September in Review (Late! Geez!)

My Reading

# of books read: 11, including a record-breaking 3 re-reads
Best(s):(In which I tell you all my five star reads and make up categories so they each win something)**

• Best Re-read: Vicious
• Best Book Recommended by My Niece*: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff,  Christ's Childhood Pal
• "Best" Cliffhanging sequels: Vengeful and Two Dark Reigns

Library Love: +6, so 105/60.
Beat the Backlist: +7, so 109/100
Goodreads: 135/52
Popsugar: +2, so 30/52
Discussion Challenge: +1, so  7/12 I did keep my vow from last month to read a bunch of the discussion posts, which was a blast. My own discussion was on banned books, which has become sort of an annual thing here on Falconer's Library.

**Though this month, only Vicious actually got five stars. Plenty of four stars though!

Bookish Events and Happenings

Things picked up here this month! I got to see V. E. Schwab at Powell's Books, which was great fun. I posted about it here.














I celebrated Banned Books Week in my classes and made a hallway display that I'm actually going to leave up for awhile. My favorite library was giving away a banned book if you took a selfie with their display, and the let me take two books for my classroom: Among the Hidden and a Spanish language copy of Paper Towns (Ciudades de Papel). I have two non-English speaking students taking my reading class as an elective this semester, and I'm trying to stock my library with some options for them.

 In addition to my library and local bookstores, I got to visit an independent bookshop called Artifacts in Hood River, which advertises "good books and bad art."  And oh my word, are they correct on both points. I think it's a local tradition to dump terrible paintings on their doorstep. If they're bad enough they put them on the wall with ten dollar price tags. They had a bunch of sassy magnets and cards and so on in addition to a pretty complete used/new book mix. I was able to pick up a few used books for my classroom, and some great cards too.




I also got deliveries from my Donors Choose project; three big boxes of sets of 2-4 books for student book clubs. Some were books I'd been unable to track down copies of at all, so I was super excited about them.

On the Blog

I posted seven times, which is becoming the norm these days. I'm not sure what I'm doing that's getting in the way of me blogging more. Well, it really helped when my kids had weekly events where I had to wait for them. My TTT post about my fall TBR got the most pageviews and comments. (I've actually read 2.5 of the books on that list already, which is probably a record for me and prescribed reading lists I make myself.)

IRL

Another lovely month, really. We've had great weather for the most part--I wear gloves in the morning because the steering wheel is cold, but by afternoon I'm in short sleeves. Early in the month I spent a full day (7 am until midnight) on an outing with my sister. For various reasons, she didn't get much Summer in her summer this year, so we tried to cram a vacation into a day. We took a hike, had coffee at two different places, picnicked in our car with a gorgeous sunset view, and yeah, went to that bookstore. 

I was pretty social overall this month--went to a trivia night sponsored by the library with a co-worker and her friends, attended another work social hour, took my niece* out for dinner, enjoyed a birthday brunch with a group of old friends, and started attending Latvian choir once a week. For me, that's quite a bit. 

And now we're so far into October that I had to erase some of what I wrote because I'd forgotten it happened THIS month. I hope you're enjoying your autumn, if that's what is going on where you live. 

*Different nieces, both awesome.

My monthly summaries are always linked to the Monthly Wrap-Up Round-Up on Feed Your Fiction Addiction, along with many other terrific blogs' monthly reflections.  Nicole usually puts together a fun scavenger hunt giveaway too, so go check it out!