November Wrap Up – Down the Rabbit Hole

I am very behind on all these wraps up! I’ve been doing another Goodreads reading challenge since September and I find that setting TBRs for the month go horribly wrong as I have to read books for the spell it out and between that and my library books, whatever I plan to read at the start of the month goes out the window. But it was a very successful reading month in terms of enjoyable books and getting books I own off my TBR.

Books I Read

Favourite Book of the Month

This was such a hard one to choose, because there were many books which surprised me with how much I liked them (One More Christmas at the Castle, After Dark, The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted) but also ones I expected to like and got what I expected (the rest of the Kamogawa Food Detectives series, Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, One Life). But one book in particularly blew me away with how much I enjoyed it and is something I will probably reread in the future, and that is the first book I read from Elenor M. Ingram, From The Car Behind.

Least Favourite Book of the Month

Much like the favourite book category, this was hard to choose from. There were some which just bored me but I liked small parts of it (The Road Trip), others which had a fun premise but it’s been barely a fortnight and I can’t remember who died and who the murderer was (Murder Most Festive). But the one that ‘wins’ this category is by an author that I have previously loved in the past, but somehow managed to take an isolation thriller and turned into a survival horror with the focus on an abusive relationship and a frankly depressing ending. So glad I got One Perfect Couple out of the library.

Reading Updates

This is the final update before the end of the year so it’s definitely a chance to look at my goals and see what there is to complete before the end of the year. Spoiler alert, it’s definitely worse than I thought but I’m not completely off track?

~~Read 200 books~~
Read 80,0000 pages – I’m at 77,167 so I’m on track to complete!
Read all the books on my 2025 TBR – AHHHHHHHHHH (that’s how that is going)
- Bonus: Read the 10 bonus books on my 2025 TBR – don’t ask.
Get my NetGalley to 90% – well, I got four off my NetGalley TBR but then I requested (and got accepted for three more). Oops?
Read the complete Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist – two more books to be read from this, both on my library app, waiting for me.
- Read the complete Women’s Prize for Fiction Shortlist – one more book on this (The Persiasns) but I have heard mixed reviews so I am hesitating.
Complete the Pop Sugar challenge – I’m at 88% so 5 books left for this challenge. Very doable!
Complete the Reading Harder challenge – 79% done so again, five books left.
Have my TBR balanced at the end of the year (or in the negative) – TBR +57 which is still ridiculous but since it was +84 after I counted all the books I bought in November (someone stop me!), this definitely wasn’t as bad as it could be. No clue how I’m going to make it up enough that I don’t have to get rid of a whole shelf of books at the end of the year.
50% of books bought in 2025 read in 2025 – 52 read, 107 left unread, 32% read of the books bought in 2025. I thought I was doing so much better for this but I was definitely calculating it wrong! Still not bad, I do like checking the little box on my spreadsheet when I read it so I’m definitely going to continue working on this (in preparation for the next Stuff Your Kindle day after Christmas where all these numbers go out the window).