I’ve never been good at reading spooky stuff and watching scary movies, but I am so excited for Halloween month ! I’m looking forward to making a ton of pumpkin dishes and decorating my small apartment in orange and green – and participate for the first time in Blogtober this year !

I’m planning some more varied content this month, with a few book reviews, but also some discussion posts and – hopefully – some photos I’ll be able to take in my new neighborhood before winter comes in ! I’m hoping that having a set plan for those posts will help me stay focused on my daily to-do list as well as regain some of the productivity I’ve lost through the summer.

October is a month of midterm exams for me, and as weird as it sounds, I’ve found that it actually helps me more to have a lot of things planned in my days. It’s really useful to force me to get out of bed in the morning and follow through on my plans instead of sleeping until the afternoon and not finding any motivation to do much of anything.

The TBR part

For this month, I don’t have a fully planned TBR yet – only a few notes in my brand new notebook, which I’ve been carrying around with me at all times these past few weeks in order to keep track of all the books I see during the day that might be interesting to read.

I also have a few ARCs to read from NetGalley – I’ve been granted a wish by a publisher for a book I’m really excited about, but those will have to wait until we’re a little bit closer to their publishing date.

So far, I’ve got, for the first books of October :

The 5 am club, Miracle Morning, and Your dream life starts here – Lately, I’ve been listening to some motivational podcasts and reading some blog posts about motivation, and how to organize your day. I’m not convinced that I’ll actually start waking up at 5 in the morning after reading those (especially during my midterm exams week) but I’m still curious to see what this is all about. And if there’s something I can use and apply to my own personal life, that’d be a pretty good bonus !

Rage becomes her, and Travail gratuit, la nouvelle exploitation (In english : Free work, the new exploitation) – I had planned to read those two a loong time ago, but I just never could get my hands on them. Now that I’ve moved into a much bigger city than the one I lived in before, I’m hoping one of the local libraries will have them – these are the kind of books I feel like I’ll be able to learn a lot from, but that will take me some more time than usual to read.

Digital minimalism and Irresistible – I’ve been watching a lot of videos from Ashley at bestdressed, and saw her mention those two books in one of those. I spend a lot of time on my phone everyday, doing more or less nothing on it – except maybe read a book or two, but nothing I couldn’t do without it. I’ve been meaning to try and see if I could use it a little less, try to be more focused on what I’m currently doing than on who posted a new story on Instagram or what party my ex-roommate is going to tonight.

So that’s it for me today ! I still have to find a way to obtain those books – something I’m hoping to find some time to talk about at some point this month, and we’ll see how it goes.

N.B. : All the photos in this post are from Unsplash.