June Reading Wrap Up – and July Hiatus Announcement

I feel like every month I have to curb the urge to say ‘I don’t know where the month went’, but it’s true! June absolutely flew by, and it’s already time to do my wrap up.

Things have been pretty stressful chez Cat for the last few weeks (the work being done to our house continues, for one!) and I’ve found myself really not enjoying blogging – and worse, really not enjoying reading, which is something that’s a real shock to me as its always been my main hobby! I’ve been noticing that I’ve been rating books lower on average than I would normally, which makes me think it’s probably me rather than just a bad run… I really need to take a bit of a break and let myself read without deadlines and without feeling like I need to take notes or analyse books, so I’m going to be taking the whole of July off from blogging. I’ll honour any blog tours I’m signed up to, but otherwise, you won’t see any posts from me until the end of the month. Apologies to anyone waiting on a review from me, they will come eventually! I’m just so tired. I’m hoping that this will give me space to relax and just enjoy reading with less pressure, so that I can come back refreshed.

Anyway, onto June’s reading stats, since that’s the fun part!

Books read:

I read 33 books in June, bringing me up to 206 books for the year so far. That puts me up over the halfway mark for my goal, and a very little bit ahead compared to the amount of year gone! 33 is an okay number for me, pretty good but not my fastest, and I think there have definitely been multiple days this month when I’ve wanted to do anything but read, even with some of my most anticipated titles coming up. Still, that is more than the book a day in June I was hoping for, so it’s not to be sniffed at!

I’m not setting a concrete numbers goal in July, because I’m hoping to clear out some older review copies while I’m off, and a lot of them are the very long books I’ve been putting off in favour of quicker reads. We’ll see how it all goes!

Owned TBR:

Finally a little bit of downwards movement! I made it down 9 books, to 296. Hopefully from here it will all be down til the end of the year. It’s still pretty high but this was a really intense bookpost month – so many review copies came in. It’s such a lovely position to be in, but it does make it hard to make progress through the list. I’ve also hit a point where there’s not much unhauling left to be done as so much has gone out already!

28 books came in, and I read 11 of them, so there are 17 new June books on the TBR going forward. I’d love to see this number drop again in July, but I’m not setting myself anything concrete here either.

Reading Challenges:

I set myself a short challenge TBR for June of only 9 books. I read four of them and DNFed one – I lost all motivation in the second half of the month, so those two chunky fantasy novels didn’t stand a chance! I didn’t write a final wrap up for this as the one book I read after my Mid-Month Check In is one I’ll be writing a full review for, Green for Danger.

Blog posts:

I did manage a few reviews this month, which you can find here:

Lord of Worth by Philippa Jane Keyworth

Someone Else’s Shoes by Aldrea Alien

The Edinburgh Mystery and Other Tales of Scottish Crime

Meliora by Talli L Morgan

Kinship and Kindness by Kara Jorgensen

Odder Still by DN Bryn

And I also posted a set of Middle Grade Mini-Reviews and two Kitten Corner posts (here and here), plus a post about my Historical Romance Windfall, a spotlight for The Lost Laird from Her Past by Jeanine Englert, and finally the Mid Year Book Tag!

How was your June? If you’ve written a wrap up post, I’d love to see it – link it in the comments for me to check out! Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you again in August!