October has passed with my nose essentially stuck in book after book.  I’m not saying I read a crazy amount of books this month, but I was able to cross four of them off my reading list.

The first three books I read were part of a trilogy by James Dashner – The Mortality Doctrine series.  I had never read his work before, since that’s not my usual genre of choice, but I decided to get out of my comfort zone.  I’m glad I did.

The first book in the series is The Eye of Minds.  It takes place in a far away future where technology is greatly advanced.  This is where we meet Michael and his friends, Sarah and Bryson, who are all skilled gamers (especially when it comes to coding and hacking).  However, someone is threatening life as they know it on the VirtNet and the three are chosen to stop this gamer named Kaine.

The Rule of Thoughts comes next in the trilogy and Kaine is still on the loose.  Michael has just found out a shocking fact about himself and has to come to terms with it while still hunting down Kaine.  Not to mention, he and his friends are now being hunted out in the real world as well as the VirtNet.

The Game of Lives, the final book in the series, continues to follow Michael and his friends as they figure out how they can finally stop Kaine as his master plan.  The stakes are now raised even higher as Michael , Sarah and Bryson try figure out who is really on their side and who the real enemy is, and any wrong move could cost them their lives.

Out of these three books, The Game of Lives was the book I had the most emotional reactions to.  I loved it, wanted to run over it with my car, and hated that this was the end of the series.  I would easily recommend this series to any science-fiction fans, especially those who love gaming and virtual reality type of stories.

After reading the Mortality Doctrine trilogy, I decided to get back into reading the Left Behind series that I had started earlier this year.  It wasn’t that I was bored with the series that I had stopped reading it, but I had fallen into a reading slump over the summer and when I picked back up again in August, I didn’t go back to this series right away.

The book I read from this series was book 4 – Soul Harvest.  It continues to follow Rayford, Buck and the rest of the Tribulation Force as the Antichrist rises in power and the world takes sides – they either stand with God or with Satan.  For me, Soul Harvest dragged in some areas, so it wasn’t my favorite of the series so far.  I have since started the fifth of the series, Apollyon, and it’s starting slow, but I’m sure it will pick up soon.

And those are the books I have read during October.  I think four books for one month is pretty good.  I mean, it’s one book a week.  But sometimes books only take me a few days to get through, then I take a few days off.  I’ll say this though, I plowed through the Mortality Doctrine triology and I sort of wish I hadn’t, just so I could’ve enjoyed the time with the characters more.

Anyway, I’m happy to be back on track reading the Left Behind series, but I will throw a different book in between reading them here and there… just so this series won’t go by too fast.  That, and sometimes the events that happen in the books need to process before I continue onto the next one.  I definitely recommend this series as well.

What did you read this past month?