october reads!

15oct.jpg

it was a pretty great month for almost everything else, though, particularly in the soup-making department.  this month, i made a korean seaweed soup, a baked potato soup, and a cream of tomato with chicken and radiatori.  i also made a double-crusted chicken pot pie and matcha madeleines.  in november, i'm tackling more ambitious projects because my big purchase of october was a dutch oven (finally) -- next week, i plan on making kalbi-jjim (braised short ribs, i think is what they're called in english), and, at some point, i'm going to develop a starter to bake bread.  food is as much a love of my life as literature is.

returning to book talk, though:  i didn't finish a single book in october.  i started many brilliant books, though, but couldn't commit to any, and the truth is that, as with most other things in my life, i go through lulls in my reading.  i've found that i tend to read most voraciously in the beginning of the year, the end of summer/early autumn, and the end of the year -- i don't necessarily know why that's the case, but it's the general trend i've noticed in the last few years, when i actually started to document my reading.

that said, i haven't gone a whole month without completing a single book in a while.  it's not that i haven't been reading; i simply haven't had the mental capacity to focus and sit down with a book and complete it.  it happens.  it means november is going to be an excellent reading month. (:

*thérèse raquin and mrs. dalloway pictured above because i dropped both books.  there will be a year-end post about the books i actively dropped this year.