 But on the last page, something happened, like there's a shock. Like I was like, oh! I'm like, go to you. And I was like, and so we're not going to have that. Okay. Welcome back to my channel. I hope you are well. You may be thinking, Megan, I swear you don't do wrap ups and you would be right. She doesn't even go here. This year I have been doing quarterly wrap up. So every three months I give my reading statistics and a few of like my favorite and least favorite books. However, I have decided to start doing monthly wrap ups. I don't typically watch them myself. Call me a bad server because I always spill the tea. But I know that a lot of people love to watch them and for a lot of people it's the only thing that they do watch on BookTube. I've always felt like almost all of the books I read are in vlogs. But like I can't expect you to watch every single vlog. So I feel like this would be a good place to just consolidate all of my reading, talk about all the books I read this month. And yeah, that doesn't mean we're missing one quarterly wrap up. But to be honest, I don't think I had any five-star books in July and August, which would be the other two months that would be in this quarterly wrap up. So like we just don't need to talk about her. It was not a good time. I'm going to give you my reading statistics for September and then we're going to talk about all the books I read. I read a total of 14 books in August, no, September. Dum dum. I read a total of 14 books in September, which is the joint highest I've ever read in a month, which is really good because I was in a reading slump in August. I think I only read seven books. So I managed to successfully get out of that this month. Three of those were under 100 pages. So there were a few short books in there that I just kind of threw in to like get the count up of it and feel a bit better about myself. I'm hoping in the last three months of the year at some point I'll read like 15 or up in a month. That would be great. In terms of star rating, I didn't have anything below a three star, which is great. Like to not have a 2.5 or a two or one, like it's just brilliant. There are a few books that were threes like maybe could be like a 2.75 but I read them as a three because I was feeling generous. He's genuine, amazing. He's selfless and he is one of the most kind people that I've ever met in my entire world. But I had two three stars, three 3.5, three four stars, three 4.5 and three five stars. So it was a pretty even split between like almost all of them. I read almost the same of each rating. Normally I would like to see more five stars especially because I had gone two months without but I'm getting there slowly. Oh, I read a total of 4192 pages this month and that is an average of 139 pages a day which I feel like is pretty good. Like 139 pages a day ain't something to be snipped at. There were definitely some days I read nothing and some days I read 300 pages. Like I'm not the kind of person who reads the same amount every day. I do go through ebbs and flows in the month of reading loads and reading not a lot. In terms of genre, I read three contemporary, three fantasy, three graphic novel, two magical realism, one nonfiction, one sci-fi and one thriller. I feel like contemporary is something I'm starting to get into more. You'll see some of the books I talk about in this video are contemporaries that I've loved. It's not like a genre I feel particularly drawn to but they're definitely books I read quickly after I buy them because they're not as intimidating as some of the other books I have on my shelf. All my big books. Oh, hold up the second lady. Don't get in my face. That's a pretty good split between everything I would say and three graphic novel shows I was just trying to get myself out of a slump. In terms of audience, I read six adult, one middle grade and seven young adult. I do like my reading to be a pretty much a 50-50 split between young adult and adult. And then in terms of author race, I read from five black authors, seven white authors and two Middle Eastern authors. So white authors is like 50%. I feel like that's pretty good. I would like going forward for my white authors to be 50% in under a month and black authors being a 36%. I always want to see that about 40% around that. I'm Middle Eastern. I don't tend to read from a lot of Middle Eastern authors. So I'm happy to see that that is 14%. But I would say that when I did quarterly wrap ups, that was more representative author race because I feel like in a month you can't get a really solid picture of that. I feel like quarterly wrap ups and yearly wrap ups are a better representation of that because I could be doing a themed reading vlog for a week, reading murder mystery, which is typically a very white dominated genre. And that would mean that my monthly to six are affected by that. So I feel like that is an area of statistics that quarterly wrap ups were better at. Also, I forgot to say that nine of the books I read this month were own voices and five were not. Okay, thank you. Goodbye. So let's get into the 14 books that I read this month. That's what we've been waiting for. It's what we wanted all along. I am going to go through them the order that I read them apart from. I'm going to start with the book that I read last. In my last reading vlog, which was where I wrapped up all my unread books and unwrap some and read them. I'll link that if you haven't seen it. I didn't actually finish