Fall weather has certainly arrived in Michigan! And of course, we picked the coldest day yet to visit a corn maze on Saturday. It was fun to watch my little guy explore the maze. We let him pick which direction to go at the intersections, which meant it took us a lot of time to get through the maze. Lots of fun - until he decided he was done walking and wanted to be carried the rest of the way. Our arms were quite tired by the end!

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde (My first reread of this Fforde young adult book. It was just as fun as I remembered!)

From Heaven Lake by Vikram Seth (I found a book set in a place that starts with X!!)
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (27% complete)
Inferno by Dante Alighieri (37% complete)

Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson (Another Newbery winner!)
The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (I'm doing a buddy read with Christine from Buckling Bookshelves starting Wednesday. I'm really looking forward to this one!)

Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon was this past Saturday! Did you participate? I had so much fun! I also spent two hours at my library book sale gathering a stash for my Little Free Library. I came home with nine bags! (The volunteers said I won the prize for the day.) There will be a forthcoming post about the many books, once I have a chance to sort through them. Such a fun day!

The Bark of the Bog Owl by Jonathan Rogers (I slipped this quick middle grade read into the beginning of the week. It was really good.)
The Prime of MIss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (The only book I completely finished during the readathon. It helped that it was only 127 pages.)
Edge of Extinction: Code Name Flood by Laura Martin (This one was even better than the first. SO GOOD!)

The Harvest Raise by Katie Schuermann (If you like Jan Karon's Mitford, you will love this series.)
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (My Classics Club deadline is the end of August next year, and I still have 12 books to read. Yikes. Serial Reader will hopefully help me get most of those titles read in time. This one is currently 9% complete.)
Inferno by Dante Alighieri (Ditto above explanation. 15% complete.)

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde (I was hoping to get to my monthly Fforde reread during the readathon, but I didn't. I've still got a week to fit it in before the month ends!)

Dewey's Readathon is finally here! As I mentioned in my prepping post, I've got some time dedicated to my library book sale this afternoon. But other than that, it's a day of reading!

Time spent reading: Five hours and 2 minutes
Number of pages read so far: 344
Book I'm reading from: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark; Code Name Flood by Laura Martin
Book I'm listening to:​ Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan
Number of books I've finished:​ One (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie)

It's time for bed for now, but I'll be able to get a bit more reading in before church tomorrow. Sometimes it pays to set the alarm for 6 a.m.!

Time spent reading: Five hours and 20 minutes
Number of pages read: 390
Number of books finished:​ One

The next Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon is this coming Saturday! These are some of my favorite days all year. My husband has usually taken charge of our little guy for the day so that I could relax and read. This time around, we're enlisting my in-laws to help a little so that my husband can spend the day taking our chimney down (sounds like fun, right?) I'm also meeting my mom for lunch, and then we're spending some time at our library book sale. Saturday is $5-a-bag day, and I'm hoping to find some treasures for myself, as well as a lot of books to cycle through my Little Free Library. It will be a very bookish day, although it won't include quite as much reading as it normally would.

Because of that, I'm keeping my stack small:​

I don't have much planned in the way of special food. Last time, I loaded up on snacks and my husband was like, "But I thought this was about reading?". Reading and snacks are both important to the day! I'm going out to lunch and trying to make pizza with a low-carb crust for supper. That sounds pretty special to me (assuming the pizza turns out okay. . .​)!

I had the most amazing experience yesterday. This year is the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Since I'm Lutheran, this anniversary is kind of a big deal for me. Yesterday, I sang in a choir of over 1,000 people at a worship service attended by over 14,000 people at the Breslin Center at Michigan State University. I have no words to describe how incredible that was. A taste of heaven!

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (Ugh. There were a few profound moments I liked, but mostly ugh. And blech. I hate saying it, but don't read this book.)

Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (This is better than I feared. I'm a Jane Austen purist, so I don't know why I'm even reading a modern retelling of Pride & Prejudice, but I was intrigued. Some of the modern twists are pretty clever. I'm only halfway through, though, so we'll see what happens with Liz and Darcy.)
Utopia by Thomas More (I should be finishing this one up in the next day or two!)

The Harvest Raise by Katie Schuermann (This is the last book in the Anthems of Zion trilogy, and I am so excited to read it!!)

Middle grade novels are one of my favorite genres. The middle grade section always holds the most temptations for me both in the library and the bookstore. (Especially in the library, because they should be fast reads, right? So it's okay if I come home with ten or so, isn't it?) Jade over at Reading with Jade had a post this week about reading middle grade novels as an adult, which really resonated with me. And it inspired me to come up with a list of some of my favorite middle grade books/series.

I highly recommend every book on this list (even if I haven't read every book in every series yet - I will someday soon!). I hope you try one out, because middle grade novels are amazing. Let me know if you do! Enjoy!

Saturday, I got to participate in a really fun experience. My church hosted an event called Walk, Learn, Pray on our local Rail Trail. My station was to teach about the Michigan state symbols (did you know we have a state fossil?). The weather was 80 degrees and sunny (What, Michigan?!). And when nobody was walking by my station, I got to sit and read a book. It was such a fun and peaceful afternoon!

The Unseen Guest by Maryrose Wood (This is the third book in The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series, and it's just as delightful as the first two so far.)
Utopia by Thomas More (Chipping away at my Classics Club list. Hooray for the Serial Reader app!)

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera (Isn't that a great title?)

Okay, let's try this again. I wrote and scheduled this post last week, but when it published, all that was there was the picture. So. . .​ take two!

Cross your fingers and hope that this one actually posts correctly this time! As for my challenge progress, as always, I need to read more of the books I own. Last year, the Read the Books You Buy challenge really helped me limit the number of books I bought. Not so much this year. Now I just need to get reading them!

This weekly chance to add to your reading list is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date.

Happy October! I can't say that I really have a favorite month, but this one is close to the top. To celebrate, here's a video of an instrumental piece called "October" by my favorite living composer, Eric Whitacre.

Frogkisser! by Garth Nix (This was a cute book. I liked it on audio.)

Minders of Make Believe: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children's Literature by Leonard S. Marcus (This is a fascinating read, but certainly not a fast one. I've been working on it since Tuesday, and I'm only two thirds through. It's so interesting, though, that I'm not feeling the impatience to be finished and onto the next book like I normally would.)
Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt (My next Newbery read.)

Wonderland Creek by Lynn Austin (I've been wanting to get to this one for a long time. And hey, I'm reading another book I own!)