And that was October! It’s been a busy month, starting with my birthday and ending with the first two weeks of midterms. I think that’s the reason that I only read two books this month, the second of which I finished yesterday evening. Technically, I finished reading Cress in October as well, but I also included it in my Monthly Recap of September, so that would be cheating…

I also had a bit of a blogging slump this month. I didn’t really feel like writing a post after I’d had a busy day, or even if I had a bit of a more quiet day. I’d just rather read or watch Netflix than write or read blogs. But that’s over now! I’ve got plenty of motivation again, probably because of my blogiversary this past week. It does mean that there weren’t that many blog posts this month, though: only one recipe and two reviews. So this’ll be quite a quick recap!

New Books this Month

I got all of these books for my birthday, except for Career of Evil, although I did partly pay for that with a book voucher. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m so looking forward to it!

The three Paul Auster novels were presents from my parents. I’ve only ever read The New York Trilogy by him (and loved it so much that I wrote my BA thesis about it), so I’m really curious to find out if I like his other work as much as I do that.

I got Queen of Shadows from my aunt, which made me very happy, and Notes from a Small Island was a gift from one of my friends. She wanted to give me something I’d never heard about and she succeeded! It looks fun, though.

Read this Month

Like I said, I read very little this month, although it doesn’t feel like it! I read both of these books for one of my literature courses and I enjoyed them both very much. Although “enjoy” isn’t really the right word for We Need to Talk About Kevin. Let’s just say I was very impressed by it.

Reviewed this Month

• My first review of the month was a review of Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas. I enjoyed it immensely, as expected, and it’s certainly up there with my favourite books of the year!
• I also wrote a review of one of my childhood favourites: Matilda by Roald Dahl. It’s still one of my all time favourite books.

Baked this Month

Only one recipe this month, but it’s a good one! For my birthday dinner with my friends I made this chocolate brownie and raspberry tart.

Other Posts this Month

• Autumncould very well be the most photogenic season of all, and I had a blast taking all of these autumnal pictures on a walk through the woods with my father.
• I’d been wondering about what makes a book review a good book review and discussed it in this post, along with the idea that the review as we know it might be “dead”.
• Yesterday marked my blog’s second anniversary, so I wrote an extra post with my favourte blogposts from the last two years.

And that’s it for this month! If you want to stay up to date with what’s going on with me, you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram. I’d love to have a chat with you on there! Or down here in the comments, of course. I hope you all had a great month!