Tag: book blogger

Posted in Chatty

April 2023 Wrap Up: I wasn’t here…

Posted on by Jennifer

~reading

How many books that I planned did I read?

Well, it turns out I didn’t do a TBR post for April apparently?? But as I recall I had about 4 books I was loosely planning to continue or start, and of those I finished one, started another (but might abandon it…), and have one listed to begin for a buddy read in May. In total though, I read 12 books somehow.

The Plan:

The Result:

Key for April: Green = finished, yellow = in progress, white = not started

The Magician’s Daughter might end up being a DNF for me. It’s not terrible, it’s just not that interesting to me. It’s not catching me at all. I don’t care at all about any of the characters or what they’re going through, and the magic is kind of interesting but not enough to make up for the rest. I have so many other books I want to read right now that I don’t feel like giving time to a meh one for me. We’ll see if I return to it (about halfway at the moment).

Besides that, as you can see, I went on a bit of a tear there! I read a ton of nonfiction graphic novels after seeing a list of them my library posted with a ton of interesting titles. I’d been considering re-reading Anne Frank’s diary now that I’m an adult, so when I saw there’s a graphic novel adaptation I was a bit nervous but also curious about how they would transfer it to this medium. Her writing is shockingly mature at times for such a young girl, but then again so were her circumstances.

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The shape of a coffee cup made up of black and brown words. There are steam lines coming off the top, too.
Posted in Reviews

Month of Reviews: How’s it going?

Posted on by Jennifer

Hey y’all!

If you’ve been following along this month, you’ll have noticed that every day in December, I’ve posted a book review. That’s because in late November, I decided on a whim that it would be fun to do so every day in December. xD

Well I’m officially at the halfway-ish point at December 15, and though I have used up my handy little backlog of pre-written reviews and will need to write one fresh for today, it’s going pretty well! I’ve been really enjoying it, actually, which is great since that is what I had thought would happen. I haven’t had as many backlogged as I had planned, and I have been writing a lot of reviews to be posted for that day. Still, it’s been going fairly smoothly. Except…

There was one night I went to a holiday party and as I was drifting off to sleep just before midnight after a long, fun night, I sat bolt upright in a panic as I realized I hadn’t posted a review! Thankfully, this was when I did still have backlog ready, so I just needed to do a little formatting. Got that sucker posted at about 11:50pm. 🤣

I’ve also discovered that I really enjoy doing my reviews by narrating them aloud for voice-to-text functions. This came about after I did one for an audiobook and ended up really liking the style. It feels very natural to just speak about the book as though I were talking with a friend about it. Then I go back and correct any words it got wrong (which is impressively rare!) and tweak the phrasing of any sentences that I want to make flow better. It also feels like doing them this way has made it faster than usual too, which has definitely helped on some of the days when I needed to get one done with not much free time. Anyway, just thought I’d do a little update! And now to prep today’s review. 🙂

Posted in Chatty

The Amazon First Read results are in… Kind of…

Posted on by Jennifer

I mentioned recently that I was finally reading a book from Amazon’s first reads program that I was enjoying. After a few rounds of stinkers, I had pretty much given up on it. I finished one from it today though and it was…

Fine. It wasn’t excellent, but it wasn’t terrible. I’d say solidly average. Some good, some bad, overall fairly forgettable and some moments where I checked how much was left.

That’s not even the book I had posted about though, so there’s a second chance to impress me in the running. We’ll see if it can be anything better than “ok at best!”

Posted in Chatty

June 2022 Wrap Up: apparently I read a lot

Posted on by Jennifer

~reading

How many books that I planned did I read?

I planned 6 books in my June TBR and of those I read 4, with one in progress and one not started. But in total, I read 15 books so… I guess I plowed through anyway.

The Plan:

A mix of library loans of new releases and books I had on my shelves but hadn’t read, this was the goal for June.

The Result:

WOWW did I ever want to abandon two other books in this list: Crying in H Mart and Remarkably Bright Creatures were both duds for me in different ways, and I super wanted to stop reading them. But since I’ve met my quantity goal for the year, I’m pushing myself to read more widely and things I might not usually try. That includes continuing with books even when they’re a struggle or I would usually ditch them due to my mood-reader-ness. I think the slog of those are partly why I read so much: trying to break them up to make them more palatable. xD

Besides those two, I plowed through a ton of other books. I peg this largely on the 20 (15) books of summer challenge that i joined a little bit into June where you have to read and review a certain number of books in the summer. I may have gone aggressively into that list, and even posted ONLY reviews for like a week straight which was an interesting experiment.

Here’s a massive list of all the reviews that came up in June, because I went on an absolute tear there for a minute.

Phew!

~stats

Last month I put an unnecessary amount of time into creating my own charts and graphs and such of my reading tracker, on top of all the wonderful charts and graphs and data that Storygraph tracks for me. So to showcase that a bit, here’s a little section for all the data people like me out there to drool over. 😍

  • My reading was 7% Nonfiction this month (and the remaining 93% fiction).
  • My top genres were Young Adult (8 books) and Romance (7 books).
  • I mostly read books that were emotional, adventurous, or lighthearted.
  • My average rating was 3 stars out of 5. I read a total of 5,958 pages in May.
  • I traveled to South Korea, Japan, France, and even the Underworld through my books. In the United States, I was in Washington, California, and Boston.
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The shape of a coffee cup made up of black and brown words. There are steam lines coming off the top, too.
Posted in Chatty

Penryn and the end of days saved me this week

Posted on by Jennifer

Hey y’all! I started a re-read of a favorite young adult dystopian novel of mine called Angelfall by Susan Ee. I started that on June 3rd (5 days ago) and have now finished the other 2 books in the series as well without really planning to do so. I posted my June TBR on June 1 all proud to have it set, and by June 3 I was already doing something else. 🤣

It’s pretty hard to resist those stunning covers, right? Anyway, I was just having a crappy day and my reading had felt quite stunted (in large part due to the slogs of Pachinko and Dune which I had recently ended). I was going through my Kindle thinking, what can I read that will be comfortable and familiar and exciting?

Angellfall was my clear answer. 🥰

I’ve had a stressy few weeks and these really helped give me something to enjoy and escape into. So now that I’ve finished them, what’s up next? Hmmm…

Posted in Chatty

June 2022 TBR: somehow I have a pile

Posted on by Jennifer

Hey y’all! It’s DAY ONE of June, and for the first time in a really long time (maybe ever?) I have my TBR already planned out AND posted! 🎉 The reason — and theme — for this is “oh wow, I actually have all these books to read, when did that happen?” It certainly wasn’t on purpose, but somehow I have a bunch of books lined up ready to be read. So here they are!

Thanks, local library!

Two out of these three are also Fast Forward Friday featured books, but the main tie for these is that they’re all new releases and they’re all ones I have a library hold coming up for in the next week or two! I got really lucky with some of these to have copies so soon! But that also means I ended up with three books with a time limit to read. xD

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