Here I am yet again with another post about TBRs (you’ve seen the original version of this last year and I’ve also discussed ARC habits and how I pick the books for my TBR)! As I started plotting out my reading challenges for 2020 at the end of last year (and my reading resolutions, including a focus on adding variety to my TBRs), I realized I should update this and PLAN for more variety. I always think about the books I missed out on reading, and how it can be really challenging to fit in everything I want to read in a given month. If I read 120 books a year, 10 books a month doesn’t feel like a lot in terms of balancing backlist, new releases, favorite authors, blog tours, book clubs, owned books, and review copies. How can I squeeze ALL of those in each month??? It seemed like a good time to remind myself what’s important and how I can curate monthly TBRs with a solid amount of variety that keep me interested and on track. So, a lot of this will be similar to last year’s Anatomy of a TBR Post that I made but will specifically include other challenges and balancing in the backlist / catching up on old review copies. As I said last time: I remember back in 2015 I followed Andi on an experiment of using TBR-related categories when picking books for the month. It worked so well for me because my mood […]

Maybe it’s the large amount of readathons and – more importantly – readalongs I’ve been doing lately, but I’ve gotten into the habit of reaaaaally scheduling out my reading. I set small reading goals per day or week and plan my TBR (and other things) at a super detailed level when I really need some motivation. My reading mojo has been down the tubes since late July/early August and I just can’t get myself to care about reading sometimes. However, I simultaneously want to read all the things??? Like, ya girl can’t stop adding books to the “currently reading” shelf and thus never actually finishing anything. I spoke a while ago about the schedule I developed for how I try to balance all of the audiobook-listening, YouTube/TV-watching, and podcast-listening I want to do on a weekly basis, so this isn’t a foreign concept to me. Sometimes setting weird goals and schedules makes me MORE satisfied and interested in reading. Following along with a basic concept from readalongs, I decided to make some kind of reading schedule for myself in October. I’m currently participating in the Diviners Readalong and FaerieAThon, where the hosts plot out one week(ish) per month to read the next book in the series or author’s backlist. They further determine how many pages or chapters need to be read each day, so everyone is having fun reading along with each other. I love the idea of setting highly-specific reading goals on a daily basis to get books DONE within […]

I watched and enjoyed Kristin’s video about how she organizes her Goodreads shelves, and then followed it up with Cristina’s post about how SHE reorganized her shelves (inspired by the aforementioned video). Both of these really inspired me to reorganize my shelves too because I’m always overwhelmed by my books and can never figure out how to actually find the books I want to read next. I could sort my to-read shelf by release date or date added, but it’s so hard to dive deep and remember that there are genuinely books on there I want to read and keep forgetting about. What I was working with I previously created a “consideration” shelf and did a bunch of moving around a few years ago. I’ve also done a decent job of adding books I’m genuinely considering but on the fence about. However, I knew I could make this shelf work even better for me. I already had a lot of other non-exclusive shelves that I love using, so I wasn’t planning on changing those. I thought it would make more sense to fix up my exclusive shelves. My “want to read” shelf was the biggest issue, with over 2,000 books on it. I had to figure out how that shelf could work for me. (This screenshot is from right after I purged a bunch from one of my shelves so the numbers are a little off.) You can see that I also have an “up next” shelf, which usually features […]

There are quite a few traditions I participate in annually/seasonally on my blog. I always sign up for certain challenges, readalongs, and readathons, but I also have my own personal traditions that I’ve kept up for at least a couple of years. These could be reading habits or something else. Here are some of the bookish and blog-related things I do each year! Read Emma Mills’ latest book on New Years Day in one sitting This is a newer tradition but one I have really grown to love. I definitely plan on keeping it up as long as humanly possible! I have a tendency to breeze through and adore each of Emma Mills’ books so far. What better way to kick off the year than with a guaranteed good book, and one I can finish in one sitting? I love having my bookish year start off that way (ahead on my Goodreads goal!). I read FOOLISH YEARTS on New Years Day 2018 and FAMOUS IN A SMALL TOWN for 2019. I’m a little concerned that her next book, LUCKY CALLER, doesn’t appear to come out until January 14th, so I’ll have to get my hands on an ARC to keep my momentum going.     Create and curate seasonal bucket lists and TBRs I’ve talked about my love for seasonal TBRs (especially holiday ones in December and summery ones for June through August) on multiple occasions. I also have come to enjoy making personal bucket lists for some seasons as […]

