February Reading Wrap Up and, Sorry, Yet Another Hiatus Announcement…

February’s done and dusted, and I spent most of it in a massive reading slump. There was a point two weeks ago where I’d only read three books, but I did manage to pick up a few things in the second half of the month, and I’m pretty pleased with my progress overall.

I think my brain still needs a fair bit more rest after January’s Covid, so I’m going to be putting myself back on semi-hiatus until, most likely, June. I won’t be totally absent, as I have a lot of review copies to talk about, but I won’t be holding myself to any sort of schedule, so you’ll just see a few posts pop up here and there as I get to them. I also won’t be setting myself any monthly TBR challenges in this time, because I think a good long period of mood reading is exactly what I need to get back to full power. This isn’t what I was hoping for, but I hope you’ll still stick around for the reviews I do manage to get written.

In all honesty, I’m a bit burned out on blogging. It’s a huge amount of work for very little interaction or reward, and while I love getting review copies, the pressure to review can make reading rather stressful as I have to be taking notes, rather than simply enjoying a book. I’m also putting a lot more energy into being an author, which as well as taking up its own time, makes it tricky to read books for fun without one eye on the craft as well as the story! You’ll be able to find me most active as AdieHartAuthor on Instagram, and I do hope you’ll follow me over there if you want to stay in touch while I’m taking a break here.

And now, onto February’s stats!

January Reading Wrap Up

Well, I didn’t intend to be so quiet this month! I was incredibly busy for the first half of the month with reading and editing submissions for Indie Bites magazine, and then after three years of managing to dodge it, I finally succumbed to Covid at the end of the month, so it was a bad month for the book side of things all over. But I’m on the mend, and the editing’s almost done, so let’s wrap up what I did get read and done, and move on to February!

December/End of 2022 Wrap Up

Happy New Year! I’m back from my hiatus feeling very refreshed, and I’m really excited to get back to reviewing and talking books! As with last year, I thought I’d reflect on December as a month, with some thoughts about the whole year mixed in, and then set myself some fresh 2023 goals tomorrow.

I set myself two goals for 2022:

• to read 400 books
• to reduce my TBR

And with both of these, I did much better than expected!

November Reading Wrap Up

I truly feel like November barely even happened! It’s been a strange reading month for me, mostly very slumpy – I’ve been writing and editing a lot, which can make it tricky to read for fun, and I’m also just really exhausted in general. I’m actually going to put myself back on something of a hiatus for December – there are a few Christmas books I really want to review, and I’m looking forward to doing my yearly wrap up and favourites list, so I won’t be completely absent, but I’m hoping that taking the time pressure off will let me get back to just reading for the joy of it again. I’ll be popping in and out with the odd post, but don’t expect something from me every day! Taking a break worked really well to refresh me over the summer, and I’m hopeful that if it sets off a reading spark like September’s again, I could be looking at a great reading month to make one final push for the year’s TBR…

Anyway, let’s see how November’s numbers panned out!

October Reading Wrap Up

Well, nothing was going to top the extraordinary heights of September’s reading, but October turned out pretty darned respectable on the book front – let’s break down some numbers!

September Reading Wrap Up

Wow, did September even happen? It absolutely flew by! I have had an absolutely stonking reading month, even if I feel like I’ve hardly done anything else, so let’s see how the numbers stack up this time (spoiler alert, I’m super pleased!)

August Reading Wrap Up – and Another Hiatus

August is the first month this year that’s actually felt like a long one! The summer’s stretched out beautifully this month, I’ve got lots of reading done, and the house stress has finally lightened up a bit.

That being said, as you can see from the title, I will be taking another month’s hiatus in September – the start of the new school year is always a real adjustment for our family as we have to readapt to juggling work and home life, plus I have a writing deadline at the end of the month, so I think this year it makes sense to put one of my spinning plates down in advance! I’ve got a couple of blog tours booked in, and I may throw up the odd post if I get a moment, but otherwise I’ll be pretty quiet on the blog until the start of October (when Hallowreadathon returns!).

Okay, with that out of the way, shall we see how my reading’s stacked up this month?

July Reading Wrap Up – And My Return!

So here I am back from hiatus! I wish I could say it had been a relaxing one, but unfortunately the plumbing saga continues and I’m still rather overwhelmed. What has happened, though, is that I’ve been able to give myself some reading space and avoid getting too slumpy, and as I’d hoped, it’s meant that I have a little more energy for reviewing. I actually have posts scheduled for the next two weeks already! I may take a few more breaks this year if things continue to be stressful, but for now, I’m happy to be back. Let’s take a look at how things went while I was away!

Books read:

I read 43 books in July, bringing me up to 251 books for the year so far. I’m pretty happy with that – it’s always nice to hit that 250 marker because it makes me feel like I can relax a little about hitting my end-of-year goal! In fact, I’m a little ahead, with 62.75% of my target hit and only 58.3% of the year gone. I didn’t get quite as many older review copies read as I’d hoped I might, but I did end up rearranging my bookshelves quite drastically (from rainbow to genre), which really allowed me to re-evaluate the kind of things I actually have on my shelves, and also helped with some of the review copy chaos on my desk, so I feel a bit more on track.

For August, I’d like to read at least 31 books. That’s at least a book a day, and I think that’s doable at the moment while it’s still the school holidays!

Owned TBR:

A very tiny amount of downwards movement to 293 books – but I really didn’t think I was going to get any movement at all! A lot of the books I read this month were from my Historical Romance Windfall post, which actually aren’t on my official TBR, so although my read number is high, not all of them were tick-off-able. I also took advantage of a Kindle offer to get some ebook credit, so I added a bunch of ebooks to my TBR that I honestly didn’t need (but am excited to read, there’s T Kingfisher in there!). 38 books came in, and I read 14 of them, so there are 24 new July books on the TBR going forward.

I’m going to aim to have the TBR creep down under 285 in August. I don’t think I have a ton of new releases or ARCs on my radar for August, so if it’s a quiet bookpost month, maybe I can finally start to make progress down towards that end-of-year 200 goal!

Reading Challenges:

There was no reading challenge in July, of course, but I’m putting together August’s TBR and it’s going to be quite an intense one! That post will be up on the 3rd August, so keep an eye out…

Blog posts:

Despite being away, I did still have a few blog tours to take part in, so here are my reviews for those in case you missed any:

The Extraordinary Voyage of Katy Willacott by Sharon Gosling

No Sleep For Bear by Duncan Beedie

Mia and the Lightcasters by Janelle McCurdy

So there we have it. What did you get up to in July? Read anything good? I’d love to be linked to your wrap up posts if you have them, or just to hear about your reading in the comments!

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!

May Reading Wrap Up

I can feel the weather getting warmer and I have to keep reminding myself we’re approaching summer, and it’s not the beginning of the year any more! I’m writing this post on the 29th, as I’ll be super busy for the next couple of days, but because of that I also don’t think I’ll finish any other books this month so this should still be accurate…