this book and I was supposed to read it in this vlog because I want to spend a bit more time with it and read it a bit more slowly. I didn't finish it in the vlog, but I told you all to come here to hear what I had to say about it. And like, I feel like it would be a bit annoying if I left it till the end because it's the last book I finished this month. So I'm going to talk about it first and it is Heard Feminism by Mickey Kendall. Now, as you can see, I tabbed this a lot. I don't tab. I've never tabbed a book fully throughout in the way that I did with this. There's too much. I'm studying a feminism module this year at uni and I feel like this was super helpful for that. So I wanted to have like a really good resource of quotes when it comes to doing essays and stuff like that. I really enjoyed this. I ended up giving it 3.75 stars. This is all about a feminism that is inclusive for all, particularly for black women, spearheaded by black women, talking about the issues and problems that white feminism and white feminists often try to ignore. I loved the message of this. I loved what this was saying. I agreed completely with it. Like my feminism very closely aligns with this. I think that this is just so insightful. If you've never read feminist literature or feminist nonfiction before, I think this is like the perfect place to start. I love it. I love it. This is where I would send you to start reading about feminist nonfiction. However, I feel like as someone who's read quite a bit of feminist nonfiction, a lot of these were issues that I was already educated on and heard about before. For many people, it's positive was kind of my negative because it covers such a wide range of issues. You know, it covers poverty, hunger, education, rape culture, the patriarchy, fetishization of black women, so much. Like it covers every single topic. And I think I'm almost at the stage now where when I'm reading feminist books, I kind of want them to be on one topic in depth because I felt like we kind of covered all these topics and I wanted to read about them in more detail and I couldn't because we kind of just sped on from them really fast. But I just always felt like I wanted us to go a bit more in-depth and to like examine issues with a bit of a closer lens. And I also just felt like the writing style wasn't for me. I feel like with nonfiction, like a writing style can either just be like completely your thing and you really engage with it or you struggle to read it. And I just struggled to read this but it's not like badly written at all. I can recognize that. It just wasn't for me. I don't know. I just don't think this is like great for me. I don't want to do it. I want to go home. Like I can't take the pressure of it. I don't think any job interview... But I would really recommend this. I found it so insightful and I'm definitely going to be lending this to a lot of people I know because I think it is so, so important. Now we go back to the start. I don't have these first few books with me. They're back home. The first book I read this month was Stranger Dreamer by Laini Taylor. I gave this 4.5 stars. If you know me, you know, I love like whimsical, magical, ethereal writing. And this is that. When I read this, I thought, thank God, we've got a five star. We didn't. You spend all that time thinking you've won. The first like 100 pages were five stars. The last maybe 80 pages, five stars. Everything in between four stars. So it kind of leveled out to a 4.5 star. I feel like it had so much potential in this. We follow Laszlo Strange as he is obsessed with like the mythical Lost City of Weep. He finds out that it's not mythical and he gets to travel there and it's about children of gods and goddesses floating above the city and dreams and it's hard to describe. Like it's impossible to describe. I feel like Laini Taylor's writing is for me. Like for me, I love that kind of purple prose. I know some people hate it and I can accept that, but you're wrong. There's nothing wrong with my views or beliefs because I have freedom of speech and everything I'm saying is true. And this made me sob. Like the ending, I haven't cried in a book in a while. Like I typically cry a lot of books, but I have not cried in a book like this in a while. Like tears were streaming. Even thinking of it now makes me sad and it makes me so nervous for the next book. Next was The Wicked King by Kate Ancrem. I gave this four stars. So this is about two guy friends, friends, friends. They have a very interesting relationship and one of their mental health starts deteriorating throughout the book and he's kind of imagining that he can see things around him and interact with them and his friend is trying to help him through that. It was very short, kind of fragmented burst of information told through mixed media, which I love. I love any aspect of mixed media. Like it just gets me. If any book, if I find out a book has mixed media straight away, I'm reading it. This wasn't everything I wanted it to be. Like I've heard a lot of people say how heartbreaking it is and like totally in capturing. No one says that, but yes. Just how much they loved it. I didn't necessarily feel like that. I feel like it's the kind of book that after you've read it, you appreciate it so much more. You appreciate how it was examining these two boys put in this shitty situation, out there control and just trying to deal with what they've got. And so I feel like I had this whole newfound