I’ve been thinking of writing this post for a while but was afraid it would come across as mean or bashing these particular books and authors. I know a lot of people don’t enjoy writing bad reviews for books (I love a good rant sometimes, but not all the time!), so I wasn’t sure how to approach this. AND THEN I said screw it, because it’s my blog and I do what I want. There are plenty of books out there that make their way onto my TBR and then the reviews start rolling in… and I change my mind about reading them. Of course, the reverse is also true: I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read a book and then some glowing reviews came in and I decided that I should try it out. Here’s a little list of some of those books and why they’re on or off my radar now, thanks to my favorite bloggers. Again, but Better by Riccio | I did actually start reading this one but didn’t jive with the writing style, to be honest. I stopped reading it because many, many others did not enjoy this one as much. I saw Chelsea discussing her thoughts on it, plus reviews from Madalyn (which wasn’t necessarily bad but just mixed!) and Amber (mostly about the writing and telling instead of showing) that didn’t make me want to prioritize finishing this book. The Wedding Date by Guillory | This is a weird one because I went on to […]

Throughout all of my TBR posts, it’s plain to see that I’m currently in THREE different IRL book clubs. I don’t know how this happened, but it has. I thought it would be fun to just share what book clubs I’m in and how they differ from each other… because they are VERY different! I’ll also highlight the books we’ve read so far. One of my book clubs (the OG if you will) has been around for many years so I won’t get into ALL of those books, but I probably can’t resist… YA Fiction Book Club Only YA fiction, all genres within Books read so far: 40 | Meets monthly Back when I first started blogging, I decided that I wanted an IRL book club to enjoy books with and maybe make some new friends. I made a Meetup group for a YA Fiction Book Club and the rest is history! The turnout was great initially and eventually we moved the club away from Meetup. Two of the other ladies and I connected really well so we ended up forming a trio and kind of abandoning the official club once the club was gone from Meetup. (Long story.) The three of us have been meeting ever since and enjoying books over dinner every month. This one serves the purpose of giving me strictly YA books in my book club. Single/Standalone Reads We’ve read mostly standalones. Any series-starters you see below (there are a few) are books where we did […]

Naturally, I just posted about the lowest rated books I’ve read and now it’s time for the highest! I decided to skip over some of the super-obvious ones (like the Harry Potter series or any classic with millions of reviews) and also didn’t want to duplicate the conversation with books in a series (for example, many books in the SJM series and the Illuminae Series would be in this list, but I’m only doing the highest-rated book from the series). Let me start out by saying that I am not surprised that books with fairly rabid fanbases would have such high ratings – between the SJM series on here, Leigh Bardugo, Holly Black, Lunar Chronicles and the Illuminae books, I know how us bloggers and fangirls can be! I definitely figured they’d have super high ratings. There were multiple books from these series in my top 15 or so, but I only included the highest from each series. ACOMAF by Sarah J. Maas | I definitely enjoyed this one a lot. It brought the series together in a cool and unexpected way for me, but I feel like I loved ACOTAR the most. I know that the whole series is polarizing, so I’m not surprised that ACOMAF, which is book two, would have a higher average rating. All of the people who read ACOTAR and hated it would not be as likely to continue with the second book. Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo | Same thing here – people who didn’t love […]

When writing an upcoming post about book ratings, I started to think about average ratings on Goodreads. My rating for September Girls was a HALF of a star and the average Goodreads rating was 2.97. That is extremely low on Goodreads, obviously. I wanted to explore some of the books I’ve read with super low average Goodreads ratings, then see where my thoughts and rating stacked up. The Word for Yes by Claire Needell | I didn’t like this book and clearly the people of Goodreads agreed with me. This is the lowest average rating on Goodreads out of all the books I’ve read. I expected this to be a powerful and impactful story about the aftermath of a date rape, and how three sisters cope and move on together. That didn’t exactly happen and the story was very pointless, which is sad to say. It doesn’t help that the book was barely over 200 pages long and therefore a little too short to successfully tackle this topic. Sam and Ilsa’s Last Hurrah by David Levithan & Rachel Cohn | I feel a little bad for this book because it wasn’t THAT terrible? The concept was better than the execution, of course, but whatever. Like many of Cohn/Levithan’s books (when they write together), at least one character has to be a little too manic pixie dream-person or unrealistic. There’s too much forced quirkiness in their characters and that tends to ruin their books for me. Posh by Lucy Jackson | This is one […]

When writing my review for You Owe Me a Murder, I came to the realization that romance plotlines rarely work for me in mystery or thriller novels. I started to think hard about why this is the case, because I generally welcome romance from any kind of book that I can. A lot of books feel like romance is missing when it doesn’t exist, just because it’s my preferred genre! Here are some of the reasons it doesn’t work for me in this genre and some of the exceptions to the rule… (1) I don’t trust anyone A good mystery novel makes you second-guess everything and everyone. I like the books where there are a bunch of red herrings and mysterious elements, so I never know what’s true and what’s conjecture. I go into these books incredibly wary of each character because you never know who could be the villain or murderer. Because of this, I almost never get invested in specific characters in mystery books. That’s a whole other topic, I’m sure, but that certainly means that romance is not on my mind. When the MC trying to solve the mystery grows closer to another character and they start to fall for each other, I don’t trust the ship. What if that person is the murderer?! I’m not falling for that. I will not ship them in the slightest because I’m afraid that I could be sad or disappointed by their heel turn (to use a wrestling term, LOL). I […]