November Wrap Up & Currently Reading: I’ve Caught the Non-Fiction Bug

I still can’t believe how fast November went by! Work was extremely busy since it was essentially the big month for online shopping (I work in marketing) so Black Friday, Cyber Monday – every sale that happens for Christmas, took away a lot of my time and energy. I managed to read 2 books this month and I happily reduced my Goodreads goal from 50 to 30 so it was more achievable with my current schedule.

November Wrap Up

In November, I read the following books:

When We Entered That House by Claire L Smith
3.5/5 Stars
This is the second novel from one of my best friends IRL and I really enjoyed the creepy atmosphere and interesting storyline of this novella! It was so short that, again, I wished it was much longer and had even more character development and back story to really add an extra depth. I don’t think much is going to top Claire’s debut, Helena, though 🙂

Dial A For Aunties by Jesse Sutanto
4/5 Stars
I started this book a couple of months of ago when it came but didn’t pick up again (I was at about 50 pages) until November. I somehow powered through it really fast in a couple of days and thoroughly enjoyed myself. This novel was so strange yet so funny and relatable. I’ll write a full review for this soon!

Currently Reading: I’ve Caught The Non-Fiction Bug!

Since I’ve been so busy, I also took a break from streaming and started focussing a lot more on mindfulness again cause I realised that I have been anxious all year because of everything going on. Part of my mindfulness routine has been to clean up my apartment more often, burn candles, journal and read a little bit. I found that because mindfulness and personal development was more top of mind, I actually found myself buying a few non-fiction books!

It’s also been so strange because I went from reading nothing to reading 4 books at once!

I’ve never been super interested in non-fiction books, fiction books were always what I enjoyed reading because they had that escapism for me. Yet, I wanted to learn more about how to improve myself and essentially get another perspective or at least more information that was interesting and not necessarily out of this world, like the kind I get from fantasy.

This month, I picked up 3 non-fiction books from the local bookstore that really piqued my interest and I’ve started reading two of them. I picked up The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van de Kolk which has been incredibly interesting. This book delves into trauma and how it changes the brain physiologically. As someone who has experienced a bunch of trauma in the past, it’s been very enlightening and interesting to read more about it and how I can potentially heal myself in the long term. I also picked up Conversions on Love by Natasha Lunn which has been super interesting! I’ve read this book the most in the last couple of weeks. Even as someone who’s in a long term relationship, this book holds valuable information on how to find peace and happiness with yourself and how to improve your relationships with others (and not just romantic) and I’ve so far really enjoyed this one.

The last book I picked up, I’ll read sometime soon (December or January), and that’s Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, it’s been shoved in my face every time I pop into a book store and I do have a deep appreciation for history, so I’m excited to see what this holds for me.

The other two books I’m currently reading are my work’s unofficial book club pick, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia which is pretty interesting so far, and I started reading an eARC for Loveboat Reunion by Abigail Hing Wen, the sequel to Loveboat, Taipei that’s coming out next year. I loved Loveboat Taipei, so it was an amazing opportunity to get my hands on it early to review for The Nerd Daily.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how I’ve been managing reading in the last month. Reading 4 books at once means I’m a lot slower at finishing them all but I’m taking my time and having fun with incorporating reading into my self-care routine. Let me know if you’d like me to write a post about my self-care routine in general, that could be fun 🙂

What did you read in November?

Until next time,