21 Books In 2021 Challenge

Hello everyone! It’s been a long time since my last post. What can I say, 2020 was a doozy. My hope this year is to be more active here but at the same time still keep things low key and as stress free as possible. This is supposed to be fun 🙂

My first post for 2021 is a reading challenge that I have been seeing around both in the blogging world and on Instagram. It seems like the perfect way to knock off some books that have been sitting on my TBR list for far too long as well as books I acquired last year that I had fully intended on reading in 2020. My full reading goal for the year is 75 books so this will be only a fraction of what I hope to read this year. This challenge is pretty self-explanatory… to choose 21 books that you want to read in 2021.

• The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons
• Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
• Aurora Rising by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman
• Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw
• Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
• A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown
• Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati
• The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson
• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
• With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
• Ross Poldark by Winston Graham
• Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff
• Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Regretting You by Colleen Hoover
• The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
• Recursion by Blake Crouch

I feel like this is a pretty good mix of genres so I should be able to fit all of my moods whenever they strike. What books are you hoping to read this year that you haven’t gotten around to in years past?

20 Books of Summer: 2020

Hello! I’m here for another attempt at the 20 Books of Summer challenge! I don’t know that I’ve ever read all of the books I’ve picked for my challenge TBR but it’s fun to put them together anyways. I am a mood reader so I put together a different variety of genres to keep me interested all summer long. I will also be focusing on ARCs as I mentioned in my last post but I decided not to include those in this list. So here we have my book choices for the next three months. I don’t have them in any particular order so I will just pick and choose throughout the list as I go. The two books marked with an * are books I need to read before two of the ARCs on my list for June.

(All links are to each book’s Goodreads page)

1. Recursion by Blake Crouch
2. The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski
3. Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw
4. Regretting You by Colleen Hoover
5. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
6. Warrior of the Altaii by Robert Jordan
7. The Beautiful by Renee Ahdieh
8. The Near Witch by V.E. Schwab
9. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
10. Misery by Stephen King
11. The Lost Queen by Signe Pike*
12. Escaping From Houdini by Kerri Maniscalco
13. Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
14. Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater
15. House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
16. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
17. Postscript by Cecelia Ahern
18. DEV1AT3 by Jay Kristoff*
19. Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor
20. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The following are the ARCs that I will be focusing on for the month of June. As I mentioned above, two of these ARCs I need to read a preceding book for and I included those books in my challenge TBR, marked with an *. I also marked the corresponding ARCs with an *. I put these in order of publication date and my plan is to read them in this exact order.

 

1. Blood Countess by Lana Popovic
2. Ruthless Gods by Emily A. Duncan
3. A Bad Day for Sunshine by Darynda Jones
4. Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner
5. The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
6. The Dilemma by B.A. Paris
7. TRUEL1F3 by Jay Kristoff*
8. The Forgotten Kingdom by Signe Pike*

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Have you read any of the books on my list?

 

 

2019 Beat the Backlist

Surprise! I’m going to do another reading challenge this year! I didn’t think I would be joining any other challenges this year but this one actually fits in perfectly with one of my goals this year so why not! Austine @ NovelKnight is hosting this great challenge. The goal of this challenge is to read books that have been on your TBR for awhile. Basically any book that was published 2018 or earlier is fair game. The challenge runs from January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019 so any book from your backlist read between those dates counts towards the challenge.

I already wanted to read a lot of the books that I’ve kept waiting on my shelves so I didn’t really have a set number or anything that I wanted to go with. So I just emptied one of my shelves and filled it up with different choices that I really want to read this year. Links go to Goodreads.

• The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson
• Dreams of Gods & Monsters by Laini Taylor
• Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff
• The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer
• Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
• And I Darken by Kiersten White
• Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
• The Fallon Blood by Reagan O’Neil (aka Robert Jordan)
• Sinner by Maggie Stiefvater
• The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
• Vicious by V.E. Schwab
• Mariana by Susanna Kearsley
• Missoula by Jon Krakauer
• The Kingmaker’s Daughter by Philippa Gregory
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Wayfarer by Alexandra Bracken
• Ivory and Bone by Julie Eshbaugh
• My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows
• Ten Thousand Skies Above You by Claudia Gray
• Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati
• My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier
• This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab

I will also very loosely be marking off squares for this bingo card. I’m not going to go out of my way to fill in any squares but any book published pre-2019 that fulfills a square will be great.

Are you participating in this challenge? Have you read any of the books on my list?

 

 

2019 Bookish Goals

Hey everyone! I meant to post this days ago but as I was finishing putting the final touches on the post, everything got deleted with no way of getting it back. I got really frustrated so left it until I felt like rewriting everything all over again. So anyways, today I am going to post about my bookish goals for the new year.

• Read 75 books – I had originally set my Goodreads goal for 100 books but after thinking about the number of books I’ve read the past two years, I wanted to lower that number to ease some of the pressure. I’ve often left off reading larger books because they take longer and I’ve felt like I needed to read shorter books to get more read as quickly as possible.
• Re-read one book per quarter – The past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about the books I’ve been wanting to re-read. This year I want to take some time to read some of those so I want to try and read at least one every three months.
• Go to the library once per quarter – Growing up I spent A LOT of time going to the library and I loved it. I haven’t gone for a long time and really miss going. This year I want to take some time every few months to go to the library, browse, and check out a book or two.
• Book buying ban – I am putting myself on a mostly no spend year this year, including books. I do have the exception of allowing myself the preorders I have for my favorite authors. But no more trips to Half Price Books or browsing Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
• #UNREADBOTMCHALLENGE – This is a challenge I found out about through Instagram. January, February, March my goal will be to read two of my unread Book of the Month books. I will probably try to make my own goal to continue that throughout the year until I have them all read. I currently have 17 unread BOTM books. I had canceled my subscription awhile back because I wasn’t ever getting around to reading the books I picked out. I do love the subscription though and hope to subscribe again in the future.

What are some of your bookish goals for this year?

My Blog’s Name In Books

I saw this book meme posted by Yvo @ It’s All About Books and I couldn’t resist joining the fun. This book meme was originally started by Lynne @ Fictionophile and I thought it sounded like a lot of fun and a good way to get some of these older TBR titles back on my mind.

THE RULES:

1.  Spell out your blog’s name. (this is where you wish your blog’s name was shorter LOL)

2. Find a book from your TBR that begins with each letter. (Note you cannot ADD to your TBR to complete this challenge – the books must already be on your Goodread’s TBR)

3. Have fun!

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I was thinking this was going to be a lot harden than I thought because off the top of my head, I could not think of any books starting with O and K. I have three O’s and two K’s in my blog name so I was thinking I was going to have a struggle. My goal was to look first through my unread owned print books and if I ran out, move on to my unread owned Kindle books. Luckily I managed to find them all within my unread owned print books! I don’t read my Kindle very often because I prefer a physical book so this made me pretty happy. Most of these books have been on my TBR forever, with the exception of The Kiss Quotient which is a recent addition thanks to Book of the Month Club.  So without further ado… here we go! (All links go to book’s Goodreads page)

  

T: Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake

H: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

E: Elantris by Brandon Sanderson

   

W: Warcross by Marie Lu

O: One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

R: Renegades by Marissa Meyer

N: Not A Drop To Drink by Mindy McGinnis

   

B: The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons

O: Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys

O: Our Dark Duet by Victoria Schwab

K: The Kingmaker’s Daughter by Philippa Gregory

M: My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows

A: And I Darken by Kiersten White

R: Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

K: The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

   

And there you have it! I am going to challenge myself and see how many of these books I can read before the end of the year.

Have you read any of these books?