As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from September.

Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future (Nick Foster): I read this because I wanted to become more comfortable with thoughts about the future, and the book ultimately achieves that, giving you ways of seeing though messaging and balancing your thoughts. I admittedly skimmed sometimes, but would highly recommend to anyone who thinks a lot about the future. I’ve been talking about it a lot the past month.

The Subtle Knife (Philip Pullman): Part of my re-read of His Dark Materials before the release of the final book at the end of October. No matter how many times I read it, it is just as beautiful and thought-provoking as the first time. I love being with Lyra and Will.

Displeasure Island (Alice Bell): Solid follow-up to last year’s Grave Expectations. The characters are still great. It was a light-hearted read during a time when I needed a light-hearted read.

The Killer Question (Janice Hallett): Janice Hallett is a treasure. Every book is brilliant. Even if you guess something, I guarantee that you will not guess everything. She has trick after trick after trick, and makes you laugh over and over again. Thank you for such an enjoyable experience.

The Wasp Trap (Mark Edwards): I’m so happy that I finally got to read a Mark Edwards book – they are hard to get in the U.S. – and it was a solid thriller. Good characters, great pacing, interesting situation. Well done.

The Amber Spyglass (Philip Pullman): As much as I’m disappointed that the ending doesn’t change with the re-read, it is the only ending that makes sense. It breaks your heart. But life does. Luckily, I still have two novellas and a novel left in my re-read of His Dark Materials before the final book is released.

What did you read last month?

There is a six-word line on page 281 in Ian McEwan’s book, What We Can Know, that I can’t stop thinking about:

“Nearly all of life is forgotten.”

You lived yesterday, and you can probably reconstruct a handful of moments here and there from memory. You know you were at work (maybe), and you know what sorts of things happen at work, but really remembering what you were doing minute to minute in your day is impossible. You’ve forgotten nearly all of your day.

If you jump back a few days, a few weeks, a few months, you’ve forgotten more and more and more. You take a trip, and you remember the highlights of the trip. You may even be able to answer specific questions about your time at a site if someone prompts you with questions, but overall, you’ve lived it and you’ve forgotten it.

I spend so much time worrying that I’m forgetting things, writing down lists so nothing falls through the cracks, bullet-journalling my existence. And along the way, I didn’t notice that I was forgetting anyway.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Clues by Sam is one of those games that you can pick up and play for a moment when you’re in between things. It’s a logic puzzle where you have a board of 20 people, and you have to figure out which ones are innocent and which ones are criminals based on the clues revealed in the game. So, for instance, the first clue could be, “There are no innocents between Larry and Hilda.” You look and see that Adam is between Larry and Hilda, so you can mark him as a criminal.

It gets progressively more difficult during the week, but it’s hard to get stuck because you can always get hints.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Last week, we were driving home from a work trip and realized we were on a road close to the ocean. We pulled off at the first town I recognized by name and parked at the end of the boardwalk in the public lot, intending to have a quick walk near the water before heading home.

As we were walking to the beach, we noticed a group of young adults leaning against a nearby car applying zombie makeup. What fun! They had decided to mark Halloween a few weeks early.

We got up to the boardwalk and noticed a shambling family, all splattered with fake blood. Interesting. So it seems like more people had the idea to celebrate Halloween in early October.

We took a few steps through an open-air indoor mall to continue on the boardwalk and emerged into a crowd of over 1,000 people, ALL DRESSED AS ZOMBIES. There were multiple zombie Santas, four zombie Marilyn Monroes, and a whole crew of zombie construction workers. There were also four random people holding signs and shouting that everyone was going to hell, plus a steampunk man riding a penny farthing with a bubble machine on the back. People were staring at us and our lack of costumes.

We had inadvertently stumbled into a yearly zombie walk, and it was just through strange luck that we showed up on the early end of things and were able to grab parking. By the time we left, we had to inch our way through the traffic out of town.

A very strange outing.

Yesterday was Super Thursday, which is when many many many books are published in the UK ahead of the holiday season. In case you never noticed, the US releases new books on Tuesdays, and the UK releases new books on Thursdays. I’m sure we have something similar to Super Thursday in the US, though Googling “Super Tuesday” takes you to political articles, but I buy a lot of books from the UK, so I’m particularly excited to read all the book newsletters going out this weekend.

It kind of feels like a big online party for books.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Infertile Phoenix marks 9 years of blogging. She writes: “Nine years and five days ago I took the plunge and published my first blog post. I had been thinking about blogging for awhile and decided to do it. I was extremely lonely and looking for connection. I hope what I have shared here has helped someone, but I think that what I have received here is exponentially more than what I’ve given.” It’s the same thing that drives a lot of us to set up our site, and I love our little corner of the internet. Congratulations, Infertile Phoenix.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post about childless perks. She talks about something I hadn’t thought about before: “The thing is, many of the perks that I used to think about are largely irrelevant now that I am older. On a daily basis, my life is not much different to those friends of mine who have children.” While it’s true that lives that diverged begin to look similar again, she still notes a difference and provides food for thought.

The roundup to the Roundup: Perusing the books this weekend. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 3 – 10) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.