appreciation for it when it was done. This was such a quick read. Like I think I said in my vlog, I read 100 pages in 40 minutes and like I don't read fast. At my quickest, I'm a page a minute in a normal book at my quickest, but this was just like such a page term. So if you are a slump like I was at the time, it's perfect. Next was with the far on high by Elizabeth Atavado and I gave this five stars. Success. This is my first five stars in like two months. You do not understand how happy I was. Oh my God. Elizabeth Atavado is everything. She's everything like. So I had read her two other books previous to this, The Power X and Clap When You Land. And I gave them both like 4.5 stars. They are both told in verse. It's very short. You read it really fast. And I just felt like I always wanted a bit more time with the characters and that's what I got in this one because it's told through more of a conventional novel format. This is about a character who is a young teen mum and she loves to cook. She wants to be a cook, but it's her trying to figure out how to prioritize that in her life while still taking care of her daughter and going to high school and just juggling all the things she has to juggle that a normal teenage girl doesn't have to. Elizabeth Atavado does family so well. Oh my God. The family dynamics on theirs killed me. Killed me. She's incredible. Like Elizabeth Atavado is one of my favorite writers. I just adored this. I think it's really not spoken about enough. People speak about her other two books way more in my opinion. And this is the best. This is the best. Maybe she snapped. Just all like warm inside. I loved it. This book is everything. It's just the most like heartwarming, soft, contemporary. So if you feel like you need that, it's everything. It's so, so, so, so good. I loved it. Next, I'm going to talk about two books that I read like spaced out a little bit in the month. They're so short. They're 25, 26, 27 pages each. And this is the two editions of Ghosted in LA, which I read this month. This is a graphic novel series, which is all on Scribd, so I've been reading it on there. Going forward, basically on Goodreads, you can either count each volume as a book or you can count the collection of four. So each four is a book. And I think going forward, I'm going to do that because only like 25 pages each. So that would be like 100 pages, which I feel like is a bit better than like saying I read a 25 page book. So I think going forward, I'm going to do that. But this is about a girl who moves to LA to be with her boyfriend, but he like breaks up with her as soon as she gets there. Really savage. And she stumbles upon this house of ghosts who are all trapped in this house together. It's just kind of her interacting with them and like going about her life with these ghosts with her. I'm giving them both three stars so far. I think maybe if I read the collection of four, it'll be a bit easier to write because you may have a bit more of like a roller coaster of emotions, but because they're so short and they're graphic novels, it's just kind of felt a bit like that was okay. And that was fine. You know, I enjoy reading them and it's something I definitely want to read into the future, but it's just like okay. I think the vibes of it are great, especially for October if you're looking for some like ghostly stories. It's all on script for free, which is wonderful. And it's got like a really cool like 1920s art style vibe to it. I think it reminds me of the Tower of Terror at Disney Hollywood Studios, my favorite ride ever. But I'm still waiting for an addition of it to like really hit me. That hasn't happened yet. So next is Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. I gave these three stars. I was really disappointed and this is the one I was talking about where this may even be more of a 2.75. This society have to live underground because there are aliens attacking them constantly. And so the pilots are like the most important job and Spencer's dad was a pilot. He famously ran away from the battle and so his co-pilots shot him down and so he's known as a traitor. Spencer just wants to be a pilot so bad but they don't want her to be but she managed to kind of scam her way into flight school and it's just her story of kind of training to become a pilot now. It just felt flat. I just don't think Brandon Sanderson's writing is necessarily for me. I just want my writing to be a little bit more pretty. It doesn't have to be Laney Taylor level purple pros. I want there to be something in the words that like gets me going but this just didn't. I just found it really boring. I didn't feel like the characters were particularly well developed. I didn't feel like the relationships were well developed for someone who's known for his world building. The world building was just fine. Like it was a bit boring. I don't think I'm going to be continuing on with this series. I just find it's so average. I don't know for something that was so hyped up is like one of the highest rated average ratings on Goodreads. Like how high is this? 4.52. That is ridiculous. That is like unheard of on Goodreads. I don't understand it. I don't get it. I really had to force myself through it. If I had not have gotten the audiobook on the day that I had to finish this this would not have been finished. Next I read on the come up by Angie Thomas and I gave this 4.5 stars. So this is the story of I can never remember people's name. I don't