
If you saw yesterday’s post, you will know that I am trying to squeeze in a few more books that were nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards, so that will be my focus in November. I am currently reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, which was nominated in the Best Fiction category, and I am loving it- there is the potential for it to become my winner for that category.
Skyhunter by Marie Lu

In a world broken by war, a team of young warriors is willing to sacrifice everything to save what they love.
The Karensa Federation has conquered a dozen countries, leaving Mara as one of the last free nations in the world. Refugees flee to its borders to escape a fate worse than death—transformation into mutant war beasts known as Ghosts, creatures the Federation then sends to attack Mara.
The legendary Strikers, Mara’s elite fighting force, are trained to stop them. But as the number of Ghosts grows and Karensa closes in, defeat seems inevitable.
Still, one Striker refuses to give up hope.
Robbed of her voice and home, Talin Kanami knows firsthand the brutality of the Federation. Their cruelty forced her and her mother to seek asylum in a country that considers their people repugnant. She finds comfort only with a handful of fellow Strikers who have pledged their lives to one another and who are determined to push Karensa back at all costs.
When a mysterious prisoner is brought from the front, Talin senses there’s more to him than meets the eye. Is he a spy from the Federation? Or could he be the weapon that will save them all?
Shyhunter was not nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award, but it is a book that I meant to get to in October and I am about to start the audiobook. I have had great luck with Marie Lu’s novels in the past, and look at that cover!
There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins

Love hurts…
Makani Young thought she’d left her dark past behind her in Hawaii, settling in with her grandmother in landlocked Nebraska. She’s found new friends and has even started to fall for mysterious outsider Ollie Larsson. But her past isn’t far behind.
Then, one by one, the students of Osborne Hugh begin to die in a series of gruesome murders, each with increasingly grotesque flair. As the terror grows closer and her feelings for Ollie intensify, Makani is forced to confront her own dark secrets.
There’s Someone Inside Your House seems to get mixed reviews, and I do not think it is one I would ever have picked up on my own, but I am reading it for a buddy read on Instagram. I have a feeling that this book might end up being more of a fun thriller and I am hoping it is a little campy? We will see!
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.
With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood.
I have not seen many people talking about Bestiary, but there is something about it that intrigues me. I just have this feeling that I am going to love it! I was reading some of the reviews of Goodreads and everyone has such interesting thoughts about it. Can’t wait!
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.
Once I am done with Hamnet, I will be picking up Transcendent Kingdom! I cannot believe I haven’t read this yet, as it is one of my most anticipated books of the year. I think it is because I know I am going to love it so much that it might put me in a reading slump. Transcendent Kingdom was nominated in the Best Fiction category.
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Every city has a soul. Some are as ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York City? She’s got five.
But every city also has a dark side. A roiling, ancient evil stirs beneath the earth, threatening to destroy the city and her five protectors unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.
I have fallen in love with N.K. Jemisin’s writing this year. I probably should finish The Broken Earth trilogy before starting her new series, but The City We Became was nominated for Best Fantasy, and I am so intrigued by the premise.
Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun
In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.
Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.
Black Sun was also nominated for Best Fantasy! I would love to read a few books in the category before casting my vote, and I have a feeling Black Sun and The City We Became will be my top two contenders. I have had Trail of Lightning, which is also by Roanhorse, on my TBR for awhile now. I am hoping that I will fall in love with her writing and finally get to that book as well!
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, Kira finds an alien relic. At first she’s delighted, but elation turns to terror when the ancient dust around her begins to move.
As war erupts among the stars, Kira is launched into a galaxy-spanning odyssey of discovery and transformation. First contact isn’t at all what she imagined, and events push her to the very limits of what it means to be human.
While Kira faces her own horrors, Earth and its colonies stand upon the brink of annihilation. Now, Kira might be humanity’s greatest and final hope . . .
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars was nominated for Best Science Fiction, and I think it is the only book in that category that I will have a chance to read this year, especially when you consider that it is almost 900 pages! I am in the mood for some “first contact with aliens” type of SciFi, so I am hoping that this fits into that category. Let me know!
Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand of his discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered.
Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world.
When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet.
Why Fish Don’t exist was nominated in the Science & Technology category. It is also Nonfiction November, so I would love to fit in a few nonfiction titles this month. I have found that I love books that are part memoir part nature/science writing- something similar to Lab Girls. I have high hopes for this one!
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

Helen Macdonald’s bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century’s most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine.
In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate through the Tribute of Light, watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary, seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk’s poplar forests. She writes with heart-tugging clarity about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds’ nests, and the unexpected guidance and comfort we find when watching wildlife. By one of this century’s most important and insightful nature writers, Vesper Flights is a captivating and foundational book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make sense of the world around us.
Vesper Flights was also nominated in the Science & Technology category. Libro fm sent me an ALC of Vester Flights a few months ago, and I am ashamed that I haven’t listened to it yet! I haven’t read H is for Hawk, but I remember it being very popular for awhile. I appreciate a good essay collection, and the reviews for this one have been fantastic.

