 to my channel. Today's video is going to be in kind of two parts the first half being a wrap-up of what I read in October and the second half being my November TBR and I'm doing it this way because I don't think either of these ideas really have enough for me to make them separate videos plus I have a lot of video ideas planned for the next coming weeks and so I want to make sure I get them all done before the new year happens. So we're kind of squishing these two videos into one quick side note before we begin now. Yes, I do still have my Halloween decorations up and the next day or so my husband and I will be de-decorating the fall from our apartment and redecorating with winter slash Christmas. So for now they're still up but when I do next week's video they will not be up. That was just kind of a sign note but I figure like if I'm doing my October wrap-up it's okay to still have the spooky decorations. So jumping right into it the first book that I finished in the month of October was Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim. I gave this book initially five stars but I'm thinking of bumping it down to four just because a lot of times when I finish a book I have an initial like powerful feeling afterwards and I rate based on that but then after a little time goes by and I reflect I realize you know the ending may have been great but once I think about the entire book was a really five stars. I did however love this book and I agree with what I have been saying beforehand before I read this book and what other people have been saying that it is very much like Project Oneway meets Mulan with the fact that the main character Maya dresses up as her brother in order to compete in the emperor's competition to find a new tailor and because she is a woman she's not allowed to be a master tailor but she is pretty good and she comes her father is an amazing tailor as well. The only thing is that when I hear this description you know I think oh that's super exciting but it really only encompassed the first half of the book. The competition is over once you reach halfway through the book and then you start on another plot point that was just as fun and interesting. It just kind of felt weird to have one arc stop and then another arc with the same characters and everything so it wasn't super crazy but just keep in mind that that's kind of how the book setups is that there's a competition and then there's something that happens afterwards and they both take up about half of the book. I really enjoyed it. It does really have that like has a couple tropes of oh he's so dark and mysterious I'm not gonna fall for him and then you do because he's dark and mysterious. It has that trope it has that trope which normally makes me roll my eyes and I did add a couple moments in here but overall I didn't hate it. I don't know I guess Elizabeth Lim just kind of played the trope off a little better than other authors have in the past for me and then there was also the trope of she doesn't necessarily think I'm different I'm special but some people do say you know she is different she is special because of her magical scissors that she is able to use so there's a little bit of that trope but not a lot which is why I still rated this book four out of five plus just made me very happy and I loved the little bits of magic in here it's not overwhelmingly magic but there are little bits of it in here. The next book that I finished reading was in real life and this is by Corey Doctorow and Jenn Wang. Again I gave this four out of five stars because I loved it so the main character is a girl who has a speaker come to her school and she talks about this video game and how they're encouraging other young women to play this video game in order to boost their self-confidence. So her main character does and it's really cool to watch her go through this transformation of becoming more confident as this is her in real life and this is her character and it's really cool to kind of see how she morphs into her character in real life for the better. However this book does deal with some issues that I wish it had um I dove in more into. It kind of scratches the surface of it of the issue of um other players from around the world and why they play video games rather than just to have fun but more so as a source of money um and the illegality of their jobs um so I feel like it was very distant from that problem so I think if the book had been longer if this graphic novel had been longer then it could have dived in a little deeper to that issue and kind of not made it so surface level. That's kind of my only critique otherwise I loved it I loved the art style uh very precious and I really want a lot of young women to read this especially if you are interested in video games. The next book that I read that I want to talk about is when I got from the library and that's dream a little dream and this was a book translated from German into English. I read it in English and I gave it three out of five stars because I feel that it was the beginning to a trilogy but it didn't kick start the plot enough for me so she it's about a girl who her and her younger sister um travel a lot because their parents are divorced and both parents travel a lot due to their jobs but they finally settle in with their mom who is going to move in with her new boyfriend and his kids and so you kind of got that reality of life as well as going to a new school being in a new country um but she has the ability to walk into people's dreams and there's some kind of dealings with the devil a little bit that she kind of gets mixed up in which sounds really fun but when I read the book it was not as interesting as the summary made it seem which is kind of bummer but you know we're gonna go with it so I'm not going to pick up the next book in the trilogy I'm gonna put the trilogy down um it did not have enough of a cliffhanger for me to continue to want to read it unfortunately but it was still a pretty good book I think it's more on me than the book per se which is why I still read three out of five stars then the last book that I read in October is the one that is featured in my Halloween vlog slash a Catherine House vlog because all I did was read this book so this is Catherine House and it was written by Elizabeth Thomas I read this book all on Halloween and I gave it three out of five stars but I'm thinking about lowering it down to two stars because I really did not enjoy this book very much uh I do go into quite an in-depth summary in