read names. So this is the story of Brie who wants to become a rapper. It feels like I read this ages ago. How was that this month? And it's basically her story of being on the come up like starting to get successful and figuring out where her loyalty is lie and dealing with racism in society. And it was really really good. It was really good. Angie Thomas is another young adult writer who I really enjoy reading from. I think I gave the hate you give and on the come up both 4.5 stars. She's another author who does family so well. What Angie Thomas does the best better than almost any contemporary writer is making every character feel so fleshed out in such a natural way. I think it's really hard for even like minor minor minor characters to feel real in some books but everything just feels so realistic and fleshed out and like 3D in a way that I don't feel like with a lot of other contemporaries. I have read both of her books on audiobook and I would really recommend it. The narrator is brilliant. I'm hoping that concrete rose is going to have the same narrator. Just love it. Just love it on the come up is just such a beautiful story of like joy. It is brilliant American literature and I don't care what anybody it is. It's lit. It should be taught in schools. So next with a couple of books that I read in my bookopoly vlog which I will link. This is like a 48 hour reading vlog. The first book I read was The Chalkman by CJ Tudor. So this is a thriller about how I even describe this A body of a girl is found in the woods cut up into different pieces and her head is missing and there's like a few other mysterious deaths. I don't know. The plot of this kind of is very different to what I thought it was going into it. I thought that the kids were going to have been playing this game and it was gone wrong when it's not really about that at all. I enjoyed the reading experience of this. I feel like the pacing was great. There was a lot of kind of shocks that I feel like other thrillers are missing. However, the ending pissed me off. I gave it 3.5. The ending made me mad. Like the whole time I was thinking if it ends like that, I'm going to be pissed. I'm going to be pissed. And then it didn't end in time. The end like that. But on the last page, something happened. Like there was a shock. Like I was like, oh! I'm like, go with you. And I was like, and so we're not going to have that. Okay. There were aspects to it I really liked but the ending just kind of makes me feel a bit sour. And it's a debut. For this to be a debut is mind boggling. Like it does not feel like a debut. When you read some popular thriller authors now when you read their debut but this didn't feel like that to me. This felt like a really accomplished seasoned author. So I'm really excited to read everything that CJ Cheetah puts down in the future. But the ending still has me mad. I'm not going to lie to you. It still has me mad. Next. I'm so excited to talk about this. Next is The T-Jacking Society by Katie O'Neill. I'm really happy today. I gave it five stars. This is up there as one of my favorite graphic novels ever. Up there with Heart Stopper. I love soft, pure, joyful graphic novels. If you have recommendations for me, please let me know. So this is just about these things called T-Dragons. They're these little animals here. So like their leaves or their flowers, they can brood this tea. It's just, it's just a curious thing. The art style is so cute. And it's about friendship. And then this like elderly gay couple who I'm obsessed with. And just every, it just, I want to read this right now. I can't wait to just read this again and again. I need somehow to get my hands on the next two in this series. I just need to own them right now. That's history, right there, you understand? It just made me feel so warm and just, oh, it's just everything is so nice. So like if you're wanting something cozy or not humble or not scary, this is perfect. The little T-Dragons. Okay, next is another five-star and it was Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown. So this is kind of autobiographical. It's very much about Echo Brown's life, but with this kind of fabulous magical realism twist. It is about Echo being a wizard and her mom being a wizard. That is the kind of magical element of it, but the real world element of it is kind of being able to articulate all these terrible things that Echo and those around have been through. There's a lot of trigger warnings for this. I can't remember them all, so let me just find a review on Goodreads that lists some. Okay, so Fadwa has written one and they said trigger warnings for trauma, addiction, overdose, child sexual abuse, rape, disassociation, talk of suicide, suicidal ideations, racism, talk of unintentional murder and death. So there's a lot to be aware of going into this. I found this to be so hard-hitting. Like it was one of the most impactful books I've ever read. The audiobook was incredible. It was narrated by Echo herself. The way that it weaves the story together is incredible. There's a really interesting element where sometimes the chapter will be following two different scenes and it will jump back and forth between them, like in the middle of a sentence. And that was just a really interesting way of telling the story of linking different experiences together. And I just loved the story. It doesn't gloss over any of the hard topics. It really just goes straight in and I love it for that. I think