Bookmark Lit Bulletin | May 2019

The Bookmark Lit Bulletin wraps up the last month in reading and what was on the blog, as well as what’s coming up next. You can check out my book haul, books read, posts shared, challenge updates, etc. You can read past bulletins here. If you’re looking for more personal updates, you can check out my Lauren Lately feature; it highlights my life events and non-bookish fun from the previous 30 days.

Like I said about April, May was also bound to be a shitty reading month. I had my friend’s wedding the second weekend of the month, where I didn’t read the whole 3-4 days of festivities, and a bunch of other weekend plans to account for. Luckily Bout of Books happened the day after the wedding, which put my butt in gear to get back on track with reading and make up for lost time! I ended up reading two graphic novels for one of my challenges, which helped keep me in the normal range of 9ish books read.

    

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All of the books from this month:

L-R: Set in space, read during season the book is set in, by two female authors

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Breakdown: 1 bought  | 3 borrowed  | 0 free/gifted | 2 for review
All review copies were provided for free in exchange for an honest review.

Preordered and Review Copies

Preordered: Finale by Garber
From Penguin: Screen Queens by Goldstein (egalley and ARC copies)

Library Books

Library checkouts: Aurora Rising by Kristoff and Kaufman,
The Woman in the Window by Finn, Red White & Royal Blue by McQuiston

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My recent personal / life update found in the last Lauren Lately HERE.

• [6 May] Fumbled by Alexa Martin ★★★★
• [6 May] The Manic Pixie Dream Boy Improvement Project by Lenore Appelhans ★★½
• [6 May] There's Something About Sweetie by Sandhya Menon ★★★★★
• [13 May] Romanov by Nadine Brandes ★★★½
• [24 May] Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love by Elsie Chapman, Caroline Tung Richmond, Sara Farizan, Sandhya Menon, Sangu Mandanna, Rebecca Roanhorse, Adi Alsaid, Phoebe North, Anna-Marie McLemore, Jay Coles, Rin Chupeco, S.K. Ali, Karuna Riazi ★★★★
• [31 May] Only Ever Her by Marybeth Mayhew Whalen ★★★

• [1 May] Bookmark Lit Bulletin | April 2019
• [2 May] March-April Bookish Bullet Journal
• [3 May] Goals & Challenges After 4 Months | Check-In
• [7 May] Top Ten Tuesdays #234: Characters Like Me
• [8 May] What Does Mood Reading Even Mean?
• [9 May] The Cookie Book Tag
• [10 May] Bout of Books 25 TBR and Tracking
• [14 May] Top Ten Tuesdays #235: Page to Screen
• [15 May] Lauren Lately | May 2019
• [16 May] Romance in Mystery Novels
• [17 May] Books I’ve Read with the Lowest Average Goodreads Rating
• [20 May] TV Shows I Probably Won’t Ever Finish
• [21 May] Top Ten Tuesdays #236: No Redesigning
• [23 May] Books I’ve Read with the Highest Average Goodreads Rating
• [27 May] Far, Far Away Books I Literally Cannot Stop Thinking About
• [28 May] Top Ten Tuesdays #237: Ten Years
• [30 May] June TBR

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May: Finish Spring Bingo and get back into challenges ✔
June: Finish the month with a 72% NG ratio

I’m impressed that I manged to finish Spring Bingo fully this month because it was looking dicey even a few days before the end of May! I was able to rearrange a few of my picks into different categories and pull off the full sheet of bingo. I also continued with my Retellings challenge (one book), Picky Pledge (two books), and Popsugar challenge (three books).

I did a little math to try to see how many books I’d need to complete to get my Netgalley ratio up a few percentage points. I’m currently, at the time of writing this, at 70%. Not too bad! I’m well on my way to getting toward 80% finally. Anyways, if I don’t get approved for anything else (whoops, easier said than done), I’ll need to read 3-4 books to get my percentage up to 72% I think. I’ll see what it looks like when I finish and update 3 of them but I might need 4 because of decimals/rounding. Shouldn’t be too hard based on my TBR!

Blog Tours: Summer on Mirror Lake and Screen Queens | I have two blog tours in the early part of June. One is the next in the Honeymoon Harbor series that I love, and the other is for SCREEN QUEENS. I’ve been excited for this one so fingers crossed!

Summer Bingo TBR Ideas | I know that Bekka hasn’t been blogging as much lately but has continued to update her seasonal bingo cards, so we’ll see. If Pretty Deadly doesn’t host one, I’ll probably create my own card based on previous summer bingo sheets and my own ideas for the season 🙂

A Royal Change of Heart | I’ve noticed I’m more and more open to royal-related fiction these days and it inspired a post! I included some of the books that helped me turn a corner, the general trend toward royal fiction and its popularity, and books I hope to read soon.

50 Books in 50 Days | I’m doing something a little crazy (for me, someone who reads 10 books in 30 days usually), and am debuting the idea for the world next month. I’ll keep it simple here but basically I’ll be trying to read/finish/highlight 50 different books from July 1st through late August.

ARCs I’m Excited About | I always request books and forget about them like an asshole. Some I’m genuinely so excited for and just can’t seem to fit into my life! I hope this post will remedy that for me and remind me of the future books I need to read.

Book Clubs | I’m in three local/IRL book clubs and thought it would be fun to share a post about each of them! I read wildly different books/genres for each and they don’t all meet monthly, so there are some different experiences that I get out of them.

Reviews Made Me Reconsider | I was debating this post for a while but decided to go for it. There are a number of books I was excited to read but changed my mind because of friends/bloggers reviewing them. It won’t be all negative though, because there are obviously quite a few books that I decided to read (after initially thinking I wouldn’t) because of positive reviews!

Check out my June TBR post! ?

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How was your reading in May?
What do you have up next in June?

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