General Updates

January/February Wrap Up

- Meg

I should have made posts like this at the end of January and at the end of February, but better late than never! I also pretty much failed at blogging during the month of February, so I’m going to do better in March and beyond! Several of the books listed below will have reviews posted later in the month.

I read ten books in January and ten books in February for a total of twenty books read to my yearly goal of 100! Most of the books I read I gave a rating of 3 stars or higher. The few 5 star ratings include Thomas’s The Hate U Give, Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic.

MEMOIRS

  • The Princess Diarist – Carrie Fisher
  • Spaceman – Mike Massimino

YOUNG ADULT

  • Caraval – Stephanie Garber
  • Heartless – Marissa Meyer
  • The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas
  • Martians Abroad – Carrie Vaughn

ADULT FICTION

  • Swimming Lessons – Claire Fuller
  • Our Endless Numbered Days – Claire Fuller
  • Human Acts – Han Kang

MYSTERY

  • The White Cottage Mystery – Margery Allingham
  • The Cuckoo’s Calling – Robert Galbraith
  • A Perilous Undertaking – Deanna Raybourn

SF/FANTASY

  • A Darker Shade of Magic – V.E. Schwab
  • The Bear and the Nightingale – Katherine Arden
  • The Best American SF/F 2017 – ed. John Joseph Adams & Karen Joy Fowler
  • The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin

CLASSICS

  • Passing – Nella Larsen

MYTHOLOGY

  • Norse Mythology – Neil Gaiman

DNF

  • Carve the Mark – Veronica Roth

One Year Online!!

- Meg

fairybookmotheroneyear

I wanted to make a small post celebrating one year online and thanking every one of you for visiting and commenting! I can’t believe it’s been a year already!

I started this blog with the tiny shred of ideas of what I wanted to do last August at the beginning of my first year of teaching, and I feel like it’s taken almost that long to feel like I know what I’m doing and what I want to do. Here’s to many more years!

Monthly Rewind: February

- Meg

rewind

February was so quick and so full of activities! I did manage to read quite a bit and I’m now in the process of writing and adding the reviews. I’m using a new plug in that makes it so easy to add in all of the information! I’m working on updating the older posts with the new system, so if you see any weirdness, please let me know!

GENERAL BLOG UPDATES

I’m working on incorporating all of the old reviews into the new plug in, and it’s already keeping things incredibly organized. Some of the pages might look wonky in the process of it all, and I’m going to be working on some of the information pages as well to get it even more organized!

BOOKS READ 

DNF

BOOKS ACQUIRED

I am trying to curb my acquisitions, spend less, use my library more, and read what I own, so I’m pleased with this list. I’m still waiting on the two giveaways I won from Goodreads, so if those don’t arrive by this weekend, I’m going to drop both a line!

  • Stars Above – Marissa Meyer (purchased)
  • The Lady of the Camillas – Alexandre Dumas fils (purchased)
  • After Alice – Gregory Maguire (library, Edelweiss)
  • The Diviners – Libba Bray (library, audiobook)
  • War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (purchased)
  • Moby-Dick – Herman Melville (purchased)
  • The New York Stories of Edith Wharton – Edith Wharton (purchased)
  • Shylock is My Name – Howard Jacobson (Blogging for Books)
  • The Aeronaut’s Windlass (The Cinder Spires #1) – Jim Butcher (library)
  • Passenger – Alexandra Bracken (library, Netgalley)
  • Uprooted – Naomi Novik (library)
  • Assassin’s Apprentice (Farseer Trilogy #1) – Robin Hobb (purchased)
  • The Quick – Lauren Owen (purchased)
  • The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller (purchased)

March’s review will be posted at the beginning of April! This month has already flown by too!

Monthly Rewind: January

- Meg

rewind

January was a weird and busy month! I moved back in with best friends in their new house, I am on the hunt for an additional job to support myself while I finish out this semester as an adjunct English professor, and I’m seriously loving that I can see the library from my front door. I did manage to read six books (and didn’t finish one). Now that I feel more established, I think I’ll be posting these once a month, and next month’s will hopefully be less sparse. So here’s January’s recap!

GENERAL BLOG UPDATES

Even though I technically implemented it in February, the blog has a little bit of a facelift! It was looking a little plain and impersonal, so it was time for a change. There’s a main blog header, and three headers for the three main styles of posts I’ll be writing. I might get fancier later.

BOOKS READ 

I’ve posted a review for one of these, I want to write a proper review for Truthwitch, and I think I’ll post a mini-review recap in a few days for the rest of them.

