I’m not sure if this will be a regular monthly feature, but this month happens to have a bunch of fun things going on, and I’d have liked to share more about the Haunted Shelf Shenanigans last month… so let’s have a chat about my reading plans for the month!

First up, there’s a readathon on Dreamwidth’s readingtogether community designed to focus on unread and half-read books in November. I have a plethora of those, so here are my targets:

• Finish five books from my “paused” pile on StoryGraph
• Finish five books from my backlog (that aren’t already in my paused pile), i.e. books bought before 2026 began
• Finish five books bought in 2026 (that aren’t already in my currently reading/paused pile)

I figure that’s very doable (at least at my current reading pace), without constraining me too much on what to read. It should be able to feed into most of my other reading challenges this month!

Speaking of which…

Learn more here!

If you’ve hung around here much, you’ll know that I’m a fairly big non-fiction reader, and I hope to join in with the posts about this and do some non-fiction reading this month — especially since I didn’t fit in a lot of it last month. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll read, but here are some possibilities:

• With My Own Hand (Ashley Douglas)
• The Castle: A History (John Goodall)
• A Lab of One’s Own (Patricia Fara)
• The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (Sam Leith)
• X Marks the Spot: The Story of Archaeology in Eight Extraordinary Discoveries (Michael Scott)

But I’ll lean into my whim here, as ever. There are lots of books in my non-fiction bookcase that I haven’t read yet!

Read more here!

I don’t know how much I’ll be participating this year, but I hate how every time Wyrd & Wonder and ScifiMonth come round I’m too frazzled to participate anymore… so let’s make sure I participate at least a little bit, as and when I can. While I expect I won’t end up joining in the readalongs, I’m actually intending to read the books involved… so maybe it’ll happen anyway?

Here’s a few books I hope to get to this month:

• As You Wake, Break the Shell (Becky Chambers)
• Radiant Star (Ann Leckie)
• The Last Contract of Isako (Fonda Lee)
• The Red Scholar’s Wake (Aliette de Bodard)
• Little Mushroom vol 1 (Yi Shi Si Zhou)

I might also have a rummage deep into my backlog for something neglected and drag it back into the light of day… but we’ll see.

But wait, that’s not all?

More info on this one here!

I actually read quite a few of the novellas on my list back in October, but I can’t resist a good novella, so let’s see what I can dig up for a reading list here!

• A Theory of Haunting (Sarah Monette)
• Full Speed to a Crash Landing (Beth Revis)
• The Iron Below Remembers (Sharang Biswas)
• Paradises Lost (Ursula Le Guin)
• The Kamogawa Food Detectives (Hisashi Kashiwai)

And maybe more! Who knows.

And that’s still not an end to the challenges I’m taking part in this month…

Book Spin Bingo is a challenge that runs monthly over on Litsy, and you can read more about it here. This month’s Book Spin and Double Spin numbers are here, and the board layout was announced here. I often pick specific books to read, but this month I’ve gone with a more loosey-goosey format since I’m already doing plenty!

If you’d like to join in, hop onto your Litsy or spin up an account and post a list. And let me know; I’d love to add more people on Litsy.

Finally, there’s one more challenge, which is all about the books you want to read before the year is out: 10 Before The End (more info here)!

Obviously I don’t need to finish all of those in November, but I hope to make a dent in the pile!

So… that’s the month. I’ll be keeping busy, as ever, and looking forward to another Litsy readathon (held on both Litsy and Discord) next month, the Misrule Readathon. There’ll be some similarities to the Haunted Shelf readathon, with teams, points, games and activities, but the main idea is to see out the year with some fun and reading with friends.