Welcome back to another autumn mini reading challenge! Like last year, this is a shorter one to bridge the gap between our longer summer and winter challenges 🍂

RULES:  → reblog this post if you're participating → the challenge officially starts on october 1st and ends with november 30th, but you’re welcome to finish it at your own pace → use the tag #studyblr w/knives reading challenge when you post your updates/pics → the challenge is ofc, as usual, also on storygraph (check the notes for the link)

once you’ve read a book that fits a prompt, cross it out on the above template and/or share your thoughts on it in a post here on tumblr; make sure to mark any spoilers (hide them under a cut etc.), so people can avoid them if needed :) you can also have just one post and update it as you go, or you can post good ol’ aesthetic book pics!

as always, if you have any questions, my asks are open 🍂

(our book recs for this challenge are below the cut)

Since this is a mini reading challenge, there won't be separate book rec posts, but we still compiled a couple good reads for you, just in case you can't think of a book to read for any of the prompts :)

The Atlas Six - Olivie Blake

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Eight - Katherine Neville

Read any book released this year that you've been excited for!

The Charm Offensive - Alison Cochrun

Radio Silence - Alice Oseman

The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A book that makes you nostalgic!

The Inheritance Games - Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Gilded Wolves - Roshani Chokshi

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing - Hank Green

Six of Crows - Leigh Bardugo

All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie

In My Dreams I Hold a Knife - Ashley Winstead

If We Were Villains - M.L. Rio

Maus - Art Spiegelman

Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed - Mariana Enríquez

The Hollow Places - T. Kingfisher

In the Dream House - Carmen Maria Machado

The Anthropocene Reviewed - John Green

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty

Cemetery Boys - Aiden Thomas

Pumpkinheads - Rainbow Rowell

Dracula - Bram Stoker

A Dowry of Blood - S.T. Gibson

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

9 October 2022

Enjoyed listening to The Yellow Wallpaper this morning and on to the next book! It’s nice and cold which is perfect for reading. Happy times!

Currently listening to: Cardigan by Taylor Swift

Since it's the end of november, I thought I'd give an update on my reading for the Autumn Reading Challenge 2.0 :)

I am working on a few other prompts atm so I think I will be through kind of soon. I have decided to pick books I already own for all of these so I can use this challenge as motivation to reduce my tbr. I fear this post will be kind of long so be prepared :D

Number in the title: Million Girl Vol.1-3 by Kotori Momoyuki

I read the 1rst and 2nd volume of this years ago when I was a teenager and bought vol 3 secondhand for this challenge bc I always wanted to finish it. It’s about a girl at a very elite high school who finds out that her family owes a lot of money to the yakuza. To repay them, she enters the Money Game that is established at her school, which consists of multiple rounds of competing against different opponents in different challenges, cheating is allowed. While I enjoyed the atmosphere and the reading experience, I’m not the biggest fan of anything beyond the first volume. It gets a little absurd and one does not get the chance to solve the mysteries of the rounds alongside the protagonist, which I would’ve liked to try.

Book with riddles: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

I love the movie, so I hoped to like the book as well. Sadly, I was disappointed :(

I think one of the problems with it was the pacing, because a lot of the moments that are essential for the plot and should be interesting to read are just really hard to transfer to written text (while looking cool on screen). It’s not that interesting to hear Wade talk about how he has to beat a Pacman-high score. Moments like these were either boring to listen to (audiobook) or skipped over by the author, the latter option being weird as well because some of these moments were quite important. I also found Wade to be pretty annoying and full of himself. I think he compensated a lot of his low self esteem by feeling like the absolute best at knowing niche pop culture details. I kind of relate to that bc my self-esteem is held up by similar things, but I would like to think that I am not as insufferable. Or maybe I am but nobody notices bc nobody can read my thoughts. And I had to listen to Wade’s through the whole book, which made me want to scream sometimes. Artemis was pretty cool, but I felt like a lot of her character was the way it was to make sure she’s the ideal girl that lonely gamer guys wish to meet somewhen (spoken in cliches, I don’t want to shame lonely gamer guys in general here). I guess you can read this book either as a homage to 80s pop culture and be happy about a virtual reality adventure or it reads as a slightly problematic self-insert. … Idk, the book had its moments but ultimately it was a bit of a letdown. I will stick to the movie. And I still love the premise of this story a lot.

Nostalgic read: Sieben Pfoten für Penny – Freiheit für einen Delfin by Thomas Brezina

This book is part of a large series of books about a teenage girl named Penny who gets involved in different stories with animals that usually need saving. Like Flipper 2, the dolphin this book is about – or rather: Should be about. The story of saving this dolphin would be enough to tell a compelling story, if it was detailed enough. Instead, a lot of different side plots get introduced and solved within a few scenes and everything just felt rushed, mismatched and weird. I wondered whether that was because I am reading this as an adult now or if it was because of the way it was written and I landed on the latter since I read plenty of children’s books as an adult that I enjoyed a lot.