I’ve read Black Sun, Why Fish Don’t Exist, and Vesper Flights, and they were all great. I’d say that Why Fish Don’t Exist was my favorite of the three.
I started the ebook of Why Fish Don’t Exist this morning and I’m already really into it. I love how the author is reflecting on her own life as well.
Hammer is in my TBR and I’ve heard only praises for that one. 😍
I am absolutely loving it!
I have barely read any of the Goodreads nominees this year and, given my mood, I’m probably not going to try very hard, if I’m being honest. I will likely read the picture books and middle grade books, since those are generally easy for me to get through. But they have a lot of great selections this year, in all categories.
I don’t blame you! I don’t normally read so many of the books. Just got lucky this year!
I was looking at the middle grade nominees and I am intrigued by so many of them.
I was too. I got a few of them from the library. Besides Rick Riordan, I haven’t read much middle grade. But since I took a class this year, I want to read more.
I have got NetGalley widget for Bestiary and I plan to read it this month as well. I hope you enjoy all these books.
Awesome! I hope we both love it. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!
I hope you have a great reading month!
I really want to pick up Black sun as well!
(www.evelynreads.com)
Thank you! I hope we both love it!
Hamnet, Transcendent Kingdom, and Girl With the Louding Voice are all competing for my best read of the year!
Love hearing that! And I know we have similar tastes!
All great options! I also want to read Skyhunter and Transcendent Kingdom!
I read To Sleep in a Sea of Stars in October, it’s an epic space story. It’s only the second science fiction book I’ve read but it’s made me keen to read more.
Love hearing that! I highly recommend Sleeping Giants. It’s the book that got me into SciFi!
Why FIsh Don’t exit: Wow–coincidence. Only a week or two ago David Star Jordan’s name was removed from buildings at Indiana University [my alma mater] and at Stanford for being part of the American Eugenics movement [which encompassed much of the nation at that time] –he was president of both Universities. I knew his granddaughter who was a friend of my Great Aunt/Uncle. Interesting–I’ll get this and read it.
I just read about that this morning! I know that the author gets into that in the book. I started reading it this morning and it is focusing on his time at Stanford right now.
I wonder if her book had anything to do with that decision?
I’m not sure. I must say I was shocked. Jordan is the main drive thru I.U. (most of the frats/sororities are on North Jordan]. They changed the “Jordan River” to the Campus River–couldn’t just leave it and say it was for the Jordan River in the Bible! lol. Jordan Hall is someone else hall now. Odd considering how many people fully embraced the so-called “Better Families Movement”. There was an American Experience documentary about it on PBS. Planned Parenthood was part of it. Teddy Roosevelt, the Gilbreths of Cheaper By the Dozen and nearly every politician. So, will the take out my dorm–Willkie Quad named for Hoosier Wendell Willkie? He ran against FDR. Must be guilty of something. LOL
I finished the book last night. I would be so curious to hear your thoughts on it!!
I requested it but I’m 33rd in line. I may buy it next payday. “Watch this space” for my review!
Ah I guess because it was nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards it is a popular one. Looking forward to your review!
Skyhunter is at the top of my list too. It sounds fantastic, and I loved the extended excerpt when I read it!
Ahh Marie Lu! I’m so curious about this book even if… well, I’m not a fan of its cover hahaha. I hope you’ll enjoy all of these 🙂
I hope you enjoy all of these books!
My post.
Thank you!
I hope you get to read these this month. I’ve heard good things about pretty much all of them.
I hope so too! Thank you!
I always find I’ve hardly ever read any of the books nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards, but this year maybe even less than usual? I read a lot of books, but the amount of new releases I read in a year is usually very low!
My TTT: https://jjbookblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/03/top-ten-tuesday-288/
I was surprised by how many of the nominated books I had actually read. That is not normal for me! I think it is probably because I have been more active on Bookstagram in the last year and the community has had an influence on my reading!
That’s great! Most of the categories I don’t really read much of anyway, so I’m usually restricted down to Adult Fantasy, YA Fantasy, YA Fiction and Debut in terms of the categories I vote for.
Skyhunter looks great. I want to read more Marie Lu, I think I’ve only read one of her books. Warcross?
I’m about halfway through and it is really good. I read Warcross and Legend, but never seem to finish her series!
Yes, I still need to read the Warcross sequel!
FYI–David Star Jordan pops up in my review of another book today! LOL
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is on my to read list too!
I hope we both get to it and love it!
This is a great TBR 🤩 I really want to read The City We Became because I keep hearing such great things about it. I hope you enjoy all of your reads this month 🙂
Thank you! I’m really looking forward to that one.
Ooo… I’m looking forward to see how skyhunter, black sun and to sleep in a sea of stars are going to be like. They seem interesting
I will be finishing Skyhunter tonight and I’ll post a review soon. I’ve really been loving it!
Awesome. Can’t wait to read it. Good to know that it was a nice book.
There’s Someone Inside Your House is on our TBR!
I started it this morning! It definitely reminds me of a teen slasher movie, and I am into it!