November and The Light Fantastic

In November, I only read six books:

Naked in Death by J.D. Robb
The Complete Short Stories by Saki
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell
Lisey’s Story by Stephen King (reread)
Beware the Wild by Natalie C. Parker

I say only, because that is a much smaller number than normal for me. But as I look at that short list, I realize most of those book are big, big books (500+ pages). So maybe not so bad.

Plus, I wrote the entire first draft of a novel in November, but that’s a different post.

Probably my favorite read of these was The Girl on the Train. I have seen this book compared to Gone Girl. A lot. It is so, so, so much better than Gone Girl. This is how to make an unreliable narrator work. Paula Hawkins managed to write a character that is deeply flawed, and unable to give us the whole story for the majority of the book. I still like her. She has good qualities to balance out her flaws. I was very much rooting for her to get her act together, to survive the story and find the truth.

A close runner up was Beware the Wild. This is a southern gothic recommended to me by Ashley Hearn. This book was deliciously creepy in all the right ways and felt a little bit like coming home.

I currently have a whole slew of southern gothics on my to-be-read list and am toying with the idea of writing my own…

In other news, in September, I read and wrote a review for The Light Fantastic. It has been published! You can find it here: The Light Fantastic