October Reading Wrap-Up

Posted November 1, 2026 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

A photo of pumpkins on a pallet

Welp, October’s over and 2026 is really hurtling to a close. Have you had a good month?

October in general:

October’s been a busy month for a lot of folks in tech or tech-adjacent roles, with some scary website vulnerabilities… but I still found plenty of time for gaming, reading and crochet, and I’ve even finally got back to cycling after a year without thanks to the wrist injury I sustained in August 2025.

Speaking of crochet, it’s time to show off my progress! I’ve now finished the main body of the blanket, and “just” need to crochet the envelope border to finish it off and hide all those ends. My wife’s going to help me with tidying those up some before I start crocheting the border: they don’t need to be woven in, but I left some very long tails as insurance after the first couple of times I pulled back a few rows to fix mistakes.

Photo of my mosaic overlay crochet blanket. It looks like a bookshelf with seven shelves. On the second and lowest shelves are cats sat on a book, while most of the other shelves are covered in books. There's an ikebana on the fourth shelf, and a collection of vases on the top shelf.

I’m really happy with how it’s coming out! If you’re curious about the size, without the border it covers me from my toes to the top of my chest when I’m sat down, and it’s wide enough to wrap most of the way around me.

Gaming-wise, it’s been a month of pretty casual gaming, which has been great. I enjoy being a raider, but it’s been good to get off the schedule a while. I’ve been playing a ton of short free hidden object games, like Cats & Seek: Tokyo and the puzzle/hidden object game Membrillo Hid My Socks, in the last week or so, but I did also pick Lost and Found Co. back up to play the two new levels. There’s been more of Dressmaker, which I’ve been delighted to see has really taken off for gamers of all stripes, plus a new-to-me word game, Wordatro! and the puzzle game Mosaic of the Strange (which is a little bit spooky and seasonal). I’ve been replaying Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! thanks to the demo of the remake of the first game, as well.

Finally, in the last couple of days I’ve been playing Usagi Shima: Bunny Island. It used to be a mobile game with microtransactions, but the Steam version has cut that out, meaning I’ve just been having pure fun attracting bunnies to my island, buying toys for them with carrots, petting them, etc. The art has clearly been done by someone who knows bunnies, as there’s so much recognisable about the way they flop, sploot and loaf. I’m loving it.

Reading stats:

StoryGraph reading stats for October 2026: 50 books, 10,502 pages, average rating of 2.92. My top rated reads included Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint vol 12 (Umi & Sleepy-C), Storm of Locusts (Rebecca Roanhorse) and The Hollow Sea (Jordan L. Hawk). The number of pages I read per day was up and down as usual, with peaks on weekends and a really big on on Saturday 31st. More reading stats for October 2026: I read 92% fiction, 8% non-fiction, and 74% of my books were under 300 pages long, with 26% between 300 and 500 pages. I read 30% in print and 70% in digital editions, and my top genres were fantasy (25), LGBTQIA+ (14), mystery (14), horror (14) and manga (10).

Total books read: 50
Total pages read: 10,502
Rereads: 2
ARCs: 0
Series finished/up to date: 6
Books owned pre-2026: 3
Books owned from 2026: 16
Borrowed books: 29

Fiction: 46
Non-fiction: 2
Poetry: 2
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 15

It’s been an absolutely epic month, thanks to the Haunted Shelf readathon which runs on Litsy (and now in an off-shoot Discord as well) in October each year. I ran a lot of reading sprints at the weekends, so I got a lot of reading done there… especially on the last Saturday of the month, where I read an absolutely ridiculous amount.

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books: 289/300 (38 books ahead)
Overall pages read: 68,140/75,000 (5,469 pages ahead)
Books read from backlog: 38/50 (2 books behind)
Books bought in 2026 and not yet started: 38/40

Some good progress on my reduced reading goals, as you see! It’s possible I’ll bump it back up a bit, though I don’t think there’s much chance of meeting my original goal of 400 books this year — I’d have to read two books a day, which I didn’t even manage in October!

In November the limit on books bought in 2026 and not yet started will drop to 35… though I don’t think it’ll make it back to 20 before Christmas, ahaha. Still, I’m glad I decided to be flexible with it this year, and maybe next year it’ll work better for me again.

Blogging stats:

Screenshot of my blog stats showing high visitor counts through the month.

Views: 17.3k (up)
Visitors: 16.1k (up)
Likes: 329 (down)
Comments: 338 (down)
Reviews: 23
Other posts: 23

Bit of a downward trend for me on comments and likes lately, but lots of views! I think with the readathon and lots of weekend reading sprints, maybe I was doing less visiting of other blogs? And I know there were a couple of weeks this month where I didn’t post as much as usual, with fewer reviews this month than typical.

Most viewed posts:

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

As ever, it was really difficult to pick from a looong list of reviews I had saved for this post. I’m also sure there were some others I saved that have disappeared somehow, gaaah.

I hope everyone’s had a good month with all the reading they could wish!

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