My partner got a whirlwind new job offer – they called him up, interviewed him, and offered him a contract all within a week! Still feeling dizzy. I wrote a spell for a friend, which reminded me how much I love that and how long it’s been since I practised properly; I dragged my partner into my recent fandom dive, with delightful results; cheered my bestie on in her writing project; and I started Yule prep (which is very late for me, most years I’d have started in September!) AND THERE WERE SO MANY GREAT BOOKS READ!

ARCs Received

A most arc-packed month!!! I’m screaming not-so-internally about almost all of these!

Song of Spores showed up on Netgalley the day before it was released – confused by the timing, but sure, I’ll read your queer Jewish living-spaceship sci fi, OBVIOUSLY

Villain, of course, is the sequel to Hench, aka the best superhero novel of all time (perhaps to be outdone by its sequel? WE’LL SEE I GUESS)

Nemesis Mine sounds like very silly fun, wherein a hero and a villain team up to restore both their reputations – and it’s queer, of course.

The Witch and the Huntress was a bit of a mix-up on my part – it’s a sapphic story pairing up Medea and Atalanta from Greek mythology, but I thought it was by a different author. Oops! Hopefully it’ll be great anyway!

Ignore All Previous Instructions is the newest book from Ada Hoffman – anti-AI and story-pirates in space!!!

The Halls of the Dead is one I’ve been waiting for since before the pub deal was announced – sapphic necromancers and fucked-up magic! Yessssssss!

The Poet Empress I already finished already – the review goes live next week I think? Poetry-magic in fantasy!China.

What We Are Seeking is the sophomore novel from Cameron Reed, who knocked it out of the fucking PARK with her debut! Queer hope with far-future sci fi cultures and aliens!

The Rainshadow Orphans just sounds incredibly enchanting – dragon pearls and bubble tea in a fantasy archipelago! We’ll see if it lives up to the Studio Ghibli comps…

Read

18 books read this month – more than October, back to my September reading numbers. Still not what I’d consider my normal, but definitely getting there!

Regardless, almost everything I read was PHENOMENALLY great! The Mercy Makers, Fifth House of the Heart, and Gaywyck were all beloved rereads, and yes that does mean I’ve now read Mercy Makers twice in one year. I REGRET NOTHING!

Sekaran was kiiiiind of a short story collection following one character in the Tuyo verse, and delighted me; Slow Gods made me cry in the best way; Of The Emperor’s Kindness was a kind of mannerpunk fantasy that was as much fun as it was sneakily horrifying; The Everlasting is actually, literally flawless, so beautiful it hurts; The Wolf and His King was gorgeous and made me feel so seen; Her Subtle Investigations was non-stop, really CLEVER fun; Grace & Favour was smaller stakes (ghosts!) than the rest of my reading, but absolutely excellent; and To Ride a Rising Storm blew me away and had me SHRIEKING by the end!

You can read my mini notes on each read in my Bluesky thread; the November books start here!

DNF-ed

So many DNFs, URGH. Couldn’t help it this month, though. I called it quits on a bunch of books I’d been dragging my feet over. About time.

Quite a lot of these this month were just-not-me books, not objectively bad – Local Heavens, Needfire, and He’s So Possessed With Me, in particular, are going to rock the world of the right readers!

Reviewed

I’m so happy with how many reviews I got written this month! And only one mini-review, too! (The reviews for Poet Empress and City of Others go live next month.)

Next Up

A handful of this year’s releases I still want to get to! Though probably too late to get them onto my Best of Year list, if any of them deserve it.

ARCs Outstanding

Down to 32! Of course, I received a bunch this month…

Unmissable SFF Updates

All the books that made it onto my Best of Year list but weren’t originally predicted to be Unmissables have now been added to 2025’s list, making it 88 books long! (If I end up with more Best of Year books before the 31st, obviously I’ll add those to the Unmissable list too.)

The 2026 Unmissable list is 65 books long now – twice as long as it was when I wrote October’s update! I decided being too strict and only including books I was super-sure of was missing the point and taking the fun out of it, and I have, indeed, been having more fun since then!

How did my predictions/anticipated reads for November go? I declared just three books Unmissable for this month, and–

• two were five-star reads (Slow Gods and The Wolf and His King)
• one I haven’t finished yet (The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver)

I’m enjoying Shipwright a lot so far, so I’m willing to call my November predictions solid. Although 3/3 isn’t a huge number to be right about!

Misc

A few misc posts this month! First was my list of books that could still surprise me and end up on my Best of Year list – and for the record, four of them have already earned spots on it!

Then we had 10 of my most anticipated books of next year – books I’m expecting to adore!

I did a new rec list for Trans Day of Remembrance.

And what I think was the most fun, a reading taste book tag that let anyone who read the post compare their reading taste to mine!

Looking Forward

T Kingfisher’s newest horror standalone comes out on the 1st, tomorrow – I haven’t read any of her horrors before, I mean for this to be my first! This Hour, Our Vigil is a new instalment in the Death’s Lady series, and I genuinely have no idea what’s going to happen in it, but I’m excited! There’s two short story collections; Climate Imagination, optimistic sci fi futures, and We Will Rise Again, which is both SFF stories about activism, and essays from real-world activists – I’m reading an arc at the moment. Skullrunner promises sapphic pirates and dead gods, and Dawn of the Firebird is getting a lot of Poppy War comps, which makes since since it’s about a woman going to military magic school, among other things!

Now let’s all have a dazzling December!