What is the Pondathon? The Pondathon is a co-operative and story-driven readathon hosted and run by CW from The Quiet Pond. The aim of the Pondathon is to read books and collect points to protect the friends over at The Quiet Pond from the encroaching malevolent forces that threaten our friends in the forest. Have fun participating in the Pondathon readathon by joining one of five teams, each with a unique way to collect points and signing up! You can also follow the story of the Pondathon as it unfolds, and participants can also complete ‘side quests’ during the readathon to collect extra points. The readathon takes place from January 24th 2020 to March 7th 2020. More information about the readathon can be found here. Information about Joining the Pondathon To join the Pondathon, simply sign up anytime between January 18th 2020 to March 5th 2020. Choose a team, create your own animal character for the Pondathon and create a character card! Create a blog post, bookstagram post, booktube video, Twitter thread, or whatever medium you wish, with ‘#Pondathon’ in the title or your tweet. Share the character you have created and your character card! Link back to this post so that others can find this readathon and join in. Share your updates on your blog/bookstagram/booktube and social media. You are more than welcome to tag @thequietpond or @artfromafriend on Twitter or Instagram in all your updates! We’d love to see all of the beautiful and awesome characters that you […]

Just when you (probably) thought ya girl was done with challenges, yet another popped up for me to overanalyze and create TBRs for! 😉 You can learn all about Romanceopoly HERE but I’ll be discussing the general idea and plan of attack below. This is just such a fun and unique challenge that will help me read a bit more widely under the romance genre and beyond. The Basics The hosts have created a Monopoly-like game board with different prompts for each space. You can play a few different ways, including just going around the board in order or actually rolling dice to move around the board. You can pick between the SUN and MOON prompt packs as well, so you can technically complete the board twice if you wanted to. My Plan I decided to add this challenge to my life this year because it just seems like something fun I can do whenever I’m in the mood for romance or for something random off my TBR. Not all of the prompts are romance though! I decided to roll a few dice in a row so I have an idea of my next couple of books, and then decide when to read them. I know most people strive to complete the game board but I’m not 100% sure if I will or not. Unlike other challenges, I won’t be tracking it as closely in terms of completion percentage or goals. I’ve picked the moon pack for this because I […]

I’ve been doing these resolutions for the past couple of years and found that it’s a really nice way to keep track of some goals for the upcoming year. I’ll be honest when I say that generally “resolutions” or the “clean slate of a new year” isn’t my shtick, but sometimes the marking of a new year just helps when setting new goals. It’s an easy marker of time and that’s about it. You can find 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 resolutions as well. Continue to not feel pressured to read and enjoy other hobbies | As usual, this stays on my list for the next year! I always want to make sure I balance out my days/weeks with reading, audiobooks, podcasts, YouTube, other TV shows, and spending quality time with Chris. My goal of 120 books was super manageable last year because, as usual, I got a little ahead during certain months and it balanced out for later months with less reading. Read 50% or less contemporary novels | Yet again, can I make this one work?! I really hope the challenges below help me read more mysteries and other genres. I got VERY close in 2019 with reading other genres. Curate a monthly TBR with a lot of variety | I’m planning a post for this in the new year as an update to last year’s Anatomy of a TBR Post. I want to do a better job of really adding variety, including backlist titles and other genre requirements, to make my […]

Welcome to the kickoff for the All I Want For Christmas is You Readalong that I’m co-hosting with Forever Romance! Like last year’s read of Jenny Hale’s Christmassy book, we’ll be reading and sharing thoughts on Twitter and Instagram. I wanted to take a minute to remind you all that we are starting TODAY and hopefully you’d like to join us! Schedule 🎄December 9: Chapter 1-5 🎄December 10: Chapter 6-10 🎄December 11: Chapter 11-15 🎄December 12: Chapter 16-20 🎄December 13: Chapter 21-Epilogue Interview with Miranda Liasson What was your inspiration for the Angel Falls setting? What are some of your favorite restaurants or establishments to write about in the small town? There’s a village about an hour away from where I live in Northeast Ohio called Chagrin Falls. I  got to know it a little better a few years ago when I had to drive my kids there for SAT prep classes. I would drop them off and then take my laptop to the local coffee shop and hang out there while they did their thing. In the process, I got to explore the Main Street, see the pretty old homes, and check out the falls which are in the middle of the downtown. There is a beautiful park next to the river where they hold art shows and other events. It’s probably the prettiest small town I’ve ever seen, and it’s filled with theater, arts, activities, etc.—very vibrant. I was excited that my editor let me locate a small town in […]

