Like a lot of bookish people, I was excited to dive in to a LOT of good books during self-isolation, quarantine, lockdown – whatever you want to call it. I’ve found that my shitty reading habits have continued from February though and I haven’t finished nearly as many books as I normally would. I find myself browsing my phone, wallowing in the news/social media, playing Candy Crush, and watching Chris play Animal Crossing. It’s just so hard to focus for a few reasons, which I’ll get into below. But! I won’t just use this spur-of-the-moment blog post to whine. I’m going to make myself think of a few solutions too. Problems Unmotivated to read in the first place I’ve had a weird reading year so far. It could be general reading burnout from the past handful of years, reading and reading and doing nothing else. It could be King of Crows being the only thing I wanted to read in January and then the only thing I could think about when I finished reading in February. Either way, that book got me, y’all. I just don’t want to read. I’ve been unmotivated BEFORE all of this started and clearly that’s continuing. This situation is just not helping like I thought it might. Mind-numbing games/media > books I get sucked into the news throughout the day, but primarily first thing in the morning when I catch up on things I missed. I just hate it. I’m doing what I personally can by […]

I’ve been thinking about this word a lot lately, both in my reading life and in my personal life. I spoke a bit about it in a recent Five on Fridays post but I’m really trying to find ways to SIMPLIFY. I know I said my word of the year would be SAVE, but I’m adding this one too. (I think I mentioned in that post that saving wasn’t just about money, but also about saving time and frustration. The same thing as simplifying if you ask me!) When it comes to reading, I sometimes enjoy being incredibly organized and scheduled out. But, as my tweets say above, that only helps me when I’m in the mood to read. When I WANT to read. If I’m behind or not in the mood to read, having TBRs and reading schedules absolutely does not motivate me to read. When I’m in a reading rut due to my schedules and TBRs, the only thing that can break me out of it is reading a book I REALLY want to read. When I finished KING OF CROWS, I knew it was going to linger and ruin some other books for me. On top of that, I didn’t finish a book *before* its pub date, so I ended up being quite behind on my monthly numbers by the time I finally finished it. I slogged through a couple of reads afterwards and really struggled to find the desire to read. I started going to the […]

I’ve been struggling with this a lot lately: how do you balance reading books that you genuinely want to read and know you’ll enjoy, with also trying to read out of your comfort zone a bit more? I cannot figure out how to do both and be happy about it. For example, I joined Romanceopoly with the intention of reading some fun books. When I made my tentative TBR post / list of ideas, I came across quite a few squares with prompts that don’t interest me usually. I don’t read paranormal romance and have historically not loved it but there are so many squares within that genre. Fated mates? Ugh. Oldest paranormal romance on my TBR? Double ugh. I rolled my dice for February’s picks and groaned at both of them – I got the paranormal romance one (oldest on my TBR or recommendation from a friend) and the other roll was for a historical romance not set in London. I could very easily read a historical fiction book NOT set in London, but the romance element isn’t my cup of tea. BUT how do I know that? I’ve never read a Tessa Dare or Lisa Kleypas before. Maybe I’ll love it, but I’m stubborn. I’m finding myself unwilling to give up precious reading time to something I’m not sure about and it doesn’t feel great. I read about 10 books a month, give or take. That really doesn’t feel like a lot when you have hundreds of possible […]