Spookathon 2018 TBR List!

Spookathon 2018 TBR

Hey guys, I'm so excited to finally be starting a book blog! I have been wanting to do this for years! I'm really excited to also be starting my blog right as the weather begins to shift to cooler temperatures. Fall is my favorite season and Halloween is probably my favorite non-gift related holiday. 

For my first entry, I'd like to tell everyone a little bit about my Spookathon TBR list. Spookathon is a cool readathon hosted by @Booksandlala, @Shannon_Said, and guest hosted by @Peterlikesbooks. Spookathon runs from October 15 to October 21, 2018. The goal of the readathon is to encourage people to read thrillers and other spooky novels. I've never participated in a readathon before so I'm stoked to be participating in this one. 

There are five challenges in this readathon as well as a group read that fulfills several of the challenges. The group read is Toil and Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft by Jessica Spotswood & Tess Sharpe. Since short story collections aren't really my thing, I'll be skipping the group read book. I swear, I've tried to like short story collections but they always end up reminding me of those wretched collections you were forced to read in high school.

The first challenge is to read a thriller. For this challenge, I chose The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton. Thrillers are a genre that I can normally take or leave. I've been trying to hard to expand my reading tastes this year so I'm happy to say that I've read more thrillers than I'm accustomed to. I thought this book sounded really interesting. I like stories were you can examine what happened multiple times through different points of view. 

The second challenge is to read a book with purple on the cover. For this one, I went with Heartbreaker by Claudia Dey. I cheated a little bit with this choice. I'm not really sure if it's spooky or scary but it sure as hell has purple on the cover. Also, it had been in my Amazon cart for quite awhile. I think the book has something to do with cults so, well, that's close enough to scary for me. 

The third challenge is to read a book in a different time period. The rule was pretty vague intentionally so that you could choose any time that you wanted, past or future. For this challenge, I decided on The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I'm not actually sure what time period this book is set in but I saw it on someone else's TBR list. I'm probably the most excited for this one. I watched a made-for-tv movie of The Lottery when I was younger. That movie seriously messed me up. I finally read that short story in college and the imagery was so alive that I became physically ill when I hit the conclusion. Hopefully Shirley Jackson won't mess me up for another ten years.

The fourth challenge is to read a book with a spooky word in the title. I could have doubled up for this challenge but I decided to go for broke. I chose Kill Creek by Scott Thomas. Kill seems like a spooky word, right? Creek can also be scary if you're not able to swim! I don't know much about this book at all. I'm going into this one blind but it's pretty heavily recommended on Reddit.

Finally, the last challenge is to read a book with pictures. This could be a graphic novel, a comic, a book with illustrations, or even just a book with cool images on the chapter pages. I don't typically read a lot of comics or graphic novels so this seemed like a great opportunity to expand my reading. I went with The Empty Man by Cullen Bunn. The artwork looks very interesting. 

Hopefully I can finish all of my books for the challenge. I'll be away on a work trip during the first part of Spookathon but I'm optimistic that I'll get some spare time to read during the evenings. When planning my TBR, I chose books that sounded interesting and I didn't pay much attention to how many pages each book had. Several of the books are over 300 pages so I definitely have my work cut out for me. Even if I don't finish the books during the readathon, I'll be working on them in the upcoming weeks. I love horror movies but I haven't ventured far into horror literature. 

Thank you all so much for reading! :)