November Book Haul

My 5 book goal is going to be a bit of a wash for the rest of the year, I think. I haven’t been doing very well about sticking to it the last few months (or ever, really), and I don’t have high hopes for sticking to it in December. Merry Christmas to me. 🙂 But there’s always next year, right? I have some serious book goals for 2018 in the works, but as long as it’s still 2017 and I’m failing anyway, might as well buy all the books. These are the new titles on my shelves this month:

1. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich. This was my BOTM selection for November. This one’s narrated through letters and/or journal entries, if I’m remembering right, which sounds unusual and interesting. I like books that are narrated in uncommon formats. It’s also an end-of-the-world story, which I haven’t read in a while so it must be time to try that again. It was the only selection I hadn’t heard of in BOTM’s November list, so it caught my interest.
2. Artemis by Andy Weir. An extra BOTM pick for me. This is the first BOTM selection I regret buying, and I haven’t even read it yet. I’ve seen some negative reviews for this book (and some positive ones, but I fear I won’t be one of those), and I think I was just so busy at the time I picked it that buying new books was a stress-reliever and I just didn’t have the time and energy to actually look into it properly before I made my choice. In the end, I think what I actually wanted to read was The Martian, which was also an extra BOTM selection this month, but I chose Artemis instead because it was new.
3. The Martian by Andy Weir. After seeing yet another bad review for Artemis, I realized that what I really wanted to read was The Martian. So I decided to go ahead and buy a copy of the one I actually wanted, to boost my book-buying spirits. I’m much more confident about enjoying this one, but I might still read Artemis first; if it’s newness is the only thing propelling me to read it, I better utilize that while it lasts because I do still want to check it out for myself and not leave it unread on my shelf forever. Also, I like to save the best for last.
4. Death Note: Black Edition Vol. 1 by Tsugumi Ohba, Yuki Kowalsky, and Takeshi Obata. I needed a graphic novel for my reading challenge this year, and I ended up choosing Saga. I don’t read much that’s full of pictures. It’s just not my preferred medium. But I am willing to try something different every now and then, and I did like Saga, so I bought a manga that looked promising from my initial list of potential graphic novels. I got the black edition, which is actually the first two volumes in one book (I always choose more story in one book, when that’s an option), and I’m excited to check it out. I think there’s even a TV series.
5. Waking Gods by Sylvain Neuvel. This is the sequel to Sleeping Giants, which I bought last year and still have not read. It’s at the top of my list for 2018, and the covers are so cool that I couldn’t resist. I’ve read the synopsis a few times, about a girl who finds a giant hand and people realize it’s only part of a whole, and the whole book is narrated through interviews and other unusual mediums for a novel, which again, sounds right up my alley. And Pierce Brown blurbed the first book. And the covers are so neat. So when Black Friday sales rolled around, I picked this one up. (It never seems to be cheap enough, otherwise.)
6. Pines by Blake Crouch. Another Black Friday grab. This one is part of a series that I want to read in 2018. Crouch’s Dark Matter was one of my favorite reads of 2017 from way back in January, and I wanted to try another one of his books in 2018 as a result. I’ve heard this one’s weird and thrilling and completely mysterious, which sounds perfect. I think the main character is some sort of journalist or investigator who gets trapped in a strange town where nothing makes sense and death might be the only means of escape.
7. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North. This one’s a thriller/mystery about reincarnation, I believe. I read the synopsis so long ago, so I barely remember the details of what it’s about. But it’s been a while since I’ve read about reincarnation, and that’s an interesting topic in itself. I’m cautiously hoping North hits the mind-bending side of it and not the cheesy “let me try this same thing over and over again because my life only has so many possibilities and this is the one thing I can change” tactic. But it seems more promising than the usual tropes.
8. Macbeth by William Shakespeare. I picked up one of the Pelican editions with the cool covers around Black Friday discount time. I’m not a huge Shakespeare fan, and I probably wouldn’t have bought this if it wasn’t the play I wanted to read for my 2017 reading challenge. I forgot to hunt for the Shakespeare anthology at my library, and as the end of the year approaches I was suddenly unsure of when I would be back to get it and whether that would leave me with enough time to read it. (And whether I wanted to lug a giant Shakespeare anthology around while I was Christmas shopping.) So I bought my own copy, just to make it easier to pick up the story whenever I have a moment to fit it in. If I like this one, I might branch out and try a couple more with the covers from this collection. And it’s nice to have at least one book on my haul list that I know I’ll be reading soon.

I’m really excited about this list. I know I won’t get to much of it before 2018 because my December TBR is already pretty crazy, but I’m setting some great reading goals for 2018 that I think will really help me clear some unread books off my TBR shelves. Almost every one of these books is from a genre I don’t read super frequently (Sci-fi, a play, a graphic novel), which is exciting. I’m ready to step outside of my comfort zone. I want to be surprised.

Have you read any of these? What should I pick up first?

Sincerely,

The Literary Elephant