Considering plans went out the window and many DNFs were had during the last month, I figured some of you may be interested in finding out how my Scholarly Reading Month really panned out. What did I not share? How come some of the author names I mentioned in the Scholarly Reading Month post at the beginning of the month weren’t reviewed? Did I actually read the book I reviewed, or did I skim read them?

Don’t worry – I did read all the books I reviewed, but I do admit that there were times while I was reading various classic novels I found my attention drifting. I knew this was likely to happen because I am not a classic fiction reader in general, and depending on when the book was written the writing style may be completely different from my preferences. The other thing I will note about the classics is that while I was surprised by a few of them and will be looking into more of the authors’ works in the future, my overall opinion of classic literature hasn’t changed. It is still a very iffy area for me, but I will say that expanding my view to pick classics outside of the Anglosphere really helped create that variety that kept me sane.

My dark academia reads had me reeling for multiple reasons. There are some that felt like they went from 0 to 100 between chapters, feeling like two completely different reads, whereas others had the right elements but didn’t quite reach the potential that they could have had for my tastes. And then there was Katabasis. I am still in shock over how that went. There are some dark academia books I DNFed early in the month to keep the momentum going so I didn’t trip myself up (even though I felt I was rushing for time for at least a week of reading, but I will get more into that next), and I will be circling back to these books to give them the consideration and attention they deserve. Sometimes, I get knocked off kilter a little with the direction of a book and I feel like I have to put it down and go back to what I want from a novel, and that happened a few times. No matter! I am all for giving reads a second chance if the timing wasn’t right.

Now, I don’t plan to do another scholarly reading month again, at least not for a few years. I felt like I was juggling so many books and switching them in and out to keep the ball rolling and meet the blog post dates I had for my fairly even split of reads. Multiple books were read the night before or the morning of (or a few minutes before) so I didn’t get enough time to simmer on the ending and let my thoughts settle. I try my best to give it at least a full day, but it really wasn’t possible with this selection of genres. It was a fun learning curve for me though, and a chance to broaden my horizons and challenge my reading a little. I like too many genres to limit myself across a whole month though, as you will see in next month’s Spooktober posts.

Would you do a scholarly reading month? If so, what would you include?