A very brain-foggy, exhausting month, for no particular reason – just random brain-weather, as best I can tell. So it goes!

ARCs Received

I HAVE NO MORE PENDING REQUESTS! :D Let’s see if I can keep it that way, gods. Very excited for all of these – almost all of these authors are new to me! Which is nerve-wracking, sure, but what if one of them turns out to be an auto-buy author for me? WHAT THEN?

Read

I was really struggling to read this month, as is obvious – only 16 books read in August. Sigh.

The Fortunate Fall, Nightmare Before Kissmass and Mountain Crown were all instant new faves (and seriously, how has it taken me this long to read Karin Lowachee?!) Starfall is a fantastic novella that incorporates a protagonist’s deafness really well into a sci fi jailbreak story, and Calculating Stars was very addictive, despite having a plot I really didn’t care about. (And I remain confused about how that much sexism is anything but enraging.) Liar City was also amazingly addictive, but I did then spend the next WEEK ranting about how stupid the worldbuilding was, so I wouldn’t put it on the same level as Calculating!

Wonderful rereads included Honey Month, Floating Islands, and the last three books of the month, all deeply beloved.

To the best of my knowledge, three of this month’s books had BIPOC authors. Better than last month, which was NONE, but not exactly great.

Reviewed

I wasn’t happy with ANY of my reviews this month – Space Opera and Mountain Crown in particular deserved so much better. (You won’t see the Summer Queen review until near the end of next month, and Nightmare Before Kissmass goes live tomorrow, but they’re both written!)

DNF-ed

Did the quickly-approaching release dates of several arcs make me realise I didn’t care how they ended? Yes, yes they did. It was such a relief to strike these off my reading lists!

ARCs Outstanding

I’ve resigned myself to not meeting every ‘deadline’ for October’s arcs; I wanted to get so much more reading and writing done this month in preparation, and it just didn’t happen. Ah well.

Unmissable SFF Updates

My Unmissable SFF of 2024 list is always getting updated, what with cover reveals and new books being announced – or discovering books long-since announced, but which I didn’t hear about until just lately! With two new additions, the end of September brings us to a total of 107 Unmissable books!

My 2025 Unmissable list continues to grow too, and I am, of course, constantly on the lookout for titles to add to it… I’m not ready for 2024 to be over yet, but I’m very excited to publish next year’s list.

How did my predictions/anticipated reads for September go? I declared twelve books Unmissable for this month, and–

• one was five star read (Yield Under Great Persuasion)
• one was a four and a half star read (Out of the Drowning Deep)
• one was a three and a half star read (The Sapling Cage)
• one was a three star read (City of Dancing Gargoyles)
• one was a two and a half star read (The Republic of Salt)
• three were DNFs (Immortal Dark, A Dark and Drowning Tide, and The Naming Song)
• two were soft-DNFs that I don’t want to try properly (The Scarlet Throne and The Village Librarian Demon-Hunting Society)
• two I haven’t finished yet but predict five stars (Buried Deep and Space Oddity)

Even counting Buried Deep and Space Oddity, that only makes four great reads out of eleven – not particularly successful! Ah well. Hopefully October will go better!

Misc

For bisexuality visibility day, I made a quick rec list of M/F bi books on twitter – all SFF, of course! I do want to write it up as a proper post, but no promises as to how fast I’ll be at it.

Looking Forward

The Colour of Revenge, the newest book in the series that started with Inkheart, is out in the UK next month! (The US has to wait until November, which is practically criminal.) We’re also getting the last book in Rachel Manija Brown & Sherwood Smith’s Change series, which I am VIBRATING with excitement over, and Sacha Lamb’s sophomore novel Forbidden Book. Tansy Rayner Roberts is starting a new series, and Leede’s American Rapture hooked me hard when I read a sample. AND OF COURSE, we’re getting new standalones from Freya Marske, Nghi Vo, and august clarke!!! It’s a little hard to breathe every time I think about them!!!

May we all have a truly outstanding October together!