challenge starts on December 1. You can join it at any time but we recommend getting started early. We hope you join in because it will be a fun scavenger hunt. You can read more about it here. We also will feature our recurring posts: Love it or Hate it, Read Around the World (by guest blogger), Featured Author Charles Dickens, Kid’s Corner, and Terrible Reviews of Great Books. Finally, we’ll feature regular reviews of both non-list and 1001 list books.
For more on upcoming content you can always check out our event calendar — featured on our sidebar.
Here are a few books that will be released in December (this time we’ll be featuring a wider range of books to help our challenge participants. Many of these are not books the sorts of books we normally list in our upcoming releases section):
Paradise City by Elizabeth Day
Late in the Day: Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin
An Evil Mind (A Robert Hunter Thriller)
Blood, Salt, Water: An Alex Morrow Novel by Denise Mina
Like Family: A Novel by Paolo Giordano (fiction)
Médicis Daughter: A Novel of Marguerite de Valois by Sophie Perinot (historical fiction)
The Blizzard: A Novel by Vladimir Sorokin (fantasy, fiction, literary fiction)
The Merman: A Novel by Carl-Johan Vallgren (fairy tale, fantasy, fiction)
Ashley Bell by Dean Koontz (fantasy, fiction, suspense, thriller)
Beatrice and Benedick by Marina Fiorato (fiction, historical fiction, romance)
Time and Time Again by Ben Elton (science fiction).
We want to hear from you. What books did you read in November? Which your favorites? Least favorites? Is there anything you are looking forward to in December?
The winner of our follower appreciation is a wordpress follower: novellakoob. In order to claim the prize you need to reply to this post or email me saying that you want to claim the prize! You must claim your prize before the end of the December otherwise it will go back into the pool for the next winner. Congrats, you win a $10 gift card to Amazon!
NOTE: winners are randomly selected from pool of either wordpress or email followers of this blog.
Book Worm
jenp27
Nicole Del Sesto
The Reader's Room 
I read A Fine Balance earlier this year and thought it outstanding. It got 5 stars from me.
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Oh, and I had a pretty good November, once I got the trudging “Paris: Biography of a City” out of the way. I enjoyed reading Vertigo and comparing it with the Hitchcock film version. Zazie in the Métro was a hoot. Reading the official translations of Murakami’s Wind/Pinball novellas was interesting. I also enjoyed Kate Adie’s highly feminist and revealing history of women’s rights in the context of World War 1 (Fighting on the Home Front), but my stand out book for November was Viv Albertine’s memoir Clothes, Music, Boys. I didn’t know much about her before I started, beyond her being guitarist in The Slits, friends with Sid Vicious and on-off girlfriend of Mick Jones of The Clash, but by the end I wanted her to be my friend AND my big sister.
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