that video so if you want to go ahead and check that out so you can see what my thoughts were while I was reading it and when I finished it versus what they were at the very beginning before I knew very much about it so Catherine House is like a school kind of like a university except smaller and it's a house rather than saying they're a university or college and it's very hard to get into but if you do and you graduate you're supposed to uh get a really good job and get lots of money and blah blah blah but if you don't graduate something mysterious happens it's a dark academia except that I never got the vibe that something bad would ever happen to anyone until like the very end and even then I just had a hard time understanding this book the main character was extremely repetitive in her actions I felt like it wasn't very interesting I felt like there wasn't much plot except for like one point here one point here um and that just kind of wasn't enough to keep the story going for me I also feel like it had a very dud dull ending with not much of a climax to it and even then like I said I just don't understand a lot of what the book was trying to do and I felt like the writing style also wasn't my favorite there were a lot of uh things in here that I felt were unnecessary or weren't well explained um so I just had a very hard time keeping with this book again I could I talk more about it in my uh vlog uh that I posted last week so go there for like more extreme detail but for now I personally did not enjoy this book as much as I was hoping to now we're going to move on to my november tv r and if you've been following my channel that you know that each month I had been trying to read a different genre um I had to forego this during august in september and a little bit october because of covid affecting libraries as well as me moving um and so I wasn't able to fill those as much as I wanted october I didn't get to because I'm still waiting for the books that I ordered for october to read horror thriller but I am happy to say that for november I will be continuing on so november's theme is mysteries and I chose this because I thought it would be a very good wind down from halloween mystery still has a small spooky element but not near as much as horror and thriller or dark academia does um but it's still something that I thought would be a very good genre to read in fall so I will be reading some mystery books the first of the mystery books the first two books that I'm going to be reading are actually agatha christie books and I have this beautiful edition of murder on the orient express and other efecul poho mysteries and so like I said it obviously has murder on the orient express except that I read that last year last spooky season and so the it's the other mysteries in this particular edition that I will be reading there are two more in here the first is the murder of roger echeloroyd and I actually started that yesterday so I have already begun my november tbr and then the last book in this edition is curtain poho's last case um also look at the inside of this book it's so cute it's such a beautiful edition so I have two agatha christie books that I will be reading for the month of november but then I also have another classic mystery that I will be reading and this one's a chunky one because it's the complete sherlock holmes volume two by sir arthur conan doil um yeah so I don't have volume one and I don't have the dust jacket for volume two because I got this in a thrift store and so this is how it came and I was like oh my gosh I just want it so I have it this is huge it's 600 pages long but only 500 pages of it is actual story um so I will be making my way through this as best I can throughout the month of november I don't think I really need to explain too much about Sherlock Holmes so I'm not going to I am hoping to pick up at least another book I'm thinking maybe one of us's line I might pick that up on audiobook if I can't get the physical copy I would like to pick up other mystery books throughout the month of November but I don't own very many and I don't know very many because I don't read mystery so if you have any mystery recommendations please leave them down below otherwise if I don't get very many recommendations or the ones I do get are books that I don't have access to for whatever reason um I'm hoping to pick up some of the other books that I meant to read in October but didn't because I want to get them finished by the end of the year so the reason that I haven't read very many mysteries though is because I I haven't had good experience with mysteries in the past all the mysteries I've read in the past I've always been able to guess and you write about who did it and kind of why sometimes and so I felt like mysteries tended to be very dull and not exciting because if you guess it and you're right for over half the book but you still have half of the book to go it's just not as fun or exciting so I'm trying to give mysteries a new try and hopefully I will be able to find some mysteries where I can't call it because if I can that's such a bummer if I can't then that's super exciting so I feel like with history that genre is such a hit or miss for every single independent book and I just I don't like that I don't like knowing if the book I'm gonna pick up is either a hit or a miss until I've already read like like you know what I mean I don't want to pick up a book and be super excited about it and then know what's gonna happen for a huge chunk of the book like that's just not very exciting to me and so I've always steered away from mystery because I'm too afraid that the books are going to be misses or duds and that I'm gonna know them so that's why I haven't read a lot of mystery hopefully some of these classic books will change my mind and if you guys leave me any mystery recommendations below hopefully those can also change my mind so yeah like I said comment down below if you have any mysteries or what you read in October or maybe what you didn't get knocked over I didn't get to a lot of books so it might just be nice to finish those up at the end of November because I have a super exciting December TBR I am so excited for it but that'll be in another month from now I am trying to post a video every week so stay tuned for those subscribe so that you can get the notification of when I post otherwise feel free to like this video comment down below and yeah that's pretty much it so until I see you guys in next week's video I wish you a happy meeting