Read in December

Hi everyone,

December is finally over! I've had an okay reading month, but I always find that I tend to not have a lot of time to read because Christmas and family obligations and that definietly was the case this month too. But yeah, I've had a good enough month.

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# of books read: 6

-  Thick As Thieves (The Queen's Thief #1) by Megan Whalen Turner
- The Lost Coast by Amy Rose Capetta
- Mangoes and Mistletoes by Adriana Herrera
- No Room At The In by Brooke Winters

- The Hanging Tree (Peter Grant #6) by Ben Aaronovitch
- The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried by Shaun David Hutchinson

Best book of the month: Mangoes and Mistletoes because lesbian, hate-to-love and adorable.

Worst book of the month: No Room At The Inn because BDSM things make me uncomfortable and I accidentally read a short story which such teams. This is definitely a case of "it's not you, it's me" though.

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Happy reading! I'll see you in 2020!

My 8 reading goals of 2020

In 2019, my reading has largely been characterized by me being lazy with my book selections. Most of the time I've happened to walk by a library, walk in there and picked up whatever's caught my eye. Which lead me to mainly read YA contemporary novels this past year. Thus, for this coming year I've decided to challenge myself with reading a bigger variety of books; I've created 8 different reading goals that I want to try to "finish" before the year is over.

Like in 2019, I want to read 50 books. When I was in uni, I could easily read 100 books a year. Nowadays though, I feel like 50 is what I can do without...not doing other important stuff that I have to do in my in real life-life. Now, if you do the math you'll see that my reading goals amount to way more than 50 books. Therefore, to make this challenge more doable, I've decided that it's okay for books to belong in several different categories at once. I mean, my challenge, my rules, am I right?

Now, are you interested in seeing what I'm challenging myself to read in 2020? Then click through and continue reading below!

2020 in books: top 10 most anticipated releases of the year

Okay, so. This hasn't been easy. And I realized just now that this post probably isn't that helpful because many books are part of series and not standalones and whatnot but. I'm going to post this regardless. 

Are you, like me, a fan of thrawling through Goodreads' lists of upcoming releases, and do you also enjoy making and/or reading lists? If so, I bet you're going to enjoy this post! Here I will list my ten most anticipated releases of the coming year, that I know of right now. I tend to discover a lot of new titles as the year progresses (well, duh) so this list will have to make do right now. Some of these titles are obviously really well known but others might actually be new to you!

If you're interested in seeing what releases I'm looking forward to the most and maybe even finding something new to add to your TBR, click through here.

2019 in books: my 5 worst reads of the year.

So, the time has come for me to present to you the five books I've read this year which I disliked the most...

Now, as a disclaimer, I just want to preface this with the fact that this is just my opinion, if you happen to love these books it's perfectly fine, of course! Taste is subjective after all and just because I didn't  like them doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't.

Now, onto the books!

2019 in books: my 5 best reads of the year

So, now the time's finally come for me to annouce my top five best reads of the year!

This is a post I typically love doing; I love going back to and revisiting all books I've read in the year that passed and to give you guys short reviews.  I usually find that picking just five books that were my best reads of the year is hard but this year it came much easier than previous years.

If you want to find out which books ended up on this list, click on through. Oh, by the way, these books are not 'ranked', I couldn't possibly choose a definite favorite so ignore the order in which I present them.

2019 in books: my longlist of books read

Hello everybody,

the time has come for my weirdest wrap up of the year - a full list of books I've read this year! On the off chance that someone's interested in this, I'll post the list under the cut.

2019 in books: a breakdown

If you're a stats nerd like me, you're going to absolutely love this post!

....because in this post I will break down my reading goal into stats. What was the average length of books I read? What was my top genre? How many books by female authors did I read?

If you want to know the answers to these questions, click the link below and you shall find out!

2019 in books: a general overview

2019 in books, or the post where I'm trying to make sense of my year in reading...

So, today is it. This is it. This is where I try to summarize my year in books. Please be aware that my more "serious", stats-heavy post with analyses and stuff of the books I've read will come another day. This is mainly me venting my thoughts...

So, how did it go then?

Now, if I *had* to rate my year in books, I'd probably give it 3 ⋆⋆⋆ simply because I feel like I did try. I hit my reading goal (which was 50 books, as of the date I'm writing this post I've read 55 books), but at the same time I slumped A LOT and overall I feel like I didn't have a lot of luck with my books. I read only a few that were awful but a lot were three-star ratings for me, which is honestly a book that's ranging from being slightly meh to being good but not very memorable. I feel like I genuinely can't tell a lot of the books I've read apart from each other, I don't remember the content to a lot of them and just. There were few that stood out and impressed me. Looking back at my stats, I did enjoy quite a bit of four-star books and even some five star ones, but still, somehow, my thoughts when I look back at the year is that I've read a lot of meh books.

I've sort of hinted at it this year, but I moved in July. To my very first own apartment, that I own myself. The period in which I moved (realistically it took nearly two months), I didn't get much reading done at all. I tried, I really did, but my mind was preoccupied with other things and I simply didn't have time. Now, adjusting to living alone has taken quite a bit of time. I'm only now settling in properly and I've come to realize that living alone and taking care of an apartment is nearly a full-time job. Which means I've had to adjust my reading habits to that. But looking forward, looking towards 2020 has me hoping that I'll be better at managing my time so that I can read. Also, I've got to be better at getting myself out of reading slumps. At the same time I feel like living alone has made me want to read more than before so yeah, this is overall quite weird..

The good...

I managed to complete my reading goal!! That one was a biggie for me; there were several times when I was certain I wouldn't and it made me really sad, because I had never 'failed' before. But I kept going AND I won! I know there are people out there on Goodreads reading 300 books a year but honestly that's not me so I'm going to be happy with what I've done! The majority of my real-life friends are beyond shocked when I tell them I've read 50 books in a year..!

I've read some series; I've completed (or caught up on, more likely) some and am currently reading some. Overall, looking at my stats, 25% of all books I've read this year has been series which for me is amazing.

I feel like I've definitely read more fantasy and science fiction than what I have previous years? (Looking at my stats I can confirm that I indeed read more fantasy than ever before but that I only read one sci-fi book so that's that I guess?)

The bad...

My luck with my books. I rarely went into reading a book wondering if I'd like said book or not so it's not like I chose books I suspected might be bad, it just turned out halfway through a lot of the books that I didn't really care for them but I still didn't want to put them down. So I finished them which lead me to my second problem of the year; I spent a majority of it slumping rather badly. Reading just sort of didn't appeal to me at all after a while and that was such a weird feeling because I normally love reading. I think this comes from me reading a lot of mediocre books and also from me forcing myself to actually finish these books.  

I also got lazy and only read books from the library, nearly all of which was YA and nearly all of which I just picked up on a whim...which lead me to fail my reading challenge exceptionally. Of all books on that list, I read 3 out of 19 books...so yeah, this is a call to myself to do better with my 2020 reading challenges (which will be up on my blog soon-ish). I think the reading of lots of random YA books that hardly ever were good also led to me slumping..

To summarize; I'll say that this year is a solid ⋆⋆⋆-star year and that I'm happy with what I've achieved but that I'm hoping 2020 will be better.

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Stay tuned for the next installment of this series which will be up on my blog tomorrow. Then we'll break down my reading of 2020 in stats/genres etc. It'll be nerdery galore and it'll be AWESOME!

TBR in December

Hi all,

December is approaching and so is my upcoming Christmas break! This honestly explains my sort of optimistic reading goal; I'm hoping I'll have at least the last week of December off so that I might read a lot.

Anyways, here we go!

* The Hanging Tree (Peter Grant #6) by Ben Aaronovitch
* Thick As Thieves (The Queen's Thief #5) by Megan Whalen Turner

* The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried by Shaun David Hutchinson

* Pulp by Robin Talley
* Like A Love Story by Abdi Nazemian
* The Lost Coast by Amy Rose Capetta

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Happy reading!