I can hardly believe it is November already! Only two months left of 2016. For me that means there are some holidays on the not so very distant horizon. First the four-day Thanksgiving holiday and then thirteen days at the end of December from Solstice to the day after New Year’s. So much extra reading time to look forward to! A very good thing since there are somehow more books on my reading table now than there were at the beginning of October. I just don’t know how that happens.

Currently I am in the middle of The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh. This is turning out to be not your average book about climate change. Ghosh is questioning why literary fiction does not address climate change and why it has been relegated to genre fiction. His arguments are fascinating and I can hardly wait to finish so I can tell you more about it.

I am also reading The Windwracked Stars by Elizabeth Bear. This is the first in the Edda of Burdens trilogy. It was kind of a spur of the moment whim choice and it has turned out to be so good! It begins with Ragnarok and is wonderfully shot through with Norse myth. There is even a character named Astrid and every time she appears I think of my bike. I also have a strange urge to wear my hair in a long braid.

I’ve been reading comics too and have Squirrel Girl volume three ready to go.

But oh the reading piles! I have Elena Ferrante’s Story of a New Name waiting in the wings. Also, Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed. While I know I don’t have to know The Tempest to read it, it has been so long since I read Shakespeare’s play that I want to pull it from my shelf and read it before or along with Atwood.

I also have some recommendations from others on hand. Reader Newsha from Iran kindly gave me some suggestions and so I have Samarkand by Amin Maalouf, a novel about Omar Khayyam, and Khayyam’s Rubaiyat (I have never read it!). And Jenny at Shelf Love recently posted about Blood Done Sign My Name, a microhistory as Jenny called it, about race and civil rights in America.

Then on the way to my hold shelf at the library is The Invisible Library by Genvieve Cogman that seems to be about time travelling librarians. I will let you know! Also on its way to me at the library is Ratf**cked by David Daley. This is a book about politics and elections in America and I am not yet certain given how close election day is and everything that has been going on leading up to it, that I will be able to read this book right now. Or ever. I am so anxious about the election right now that I might be better off just sticking with time travelling librarians.

There are, as usual, lots of other books in the wings, but these are the ones that have my attention right now. I am hoping that by the end of November there will be fewer books on my reading table than there are now. That’s not too much to hope for, is it?