October Reading Round Up

October Reading Round Up

I’ve always been a lover of books. I have dipped my toes into many dystopian futures and fantasy pasts. I’ve read coming of age novels, murder mysteries, and quite a bit of everything.

But over the past couple of years or so the amount of time I spent reading has greatly dwindled in comparison to the amount of time spent on my phone. And that’s just not okay with me!

I started listening to the Bad On Paper podcast a couple months ago, which helped reignite my love of reading thanks to the amount of endless book suggestions (my to-be-read pile is on a whole other level right now). 

I recently took a deep dive back into the world of reading, and I’ve kicked it off with some INCREDIBLE reads (well for the most part).

This month I read 3 books and they were all fantastic, and all completely different from one another. I did also pick up one other book that I am STRUGGLING to finish. We’ll get into all of them down below!

*This blog post contains affiliate links for the books listed here. I would love for you to support me by shopping these books through the links if you decide to buy them! I appreciate you immensely*

First up:
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Where the Crawdads Sing was beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. The story is told between two time periods in North Carolina. The story focuses on a young abandoned girl, Kya, who has to learn how to take care of herself while living in a marsh. She’s isolated from the normal life a young girl her age should be living and Crawdads goes through it all with her. The book follows Kya as she becomes a woman, and all the tear-wrenching moments, along with the happy ones that happen along the way. There’s also a murder mystery all entwined which keeps you waiting to see how it ends.

This book has gotten A LOT of hype, and I would say it definitely lives up to it. It doesn’t really matter what type of books you are usually drawn to, I truly think that if you give this one a chance you’ll get into it. Even if it takes a couple chapters!

I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars

You can shop it here.

Circe by Madeline Miller

Circe is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s about the Greek mythological goddess who is from The Odyssey, but the entire perspective of the book is so unlike the characters portrayed in The Odyssey. If you managed to get through high school and college without reading The Odyssey, or you read it and remember close to nothing like me - you can totally read Circe and love it. If you want to remind yourself a bit about what happened in The Odyssey you can do so here. But basically The Odyssey follows Odysseus on his journey home to Ithaca after The Trojan War, and Circe is a cunning witch on an island that happens to lure him into staying with her for a long period of time.

Circe follows the goddess through her (very long immortal) lifetime. This book throws in so many various Greek gods, monsters, heroes, and the like from Greek mythology in a way that adds so much depth to each of the characters.

The book is wonderfully written and extremely clever. I honestly didn’t want to put it down, and it actually caused a rift between me and my husband because he ended up stealing it from me when I was part way through. I fell asleep one night and he started reading it. I tried my best to finish it first but he’s too fast of a reader and he beat me by a day. I’m still bitter, but I guess that’s what I get for telling him how much I think he would like it (now he’s reading The Odyssey, insert eye roll emoji).

I won’t be able to do this book justice with a description, so just trust me - you need to read this one. It will be unlike anything else you’ve read this year.

I give it 5 stars.

You can grab Circe on Amazon here.

You can also buy The Odyssey while you’re at it here.

A Sky Painted Gold by Laura Wood

Oh my, this book. I heard some rave reviews about A Sky Painted Gold and knew it had to be on the top of my list. It’s not a very heard of book, and I think it’s shipped from somewhere odd because it’s not even on Amazon Prime.

But holy crap this book is beautiful. It’s sparkly and shiny and just fills you with imagery of a world you wish you could drop yourself into.

This book follows young “Lou”, as her friends and family like to call her, in a more rural part of England in the 1920s. As a little girl Lou was always fascinated by The Cardrew House, a mansion on an island across from her, that sat empty for many years. The summer of her 18th birthday the house becomes full of the Cardrew children, Robert and Caitlin, and their guests from London. Lou ends up an outsider in this brand new world of glitz and glam. There are fabulous parties that I think Gatsby himself would approve of. This book actually reminds me of something akin to a female lead The Great Gatsby (there is even a Gatsby quote on one of the breakers in the book).

A Sky Painted Gold has a beautiful setting, romance, female friendships, and secrets that you are dying to find out.

I finished this book on my lunch break at work yesterday and I feel like I didn’t do it justice by doing so. I definitely wanted to sit with the feeling and soak it all in instead of rushing back to work like I had to. But I definitely feel like this will be a book that I go back and read again.

I give it 5 stars.

Please get it here and tell me what you think!

The Great Gatsby was also one of my absolute favorite books that I had to read in high school, so if you never managed to read it - I highly recommend! Grab it here.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

I was leaning towards not putting this book in the reading round-up since I didn’t finish it, but I didn’t want you to think that I just love every book I read based on the previous reviews.

I am actually a very picky reader, and it takes a good book to have me convinced.

And The Immortalists just didn’t do it for me. Or at least it ISN’T doing it for me. I managed to get to page 65 before I put it down. After reading Where the Crawdads Sing and Circe, my reading expectations were pretty darn high. The Immortalists is not reaching the bar even close. I was struggling to get through, reading maybe 2 pages at a time, but I never caught myself deciding to sit down and curl up with it. It’s possible I didn’t give it enough time (we’ll see), but when I polled my Instagram friends whether it was amazing and I should keep reading, or if it was only “meh” and to drop it, I got an overwhelming 65% saying to drop it.

This book had a lot of hype and amazing reviews so I had a lot of hope for it.

I had several people message me saying that it all ties together beautifully at the end, but I don’t want to spend my time forcing myself through an entire book only to like the ending of it.

After picking up A Sky Painted Gold after dropping The Immortalists, it’s hard to be convinced it will match up to any of the books I read. But now I’m waiting for more books to come in the mail so I decided I would try it out for a bit longer and see what happens. I read maybe 10 more pages and I just don’t know if I can do it.

Stay tuned!

I won’t be rating a book I haven’t finished, so we’ll have to see if I manage to make it happen.

If you want to give it a shot and tell me if I really need to finish it, you can get your copy here.

So there we have it!
My first monthly reading round-up!

I hope you enjoyed reading about my reads. If you’ve read any of these I would love to hear your thoughts. Or let me know what books you read this past month down below!

*This blog post contains affiliate links and I greatly appreciate you supporting me by shopping through them!*