If I were a little more organized, I would have made sure to have updated my October 2022 wrap up here on the blog like I did on my YouTube channel. (You can watch it here.) To be fair to myself, though, I’d just gotten off a heavy month of blogging and I guess my blogging spirit had burned out. However, the mere memory of the rush of Blogtober and the fact that I got through it, that I succeeded in posting on every day of October, puts a wide grin on my face. I had never expected that I would be able to put up 31 consecutive blog posts (33, if you include the intro and the wrap up) and to have done it has made me super happy.
So the tiredness told me that I had earned a leave of absence from here and helped me decide to combine my October 2022 wrap up with my November 2022 wrap up. I have done combined wrap ups before, so this isn’t some out of the box thing. The downside (or upside, depends on how you see it) is that there are 16 books that I need to be talking about in this blog post – 5 from October, and 11 from November. How did I end up here? We all know the answer to that! 😂
Category Archives: Booklists
Books That Made Me Cry | Some Book Recommendations | #Blogtober22 – Day 30
In today’s blog post, I’ll be taking you through 10 books (more, actually) that I cried my eyes out reading and have shouted from the rooftops about how great they were. That’s a measure of how good a book is, I think, of how much it affects the reader. And these books stand out among my read pile because of how much pain, how much emotion I felt as I read them. There were originally 15 books on this list (in the video I made), but I’ve cut this list down to 10, to the books that affected me the most.
Readathons & Reading Challenges | #Blogtober22 – Day 29
A few days ago, I wrote a blog post talking about TBRs and whether or not you should make them. Today, I’ll be talking about readathons and reading challenges. I won’t be talking about why you should be doing these. Instead, I’m listing down the pros and cons of joining readathons and reading challenges. Based on this, you can decide whether or not you want to get involved in them. But before I start, I need to make it clear that irrespective of what the pros are, if reading is stressing you out, it’s always better to take time out and become kinder to yourself.
10 Books by Queer Authors I’ve Loved | Book Recommendations | #Blogtober22 – Day 28
June is Pride Month, a celebration of queerness and our LGBTQIA+ fellows. We have loads of posts on social media celebrating the same, as it should be. But many-a-times, we tend to forget that we shouldn’t be sharing these stories and reading these books only in that month. We need to do it around theContinueContinue reading “10 Books by Queer Authors I’ve Loved | Book Recommendations | #Blogtober22 – Day 28”
Difference Between a Bad Character and a Badly Written Character | #Blogtober22 – Day 27
A couple of months ago, out of the blue, I got thinking about a character and how I didn’t like them at all. There were, however, reasons which people pointed out saying that the character was supposed to make you feel those things and that that is how the author wrote it. So, this means that there are bad characters and badly written characters and there’s a stark difference between the two. Either way, however, you tend to dislike both types of characters – one, because they’re supposed to be reprehensible, and the second, because of how they’re written.
10 Weird Bookish Things I Do | #Blogtober22 – Day 23
As human beings, we all have our quirks. We do certain things in certain ways which sometimes surprises other people. Of course, the world in itself is a weird place to be in, given how it ruthlessly cracks down on people who do things differently. But every person is different. And there isn’t just one solution to every problem. There are multiple ways of looking at things. Given, some of these ways may be weird, but that doesn’t mean they’re ineffective or bad. Diss on the bad and harmful, not on the weird. (Life lesson done for today, phew.)
As bookworms, we’re prone to doing even weirder things than is considered normal. It could be immersing ourselves in a book while at a doctor’s appointment or reading while eating or the way we store our books – every bookworm has their own quirks. More than the average human being, even.
Rereading the Heartstopper Books & Watching the TV Show | #Blogtober22 – Day 22
In 2021, a subscriber and now friend suggested that I read the Heartstopper graphic novel series by Alice Oseman. So I read it and this way, found one of my favorite series of all time. In hindsight, 2021 was a great year for finding favorites. This one especially touched a part of my heart and filled it with warmth and goodness. When the TV adaptation came out earlier this year, I knew I had to watch it, but I couldn’t at the time. Months went by and plans of rereading the series and watching the show were razed to the ground because of our move to Sydney.
My Favorite Book Quotes of All Time – Part 2 | #Blogtober22 – Day 19
Books make life more understandable. They give us the time to think about every possible thing in the world, mostly about people and their behavior. They explain to us calmly whatever they are trying to say. We can pause and reflect on what the author is saying without having to rush on with the next point in the flow. Which is why I love reading to no end. It makes me, me. As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, I’m not nothing without books and reading, but a huge part of me would be missing if reading wasn’t in my life. Reading makes me a better person.
And while I read, I give my all to it. I maintain a notebook to note down my thoughts about the books that I am reading, and I jot down the quotes that I like. I later transfer them to another notebook that’s specifically for these quotes. I’ve filled up 4 so far and have started on a fifth, which might give you an idea about how long this series is going to be. The short answer is: very long. 😛
Quick Reads to Smash Your Goodreads Goal – 2022 Edition | More Than 60 Book Recommendations | #Blogtober22 – Day 15
So we’re in October of the year and usually, now’s the time when, while the world is actually prepping for Christmas, bookworms start panicking because they haven’t reached their Goodreads goal yet. We start looking for short books to read or try to cram in as many books from our TBRs as possible in a bid to cross that frontier. So a couple of years ago, I decided to make my followers’ job easier by giving them more than 40 book recommendations of quick, easy reads that would help them smash their Goodreads goal with time to spare.
10 Things I Love About An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir | #Blogtober22 – Day 13
If you’ve been following me on social media – at least since 2021 – you’ll know that I found one of my absolute favorite series of all time that year. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, I’ve gone on adventures, I’ve smiled in understanding, I’ve experienced the characters’ pain – everything – as I read the fantasy series, An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. There’s footage of me crying like a baby and there was more that I didn’t add to that video where I was even hiccupping because I was crying so hard. Sabaa Tahir has that quality in her writing where she makes you feel a world of emotions. And call me a masochist or whatever, but I am someone who loves books that make me emotional.
The Melodramatic Bookworm 