I know that I usually talk about my upcoming year-long challenges in one big post, but I’m inventing this one for myself and wanted to give my idea a full post! Inspired by the following lovely bookish people: RAINBOW READING: Chelsea @ Chelsea Dolling Reads has been doing a rainbow challenge each month, where she spends a week reading books off of her shelves from a specific color family. It’s way for her to read from her physical TBR and get some focused reading time in. TRY A CHAPTER: I originally saw the idea for a “try a chapter” tag or unahul at Bekka @ Lock and Rose. There’s also a Bustle article about linking the original creator (Book Paradise, who appears to be inactive on their YouTube channel). This “try a chapter” thing is a way to read the first chapter of a book on your shelves. If it doesn’t grab you right away, you unhaul the book and move on. For 2020, I’ll be combining some of the ideas above into my own unhaul / reading from my shelves challenge. The idea is that each month I will have a specific color that I use to pull books from my shelves. Once the books are pulled, I will read the first chapter in each one and decide if I want to keep it or unhaul it. The idea is that if the chapter DOES pull me in, I will continue reading that book immediately. I can’t just decide I want […]

Original post HERE Hi friends, just wanted to pop on here quickly to remind you that today we are reading in the memory of Grace at Rebel Mommy Book Blog, who lost her battle to cancer over the summer. Today is her birthday. She was one of the brightest lights and sweetest people in our community, so we are reading books she loved or books she had left on her TBR to honor her. Consider joining us and please consider making a donation to one of the following: Her breast cancer charity of choice was Metavivor – donate here Her husband and family are participating in Making Strides for Breast Cancer on 10/20 – donate to their team here Today you’ll find some photos on Instagram or messages on Twitter using the hashtag, sharing our reads and memories of Grace. Please check them out and share if you’d like! I made sure to post a classic Grace picture on Instagram, where she was always found with a Kindle on her lap and a coffee in hand. I’m excited to get started on this book today.   View this post on Instagram   Happy birthday to Grace 📖☕️ Today I wanted to honor her memory with a classic coffee-and-kindle-in-lap picture, which she was well-known for! I’m starting TWICE IN A BLUE MOON from Grace’s TBR (and it’s by one of her favorite author duos) to #ReadForGrace today. More details on the blog. 💛💜 ——— #book #read #reading #books #currentread #currentreads #igreads […]

Here we are – somehow in the final three months of the year. Feels like just yesterday I was listening to Weezer’s version of Africa on repeat with my friends on New Years’ Eve and eating way too many tacos. I digress… I’m here to do my usual “holy shit I need to finish my challenges ASAP because they year is almost over” post. I had the realization that I should really try to push through in October/November: Random goal I need to tweet now to put out into the universe: finish all of my 2019 reading challenges in November so I can read 90% Christmas books in December — Lauren (@bookmarklit) September 20, 2019 I’m obviously a huge fan of a good ol’ holiday romance, so unless those fit in with some challenges, I’d love to get my challenges out of the way as soon as possible! I’m going to talk about my current status for all of the 2019 year-long challenges I signed up for, plot out when to read certain books, and decide if I still even care about meeting certain goals. Spoiler: probably not. Monthly Motif Challenge This one is realistically the easiest to track what I might want to read because each month is a specific prompt to follow along with. I’ve been aiming to read two per month, and have succeeded so far, but we’ll see what happens for the rest of the year. Status: 2 books completed per monthly motif Left to complete: 1-2 books […]

In July of this year, we lost a beloved member of our bookish community. Grace at Rebel Mommy Book Blog was an absolute light in our corner of the internet. She left positive, sweet, and thoughtful comments on ALL of our blogs. I could always count on kind words from her on a post. We spoke a lot via blog comments and on Twitter, and I grew to really cherish her friendship. I can’t emphasize enough how genuinely lovely she was as a person. When I had the unfortunate task of sharing the news of her passing, after a long and extremely hard-fought battle with breast cancer (twice), my feed was flooded with love for her. The word “kind” was the most common word to describe her, and I wholeheartedly agree. Despite the challenges she faced in the last year or two, she was always positive and bright across our community. She shared her journey and struggles with us and genuinely kept fighting until the VERY end. She sadly left behind a devoted husband and three young children, including her youngest who was only just over a year old at the time of her passing. She was the epitome of what the good in our community can look like and not a single day has passed since she left us that I haven’t thought about her or missed her. In honor of Grace and all the good she brought, I wanted to put forward a simple challenge for those of […]