TSS: September 2011 Reading Wrap-up

Late as usual, I meant to write this post last weekend, but we had house guests and unfortunately I had no time for blogging at all, something that seems to happen a bit too often these days for various reasons. It’s especially annoying when I actually feel more keen on blogging than I have in months; I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s a very good feeling.

This weekend, I’m focusing on accomplishing everything I need to take a week off starting on Wednesday for my trip to see this in real life:

As you can probably imagine, I am very excited to visit Rome! Food, history, romance, I can’t wait. I look forward to sharing my own pictures with you when I return. We’ll be celebrating our second wedding anniversary while there, so it will be an extra special holiday.

Anyway, on to September! I finished 16 books in the end over a nice variety of genres, and I even managed to get some non-fiction read. I’m very pleased about that.

Fiction

• You Are My Only, Beth Kephart
• Miles, Mystery, and Mayhem, Lois McMaster Bujold
• Next to Love, Ellen Feldman
• Becoming Marie Antoinette, Juliet Grey
• The Maid, Kimberly Cutter
• Maine, J. Courtney Sullivan
• The Reinvention of Love, Helen Humphreys
• Unveiled, Courtney Milan
• One Salt Sea, Seanan McGuire
• Death of Kings, Bernard Cornwell

Non-fiction

• All Your Base Are Belong to Us, Harold Goldberg
• Wheat Belly, William Davis MD
• The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Women of the Cousins’ War, Philippa Gregory
• The Ghost Map, Steven Johnson
• Sugar: A Bittersweet History, Elizabeth Abbott

Books of the Month

Honestly, those choices were actually surprisingly easy ones. The Emperor of All Maladies was a fantastic, stand-out book, even as it made me worry. And Next to Love has really stuck with me, so it deserves a mention here too.

October has been with us for more than a week now, so I already know quite a bit of what will be appearing. I’m shockingly on top of things, in that I only have a few books to get reviewed from those above, so the ones without links will soon appear here. I’ve already read a couple of fantastic romance novels, for those who read this blog and enjoy them as well, and I’m currently working on The Glitter and the Gold, Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan’s life in her own words.

As I may have mentioned to some of you, I’m pondering trying to actually write a historical novel myself (especially with all this newfound verve for writing I’ve acquired since I changed jobs), and I think she would make an excellent first subject. Stories about American heiresses who married English lords are very popular these days – except that Consuelo was unhappy, and fought for the right to her happiness against societal dictates. She was an utterly fascinating woman.

For the rest of October, I’ve already begun selecting books I might try to read for the Read-a-thon – it’ll be a tight squeeze to actually fit it in with the amount of catching up I’ll be doing after my trip, but I’m determined to participate. I’m also hoping that I can read:

• The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
• Storm Front, Jim Butcher
• The Plantagenets, Derek Wilson
• The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach