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2019 Reading Goals
Hello and happy Monday! It’s a long weekend here this week, and I’ve had a wonderfully lazy few days full of coffee, kitties, books, and brunch! With the New Year starting I’ve been thinking quite a bit about reading goals, but here we are almost in February already and I’m still not really sure where I stand in terms of setting goals for this year. I’ve mentally split the types of things I’m thinking about setting goals around into a few categories, and I thought I’d talk about them a bit here today. Firstly there’s the Goodreads challenge, which is about how many books you are aiming to read overall…
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Review :: A Month of Sundays :: Liz Byrski
I love a book about a book club – apart from the fact that I love reading about books, I think uniting a group of individuals based on their love of books is a great way to bring together such a variety of characters who wouldn’t necessarily spend time together otherwise and who can therefore be really different from each other. So of course Liz Byrski’s new novel A Month of Sundays appealed to me right away, and I was delighted to receive a copy in the mail from Pan Macmillan. Here’s the synopsis from the Pan Macmillan website: For over ten years, Ros, Adele, Judy and Simone have been…
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Read Harder Challenge :: Update
Hello!Here we are over halfway through the year, so I thought it was a good time to check in with how I’m doing with the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge! First, a little reminder of what the challenge is about. The Read Harder Challenge is an annual reading challenge hosted by Book Riot. The challenge encourages participants to do exactly what it says – read harder – by reading books to meet each of 24 different tasks, with a particular emphasis on increasing the diversity of books read, and reading outside one’s comfort zone. (You can read more about it on the Book Riot website here). You can see this…
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Review :: The Girl in the Tower :: Katherine Arden
I always think it is a bit tricky to talk in isolation a book that is part of a series but not the first book – to much missing context, not to mention risk of spoilers for earlier books! So today, instead of just talking about The Girl in the Tower – book two in the Winternight Trilogy – I’m going to talk a bit more generally about the series and include book one – The Bear and the Nightingale – too. I read The Bear and the Nightingale in 2017, and picked it up of its beautiful cover. (I’m starting to wonder whether I should be embarrassed about how…
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#loveOzYA :: In the Dark Spaces :: Cally Black
I had heard a little bit about In the Dark Spaces after Cally Black won the Ampersand Prize, and I was pleased when the Read Harder Challenge gave me an excuse to bump it up my tbr, with task 17 – A sci fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author. ‘Dark’ is right there i the title of this novel, and gosh was it dark! The book opens with the protagonist, Tamara, being kidnapped by ‘Crowpeople’ and finding herself in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by apparently violent people whose language she can’t understand. I felt like every bit of Tamara’s anxiety and discomfort in this situation came…
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Review :: Zenith :: Sasha Alsberg & Lindsay Cummings
Despite being a fan of sci-fi on the screen, I hardly read any (and, weirdly, vice-versa for fantasy – I don’t watch a lot but it makes up most of my reading). With Zenith, the stars kind of aligned (haha, stars, sci-fi, space – see what I did there?) – the Read Harder Challenge 2018 includes a task about female author/protagonist sci-fi, I’d heard a bit of buzz about this book, and Harlequin Books had review copies available. It’s YA sci-fi featuring a crew of female space pirates… how could I say no? Summary from Goodreads: Most know Androma Racella as the Bloody Baroness, a powerful mercenary whose reign of…
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Sunday Stack :: kind of Star Wars-y
So, this is kind of an uninspiring shot of a kind of random stack of books currently hanging out on our dining table. But there is something about piles of books like this that I just love, so I wanted to share it anyway =) These are mostly books that I got for Christmas (the bottom 5), plus Frankenstein (which I’m reading for bookclub this month), Hangman by local author Jack Heath (currently on loan from a friend) and In the Dark Spaces, which I have out from the library at the moment (it’s #LoveOzYA and also meets the criteria for the Read Harder Challenge task about scifi with…
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Read Harder Challenge update
Yesterday I started reading Katie Fforde’s new Christmas short story collection, The Christmas Stocking and Other Stories. I picked this up not only because I’m all about the festive reads at the moment, but also because it does double duty by ticking off one of my outstanding tasks for the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge – Read a collection of stories by a woman. And of course being able to check one more off my list is making me feel like I might actually be able to finish the challenge (because in my future planning imagination I can read at least 3 times quicker than in real life lol). So far I…
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Review :: Wish You Were Here :: Sheridan Jobbins
** I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own** So, you know you know I totally believe in only picking up books I think I will enjoy? This was kind of an exception to that. I really wasn’t entirely sure that it was going to be my thing, but one of the tasks on the Read Harder Challenge is to read a travel memoir, and I hadn’t found anything I fancied yet. Then I saw this on NetGalley, and despite my reservations decided to give it a try. A couple of chapters in I almost gave up on it,…
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Read Harder Challenge update
Would it be too much of a cliché for me to start this by asking whether anyone can believe we have passed the halfway mark of the year already? I’ve enjoyed hearing (reading) people’s thoughts on their reading year so far, and thought it would be good to check in with where I’m up to in the Book Riot Read Harder Challenge. The titles in regular font I’ve read, and the ones in italics are things I’m planning to read. Read a book about sports – Breaking the Mould Read a debut novel – The Dry Read a book about books – The Burning Page Read a book set in…