Nonfiction: Interest and Investment in fictional Romances (van Monsjou & Mar, 2019)

I stumbled upon this study while researching for my thesis and downloaded it bc boy oh boy am I myself invested in fictional romances – so why not find out what science says about it. I will not go into detail here bc there are too many tiny findings for that, but I was expecting what the authors were expecting as well: That high involvement in fictional romances compensates one’s one loneliness/dissatisfaction with love life and correlates with attachment anxiety. Interestingly enough, the attachment anxiety part was more or less there (they listed some statistically insignificant findings as well though and I don’t remember whether this was one of them and I also don’t remember whether it was found in all studies that included the attachment anxiety measurement). The loneliness/dissatisfaction thing was not found, instead people who were more interested in fictional romances seemed to use those as an exploration for their own romantic wishes – which makes sense, I guess. It is to be said though that the sample was taken from people who were not very involved in fandom over all, only a slight number of participants read or wrote fanfiction for example. As well as the authors, I do think that in a sample that consists of people who are actually involved in shipping and stuff, the results could be more consistent with the expectations, because I do think there is a big difference in the reasons for enjoying the chemistry of a fictional couple casually and being extremely invested in a fictional couple to the point of obsession. Therefore, I’d like to read follow-up studies that have these samples; so far, I have not seen these anywhere.

Autumn Mini Reading Challenge : The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

It had been no such triumph of moral education and general cooperation as I had imagined... but a triumph over Nature and fellow man.

First book finished for the reading challenge! This story was a nice short one to help get me started on the challenge, and it's a book that's been sitting on my shelf for a while. To prevent spoilers, I'll be vague.

Just like his War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells draws you in quickly to a story that has you on the edge of your seat to see what dark truth runs underneath his fantastic worlds. He is great at giving just the right amount of details that the picture is complete and compelling without getting hung up on descriptions. The twist in this story is one that is both shocking in its extremity but predictable in its build up, which left me quite unsettled. The beauty and horror found at the end of Wells' world is something that will stick with me for a long time.

.... it's autumn and you know what that means!

who's ready for the autumn reading challenges 🍂🍃🍁

The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake

This book has been all over the place and I was just too curious to know whether all the hype was worth it. This is a fantasy novel with six main characters who all have different magical abilities and who are chosen to be iniciated into the secret society of the library of Alexandria. This is said to fit into dark academia, to be honest it does mainly for the general vibes because these characters are acadamics and study, but that's it. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but do not expect something like The Secret History by Donna Tartt that is entirely focused on academia. With this being said The Atlas Six wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't as perfect as everybody said, at least for me. It's a bit slow in the beginning, but after that it's really entrataining, and you really want to know how things are going to develop. I feel like the strong point of this book are the characters. They are crafted well, they all have very distinct traits, and they all work very well with each other. The plot is not bad, but to be honest I wished it dived in a bit more certain things and topics, especially cause the idea at the base of the book is really cool. The magic system not really explained as much as it could have, it works, but since in my opinion the idea of a magic system based into science was really cool, I would have loved to know more. There's a big twist at the end of the book that everyone said it blew their mind, in my opinion it wasn't that unpredictable, but still it was an interesting choice I liked. The ending of the book surely leaves you wanting to read the next novel in the series, and although I tend to prefer stand alone books I think I'll be reading the next book when it will come out. Overall as I said it was a good book, it's definitely a good fantasy novel for people who are intimidated by high fantasy but like magic in their novels, it feels like a good compromise accessible to everyone. It's really entrataining one you get into it, I particularly liked how you cannot really predict which character will end up with whom, because generally a lot of books are really obvious from the beginning. Here everyone can be shipped with anyone else, which is really fun. I also really liked the idea of having the empath of the group being one of the less likable characters instead of having your typical loving empath who cares for everyone, that was a really cool choice. I would recommend this book, the audiobook wasn't bad but I really didn't like one of the narrators which didn't help at all, so maybe go for the physical copy (which I have been told has illustrations so I am considering getting it). As for any book that has this much hype try to be realistic in your expectations.

I read this book for the studyblr w/knives autumn reading challenge for the number in the title prompt.

The Last Seance by Agatha Christie

This book is a collection of short stories that are all linked by the theme of the supernatural. They all had gothic-ish vibes, which I personally really enjoy. I had really high hopes for this book but it was such a let down. I normally really like Christie's books, her mysteries have incredibly intellingent ideas and they usually help a lot when I am in a reading slump, this book almost put me into one, even though the vibe should have been even more of my taste. I am not going to lie to you there were a lot of skips, I just couldn't get through some stories, because they were boring as ever. There's not much else to say I am afraid. It's not a book I'd recommend, especially when this author has so many mystery novels that work so well and you could read instead of this collection of short stories. I really wanted to like this book, there were all the right premises, but apparently it did not work for me. I'd honestly be really curious to hear the opinions of other people that read this book, so let me know if you read it.

