And another throwback to two years ago: Since this one worked rather well for me in May, I decided to challenge myself once again to read in 30 books in 30 days. Let’s call it the the-end-of-2018-is-near-I-need-to-get-more-reading-done reading frenzy. At the beginning of November, there were once again way too many books on my currently reading pile (CRP) and on my you-should-have-read-most-of-these-books-ages-ago reading list. Naturally, I won’t manage to read all of those but I’d like to make at least a dent. It would be nice if I managed to start 2019 with a clean slate – a CRP of 1-2 books – but let’s be realistic …

Where do I even begin? To quote one of our great poets (never thought I would draw Goethe into this): “Two souls alas! are dwelling in my breast.” So what’s the deal? Well, I know for a fact that naive 16-year-old me would have loved this series. Not-quite-as-naive-and-a-lot-more-sensitised 28-year-old me not so much. There’s common ground though: it’s just my kind of fantasy world. But while 16 is swooning about just her type of (male) characters, 28 is screeching at her that these characters, their relationships, and some of the concepts are totally fucked up and toxically romanticised, and 16 should just get lost in the past where she belongs (you see, it’s always fun living in my head). Wondering what has them so worked up?

World War II is a piece of history that interests me a lot. I have watched numerous documentaries and like finding out more about stuff that went down back then. Being from Germany, my point of view courtesy of history lessons in school, documentaries, and the media has mostly been German-centric, so I really like taking on different points of view and exploring what happened in other countries. This book is one of those that provide insight into something I had never heard of thus far: I had no idea that Russia was the only country that allowed women to fly and become fighter pilots in the war. And what an incredible story they shared!

I can’t take this novel seriously. I’m sorry, I just can’t. Seeing all my friends raving about The Scorpio Races makes me laugh out loud. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad novel, not at all. I enjoyed it immensely and had a lot of fun with it, some of it unintentional. Because it is, and there’s no way to sugar-coat it, a horse novel to a T. It’s so cliché, it can’t get any more cliché …

I think this has to be my most social month in … forever! I also did get quite a lot of reading done – so much so that I don’t even know how I did it! However, this was the first (and hopefully only) month I exclusively read books for work! However, I managed what seemed impossible …

It is not a good sign if you have to open your calendar app to check what actually happened in July. The months just bleed together in my head. All in all, July was a rather good month, though really stressful at work, but I still managed a decent amount of pages.

Readingwise, I managed to read a lot of pages in June. Apart from that, the month wasn’t that great. Maybe that was why I read a ton!