it's a book that everyone should read. It's really not been read by many people, I would say. It's got 1,500 ratings, but I feel like it should be more. This is just a magical, perfect book and it's just so heavy, but also important. And I think it's something everyone should read. So I'd really recommend you pick it up. Do it! Just do it! The next book is a really quick one. It is Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh. This is a very short book. This is about a wild man who lives in the woods. A new young man buys the house that the woods live on. It's their relationship, kind of. It is, I would say it's LGBT. It's just very, like, woodish and there's woodland creatures and like it's just very dark and like wet woods. It makes me think of the smell of wet woods. I really, really love this. It's for such a short book. I thought it was really gripping and really atmospheric. Like, one of the most atmospheric books I've ever read and I don't think there's enough of, like, this woodish, dark woods. I just want more woods. I want more books about wood. I gave this four stars. I'm very excited to read the second one in the duology. The second to last book I'm going to be talking about is A Nevernight by Jay Kristoff. I gave this 4.5 stars but I think it's going to be a very long time until I get to the next one. Can you even see that? God's grave is there. It's going to be a long time. So this follows Mia, who is a assassin or wants to become an assassin. Basically, she's going to the Red Church to become an assassin. She wants to avenge her family's murders. It's a very kind of dark, high fantasy, new adult book. The first 100 pages of this, I didn't enjoy that much because we were traveling and I just think at the start of a book, I don't vibe with that. I don't vibe with traveling for 100 pages at the start of the book. How do you know what's good for me? That's my opinion! Once that was over and we got to the Red Church and we were in this school of assassins with horrible people. Oh, it was everything. It was so good. I think the high fantasy element of this is brilliant. I love the darkness and the kind of gothic vibes. Gothic, gothic vibes of this. I really loved Mia because I love protagonists that kind of start up here and descend into evil. But like Mia from the get-go, she's like, I ain't nice. I'm not a nice person necessarily. I'm gonna trick people. I'm gonna kill people. She does have this soft side to her, but like she doesn't start soft and go dark. She's like straight away like I'm dark, bitch. I'm dark, but she keeps a very pragmatic head on her shoulders in situations that other people would crumble at. And she has some surprises that she pulls out the bag. I was talking about how I loved when there's things that the characters knew, keep secret for me for a while and then it's revealed and they've acted in certain ways because of what you didn't know and then it all comes together. And some people said they hated that, but I think it's genius. When like Mia surprised me with some things, I was like, Mia! Yes! I thought you were stupid, but you're not. Look how she came there. However, the writing style was heavy. It did take a long time for me to read. I thought I was gonna be obsessed with the footnotes. If you don't know, there is a lot of footnotes in this that make up the world buildings. Oh, you can't even see that. But like here is a whole footnote and here is a whole footnote. I just thought I could kind of drag the pace down a little bit. I love what they stand for, but I don't love it in practice. It's like a 4.25. It's not a 4.5. It's a 4.25. It's higher than a 4, but it's not a 4.5. And then the last spec that I read this month was Loveless by Alice Oseman. This is a story of Georgia going to university and she has never been in love. She's never had a crush. She's never kissed anyone. And she wants to kind of figure that out. So it's the story of her going to uni and learning about terms such as asexuality and aromantic and her figuring out how that applies to her. Alice Oseman. Alice Oseman. Alice Oseman. She just knows how to write coming-of-age young adult stories. And I loved that this was at university in the UK because all of her other ones have been like in sixth form or secondary school in the UK. I loved seeing a character at university which is so often a time of change and like figuring oneself out. I'm so happy that there was a story with an asexual main character figuring themselves out, figuring out what the terminology means for them. I feel like this is so important for so many kids out there to see themselves represented in and to see themselves seen, to feel seen. I feel like the rep was done really well. Obviously it's not entirely for me to say because I'm not asexual myself, but I really loved so much of this and Alice Oseman's stories are just the perfect heartwarming but kind of dealing with a lot of hard topics, contemporaries. So I've now read all of her books apart from two novellas but I'm hopefully going to get to them very soon. So there we have it. That is my wrap-up, my first wrap-up back. Hopefully you enjoyed this and want to see me doing it again in the future. I enjoyed it actually. I really, really enjoyed it. So I think I am going to carry on doing them. Also, let me know if there's any more statistics you want me to count throughout the month because I'll definitely do that. I will see you very, very soon. Thank you so much for watching. Bye.