I wound up reading fourteen novels/novellas in October! Here's what I've read since my last reading check-in.

KJ Charles' The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal (historical M/M) is a neat setup, where the narrator has been partnered for years with a paranormal investigator and has written famous accounts of the cases they faced, and is now much more privately writing about their personal history and the cases that instigated and shaped their romantic partnership (with, of course, many references to cases he's already written about for the public eye).

Dweller on the Threshold is my second read by Skyla Dawn Cameron, in which a woman inherits a probably-haunted house early in the covid pandemic. It's creepy and well-done and much weirder than it initially seemed likely to be (although to nowhere near the degree of weirdness that her The Taiga Ridge Murders, which I read late last year, turned out to be).

Dreadful Company (Vivian Shaw) was a quick, fun read. It's the second Dr. Greta Helsing novel, and it left me in the odd-feeling (but not uncommon for me, really) position of having enjoyed it without feeling any particular need to seek out the following books.

What Stalks the Deep is the third of T. Kingfisher's Sworn Soldier novellas, which due to the increasingly-horrifying prices of ebooks (in particular novellas, IMO) I borrowed from the library. OT1H, that's deeply annoying, because I generally really like Ursula Vernon's writing and would like to simply buy everything, if only to support her (and yes, I do know library borrows do contribute to that as well); OTOH, I avoided spending something like $20 on a NOVELLA and was (briefly) spared the need to decide what to read next, because when this became available at the library, it became my obvious next read once I'd finished Dreadful Company. Also, I enjoyed it; I wouldn't recommend reading it without at least reading the first book in this set, and if you've read and liked the previous ones, you'll presumably like this one too.

(Before my many-years-ago-now decision to spend a year [ha!] reading mainly/only from books I'd purchased but never read--which has pretty much been ongoing ever since, because I keep buying books--I almost never had to think about what to read next, because I had several hundred holds on hard copies at the library, and basically would just put something on hold and immediately suspend the hold for a year or two [whatever the maximum was], and then frequently scroll through the list and re-suspend books if I caught them in the window between them being automatically unsuspended and actually heading my way. Whatever books I didn't catch in that window arrived for borrowing at the library, so I'd pick them up and read them, whatever they were.)

Also scruloose and I finished Fugitive Telemetry, although it took us long enough that I had to check it out from the library a second time (which I'd rather avoid, given my understanding of how ridiculous the ebook/audiobook situation is for libraries >.<). When we circle back to listen to the first novel, we'll definitely have to be ready to actively focus on finding time for it.

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Current reading/watching: I'm a few chapters into Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil (V.E. Schwab), and on the non-fiction front, a little ways into Anne Lamott's Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.

Meanwhile, scruloose and I are two episodes into season 2 of Silo.

After an embarrassingly long time of sporadically reminding myself that I specifically bought a tiny low-powered laptop explicitly for use down in the living room (and used her accordingly for a while, until the spring Dayjob crunch threw me out of the still-forming habit), I've finally got Haruna up and running again. Will this help me leave fewer tabs open, or just result in them being split among more places?

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Happy Hallowe'en and blessed Samhain, as applicable! It's a quiet one here. The wind and rain were wild for much of the day, but did calm down in the late afternoon, as hoped. Reports from online locals indicate that a lot of people got way fewer trick-or-treaters than usual (if any), although some spots seemed to get normal levels.

We don't really know what our neighborhood "normal" is, either in the area in general or along our condo corp's road, since for the last few years we've just been setting out the candy and refilling as needed. Some or most of it has generally vanished, but that doesn't say much about numbers vs. the likelihood that at least a few kids take it by the fistful. But tonight scruloose decided to actually answer the door and hand it out (in a hazmat suit, because why not?) and not a single kid came by during the window of time when they were down there. (That said, they got down there somewhat later than would probably have been ideal, and the doorbell did ring once before that point [and go unanswered, but all of our lights were off until scruloose was ready]. So if we try it again next year, earlier might make a bit of difference.)

I've mostly been chilling on the main level with the cats, who've been barred from the ground floor for the evening. (We had the window open during that span of time when more kids might've been on the move out there, but I heard only the occasional young voice echoing over from the main road.) After finishing up at Dayjob for the day, I put on my Hallowe'en onesie, and scruloose made the first hot cocoa of the season, and we finally finished listening to Fugitive Telemetry before dinner was made and scruloose bagged up candy. (;_;)

I hope you're all having a fun/peaceful time of it.