[Books] November 2019 Reads

As of the time of this blog post, I'm still 7 books behind target in order to achieve my reading goal of 365 books for the year. November has been a sort of slow month in terms of completion and no single franchise really defined my reading activities for the period. It's a slow crawl to catch up, but I remain optimistic that I'll get there eventually.

Here are last month's numbers:


For November I finished reading a total of 29 titles, which is more than last month still short of the one book a day in order to hit my year-end goal. This number includes 19 comic book trade paperback equivalents and 6 Audible audiobooks. Comic books are always an easy way to help pad my reading numbers (which is why my reading goal is so high to begin with), but I've also opted to shift to shorter, simpler novels like the Star Wars titles.

My major reading project at the moment is trying to get through the Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi book series from the Legends line of books. It was the last long-running story arc before we reboot the Expanded Universe to align with the new Disney Star Wars continuity and one that had been a little overdue in my to-read pile. I've at least finished Omen and Abyss, which really weren't great examples of what the EU could offer and am still working through the fourth book in the series, Backlash. To tie to the Star Wars theme, my comic book reading included finishing the Tie Fighter and Vader - Dark Visions mini-series as well as getting caught up on the two most recent volumes of the on-going Star Wars comic book series.

This month I also explored the whole Spider-Geddon crossover event, which is essentially a sequel/rehash to Spider-Verse. Where Spider-Verse felt like a fun celebration of the diverse history of Spider-Man across various media, Spider-Geddon felt more like a sad cash grab since they couldn't even think of a new story. It was just about fighting the Inheritors again and this time they fragmented the story so severely in order to drive book sales of their tie-in comics. It was a sad little event and one that really missed the mark for me.

One of the more unique titles this month was Storytelling With Data, which I had to read for work. It's a great guide for how to reimagine your data visualizations for presentations and I'm still struggling to figure out how to both apply it to my own work and teach others to follow suit.

December is going to be pretty hectic because of all the usual holiday drama plus the fact that I'll need to blitz reading in order to catch up. I haven't missed my annual reading goal for a few years now and I don't exactly want to start now.