At the beginning of October, I became completely overwhelmed by the state of my Goodreads to-read list. This was one part oh God I will never read all the books in the world and one part I got a Kindle and suddenly there were all these new books! That looked good! That weren’t on my list! That I could get easily! And also here is a 12 book mystery series that I must devour!

So I set myself a challenge: I tracked down Kindle copies of as many books on my to-read list as I could, ah, cough cough, find, and I made a collection of them, and I told myself that in October, I could only read from that collection. Sure, I’ve suffered a JD Robb related head injury of late, but I managed to read 18 books off my to-read list in October! Go team me.

Those books were:

• Beautiful Redemption, Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
• Loose Girl: A Memoir Of Promiscuity, Kerry Cohen
• Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi
• The Drowned Cities, Paolo Bacigalupi
• These Things Hidden, Heather Gudenkauf
• An Unfinished Score, Elise Blackwell
• Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway, Cherie Currie
• Necromancing The Stone, Lish McBride
• Fate, Jennifer Lynn Barnes
• Running The Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian, Avi Steinberg
• Drama Queers!, Frank Anthony Polito
• Seating Arrangements, Maggie Shipstead
• Band Fags!, Frank Anthony Polito
• Inmate 1577, Alan Jacobson
• You Take It From Here, Pamela Ribon
• The Mark Of Athena, Rick Riordan
• Stealing Parker, Miranda Keanneally
• Looking For Salvation at the Dairy Queen, Susan Gregg Gilmore

Broken down: 7 YA novels; 8 grown-up novels; 3 non-fiction. I’m part-way through the latest Nick Hornby book columns collection, Jim DeRogatis’ biography of Lester Bangs, and a short story collection, but none are finished at the moment. And I totally read the cast of characters from Wolf Hall. That counts for something, that was as long as some novels are.

My to-read list is still insane. I don’t feel any better about it, and I still haven’t read any of the books in this stack by my bed. But some kind of concrete progress is nice, too.