  • The Crimson Petal and the White – Michel Faber (owned)
  • The Bad Beginning – Lemony Snicket (owned)
  • The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight – Jennifer E. Smith (Netgalley)
  • Moth and Spark – Anne Leonard (owned)
  • The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories – Michel Faber (library)
  • Truthwitch – Susan Dennard (library)

DNF

I usually try to finish all of the books I read, but this one I had to stop about 60% of the way through. I’ll post more about it in that mini-review recap.

  • The Good Luck of Right Now – Matthew Quick

BOOKS ACQUIRED

I am trying to curb my acquisitions, spend less, use my library more, and read what I own, so I’m pleased with this list. I’m still waiting on the two giveaways I won from Goodreads, so if those don’t arrive by this weekend, I’m going to drop both a line!

  • 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas – Marie-Helene Bertino (Blogging for Books)
  • The Apple: New Crimson Petal Stories – Michel Faber (library)
  • Truthwitch – Susan Dennard (library)
  • The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah (library)
  • The Dressmaker – Rosalie Ham (library)
  • Eleanor – Jason Gurley (library)
  • We That Are Left – Clare Clark (library)
  • Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (purchased)
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens – Alan Dean Foster (purchased)

That’s all for this month. I’m planning on making this short, leap-yeared February a full one!

 

2016 Challenges and Goals

- Meg

I know a lot of people set goals and resolutions for the new year, but it’s such a great time to do it! I’m moving at the end of this month (ick, timing), so being in a new place in the new year will be absolutely a great time to start reinforcing good habits and practices. I won’t list my personal goals as they don’t really fit in with the bookish theme I want to keep with this blog, tf

READING GOALS

  • Read a minimum of 100 books (tracked by Goodreads and my spreadsheet). 100 is a good number for me. I don’t feel too bad if I just read a hundred, but when I read more than that, it feels like a real accomplishment.
  • Read all of (or at least a majority of) the ARCs I’ve been approved for (on Netgalley and Edelweiss). There are fewer than 15. Sometimes about a third of them I don’t finish because I don’t like them, but I want to be better about this and get my percentages to 75% or higher. I get approval happy and have had a few books sitting on my iPad from… over a year now. I’m going to start with the oldest first and move forward. It doesn’t necessarily help that I just got a little download/request happy and filled up my queue with a bit more. I’m just really excited about these titles and need to read them now!
  • Use my library more. I want to save a good amount of money in 2016 to travel and to pay off some lingering bills, so instead of buying a lot of books (not working at a bookstore currently helps with that) I want to use my library!
  • Purchase no more than two books a month. The only times I can purchase more are when I’m taking books to my local used bookstore and have the credit for them, when I finish one of the Penguin Drop Caps and want to read the next letter, or during my birthday month (April).
  • Write about the books as I’m reading them. I started doing this last year when I started Madame Bovary (which I currently haven’t finished but I remember everything that happened). I paused every three or four chapters and wrote something about it: a summary of what happened and/or my thoughts about it, even if it’s just a few sentences. This also ties into my own personal goal of writing in a journal more. I’m going to use a journal as a catch-all for everything rather than have individual journals for different things.

BLOG GOALS

  • Post at least three times a week (hopefully Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, but whenever I feel like it because sometimes scheduling these things doesn’t always line up with my work schedule). If it makes it easier for me, I might have “writing days” in which I write a lot of posts and schedule them to be posted at a later date. Scheduled posts would work well with ARC reviews, too, because I wouldn’t want to post reviews too early.
  • Comment on blogs I like and use social media more! I visit a lot of blogs but I never comment, mostly because I feel like I have nothing to say but most of the time I feel too shy to say anything. Oops.
  • Use more images in my posts! I’ve been teaching myself Canva because it makes it really easy and helps make everything uniform!

READING CHALLENGES

I’ll make specific posts for these soon! Some of them are happening around the book blog world and some of them are my own personal challenges.

  • Flights of Fantasy – read at least 12 new to me fantasy titles.
  • #RockMyTBR – read at least 40 books I already own, cannot combine with other challenges.
  • Classics Challenge – personal challenge; read at least 24 classics, 12 must be new to me.
  • Star Wars/Star Trek – personal challenge; read at least 5 Star Wars novels and 5 Star Trek novels and review them.
  • Strips/physical ARCs – personal challenge; working for a bookstore allowed for stripped titles and ARCs to be taken home. I have quite a few of these so I’d like to read at least 10 of these and review them.

If I finish my above challenges, that puts me really, really close to my 100 title goal for 2016. I’m ready for it!