I read this for the studyblr w/ knives autumn reading challange for the prompt seasonal read or spoopy classic

Autumn reading challenge 2.0 update

Second update for this reading challenge! Here's a link to my first update. I have zero books on my shelves or on my tbr that seem to fit any prompt I am missing at the moment, I might find something for the nostalgic prompt, and I have an anticipated release on my wishlist, so I should manage to go on a bit more with the challenge, but there's a chance it will stay forever incompleted like previous ones, or maybe not, we'll see.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the murder mystery or banned book prompt

I know this book is technically not a murder mystery because it's not a who done it and more of a why done it, but there was a murder, it was mysterious enough and it gave me autumn vibes so I picked it anyway. I also needed a bit of expertnal motivation to read this novel because it's really long (and unexpectedly slow especially in the second part). I really liked the writing and the reading experience overall, the strongest point is of course the critique to elitism and classism in academia which I feel was done very well.

Something Is Killing The Children vol.4 by James Tynion IV, Werther Dell'Edera and Miquel Muerto for the horror or non fiction prompt

I started reading this series earlier this year and I am loving it, this volume was by far my favourite and I cannot wait to read the next one.

Full reviews of the books linked in the titles above as always!

Legends And Lattes by Travis Baldree

Ever since I first heard of this book I was intrigued. It's described as an high fantasy with low stakes, people who read it defined it super cozy, so I had to try it. Especially because in the past few years I have read less fantasy than I'd like to admit, mostly because I felt like I didn't have enough mental energy to follow a complicated high fantasy world, I don't like to get into books just because and not dedicate each of them the right amount of attention and energies. This book was the perfect lighthearted and cozy story with a fantasy setting that just made it so much better. This has definitely entered my comfort books shelf, I will definitely pick it up again in the future when I need something cozy to feel better about everything in life. The story is quite simple, Viv, an orc, decides she has had enough advenutres and decides to open a cafe. It's the perfect story for autumn and winter because it is indeed very cozy, and it will make you want to bake every food you read about. I highly recommend this novel, I think it would work amazingly for those who want to read fantasy without getting into a super complicated world of politics, it would also work very well if you want to get into fantasy but are intimidated by the genre, this could be a very light-hearted start. I also think it could be the perfect book to get you out of a reading slump.

This is one of the books I read for the studyblr w/knives autumn reading challenge for the anticipated release prompt.

Family Business by Jonathan Sims

Jonny is the only author besided Neil Gaiman I buy books without knowing anything about them. I trust him with my whole heart, his type of horror is exactly what I love, and to be honest I'd even buy his grocerie's list if he published it. Of course as soon as I heard this book was coming out I was super excited, and I did not care to research the topics, so I started reading without any base knowledge of the story which is something that has become rarer and rarer for me. This novel is a very simple supernatural themed horror. It deals with grief, death, and what is left of us after we die. The themes were a strong point of this book in my opinion, and I really liked how they played a role in the novel. We follow a main character who has recently lost her best friend of a lifetime, and is still processing her loss. She gets a new job working in a cleaning company that cleans after recently deceased people, and her new coworkers are also dealing with grief of their own for the loss of a bother. During jobs the main character will start seeing weird things that might be supernatural or might be linked to her recent loss. Another thing I really appreciate about Jonny's stories is the casual representation of queer people. Being queer is never the central focus, but he just reminds the readers that queer people do exist and we are everywhere. It's something I particularly appreciate, because casual representation is so important for people outside of the comunity as well. In these particular story we have both bisexual representation, which always makes me very happy because it's not that common, and there's also trans fem representation, which is delightful great to see. She ended up being one of my favourite characters of the book. With this being said I really like Jonny's stories, they feel clean, because this man manages to perfectly pull the strings of everything and have nice endings that just make sense. As I said I loved the themes and I would definitely recommend this novel, it's a lovely light horror with interesting themes to it. Jonny's writing is always worth it in my experiece.

I read this novel for the studyblr w/knives horror reading challenge for the sulernatural prompt, and for the autumn challange for the anticipated release prompt (alongside another book cause I couldn't pick juat one).

Something Is Killing The Children vol.4 by James Tynion IV, Werther Dell'Edera and Miquel Muerto

This volume is probably my favourite of the series so far (reviews of the other volumes linked here: first, second and third). The story is set in a world where monsters exist, only children can see them although monster can murder anyone, and there's a secret organization that hunts them. In this volume we learn a bit more about Erica, the hunter we have been following since volume one. We get to see more of how she became part of the secret society, and we also learn more about this society and how it works. This was by far my favourite volume of the series, I really enjoyed learning more about the main character. I am really excited to read more of this series, because it's a really simple yet interesting concept that could create amazing stories.

I read this book for the studyblr w/ knives autumn reading challenge for the horror prompt.

Sabrinaaa- everyone's reading The Time Machine by H.G. Wells???? Honestly, it's not that great lmao. I read it because I put it on my reading list for this year. I would definitely recommend War of the Worlds by him though! But if you do end up reading The Time Machine, it is a very quick read!

sbsdafghjq yeah, it's insane! i'd honestly never even heard of it till so many ppl started posting abt it in the challenge tag? i'll definitely come to u with Opinions™ if i pick it up at some point :)