March & April Reading Wrap Up

Hi all!

I didn’t do a wrap up last month so am combining it with this one into a two month wrap up of a mighty 14 books!

So admittedly, these are mostly audiobooks but I still count it and am really happy to have gotten through so many. March started off with the Yearathon which I posted about here and where I started reading Winter by Marissa Meyer which I’m still reading now, and finished 2 Harry Potter books; The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire.

The next three weeks were then spent traveling about Ireland with my boyfriend and during these long drives we listened to the last Harry Potter books; The Order of the Pheonix, The Half-Blood Prince, and The Deathly Hallows. I loved this whole re-read through and will be sure to do it again sometime. The only physical book that I finished was the Berlitz Dublin Pocket Guide, which was perfect for what I wanted as it had lots of great place recommendations and also a few bits of info on each place so that I could pester my boyfriend with cool facts about everywhere we went in Dublin. We began Sylvain Neuvel’s Themis Files series, finishing both Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods. I hadn’t previously heard of this series or author but absolutely loved both books. Sadly the third book was then only released on the 1st of May so I’m excited to read that this month! I then listened to The Undomestic Goddess by Sophie Kinsella which was pretty good, and Outlander by Diana Gabaldon which I have mixed feelings about but am planning to continue with the series at some point.

This then marked the end of our driving through Ireland, but had reignited my love for audiobooks so I began working through some of the unread titles in my library; The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rob Dobelli and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I found The Art of Thinking Clearly boring and repetitive, while How to Win Friends and Influence People was better. I then took a break from the non-fiction with Lost for Words by Stephanie Butland which was great, all about books, families, and relationships. Lastly, I went for The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg which I found fascinating although again was a little repetitive.

I doubt I’ll read anywhere near as many books in May but will hopefully get through a couple at least, tell me in the comments if you’ve read any of these and what you thought! See you next time 🙂

March #AYearAThon Wrap Up

Hi all!

I took part in the yearathon again this month.

The theme was retellings for which I started reading Winter by Marissa Meyer, the last book in the Luner Chronicles series. I’m enjoying this so far but am getting through it slowly so am still not very far.

However, for the challenge of marathoning a series I continued with listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks, finishing both The Prisoner of Azkaban and The Goblet of Fire. I’m loving this rereading and am listening to these as much as possible, enthralled once more in the wizarding world.

The April Yearathon is from the 2nd to the 8th and has the theme of books that have been sitting on your shelf for a while, with the challenge of one-word titles. I think have quite a lot of books that will fit both of these categories so will hopefully get a lot of reading done and clear my tbr shelves a little!

See y’all at my monthly wrap-up!

February Wrap Up

Hi all!

Hope you’ve had a good February! I’ve got a bunch of reading done so am really pleased with that, kicking off the month with the #AYearAThon readathon which I posted about here, in which I finished reading Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book: The Mowgli Stories. I also started reading Teju Cole’s Open City which I haven’t finished, and Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone by JK Rowling and which I did finish. I have since also finished The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz which was good but very strange, and Descender Vol.2.

Other than Descender, these were all audiobooks which is how I was able to read so much this month but I’ve enjoyed my reading this month and am currently reading Zadie Smith’s NW and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

How did your reading go this month and did any of you read any good books?

February #AYearAThon Wrap Up

Hi all!

I took part in the #AYearAThon this month, although wasn’t planning on sticking to the theme, although I didn’t realise that the theme was ‘New to you authors’ which applies to both books that I finished.

I finished listening to the audiobook of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and also listened to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book: The Mowgli Stories. I loved both books as I found Remainder intriguing, thought the main character was really well written, and the ending had me gripped. The Jungle Book stories were then very sweet, although different to how I expected them to be, very enjoyable though while each story is nice and short and the voices for each character are great.

I have also started reading Open City by Teju Cole, another author that is new to me, so fits with the theme, and then am listening to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling, so will hopefully finish both of those in the rest of this month.

I’ll do another post at the end of the month as a monthy wrap up for the rest of my uni reading, Harry Potter, and some graphic novels that I hope to read, and will hopefully take part in the March #AYearAThon which is going to be on the 5th-11th with the theme of retellings and the challenge of marathoning a series.

Anyone else taken part in the February #AYearAThon and read any good books?

October Wrap Up & November TBR (Including AYearAThon)

Throughout October I didn’t do that much reading sadly, but I participated in the AYearAThon and posted about it here.

So for the readathon I read part of Northern Lights, some individual poems, an extract, and an article. For the rest of the month I read:

• Some extracts from Personal Narrative of Travels of the New Continent During the Years 1799-1804 by Alexander Von Humboldt
• Part of Findings by Kathleen Jamie
• Part of Travels in Alaska by John Muir
• Part of At the Yeoman’s House by Ronald Blythe
• Part of The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau

I’m disappointed that I only read parts of books and didn’t actually finish any books, but hopefully, November will be my reading comeback!

Because I’m writing this on the 5th of November I’ve already read the poems by Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snider, and Judith Wright that I needed to read for class, then the November AYearAThon is the 6th to the 12th (with details here) and so I’m planning to read:

• The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation by Leopold Aldo
• The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

Then for the rest of the month would like to read:

• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
• “From Practitioner to Practitioner-Researcher” by Robin Nelson
• “Creative Writing as a Research Method” by Jon Cook
• The Last Canyon by John Vernon
• Dart by Alice Oswald
• The Luminous Coast by Jules N. Pretty
• Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees by Richard Mabey
• Nature Cure by Richard Mabey
• Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill
• Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

I’ll be doing an AYearAThon wrap-up at the end of the week and then a November wrap-up at the end of the month so see you then, and comment if you’ve read any of these books or are also planning to!

Yearathon Wrap Up (+ Altered October TBR)

I sadly didn’t have a very productive October Yearathon as I have been ill with freshers flu but uni is now underway and so I did get a little reading done.

Firstly I just read 1 chapter of Northern Lights by Philip Pullman, which I’m really enjoying but am getting through really slowly. I have read this book before but only vaguely remember it.

Then there were some changes in the reading for one of my university modules so I read some things which weren’t in my Yearathon TBR but that I needed to read this week:

• “Nutting” by William Wordsworth
• “Kubla Khan: Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• “Darkness” by Lord Byron
• “I am” by John Clare
• An extract from A Defence of Poetry by Percy Shelley
• An article about the ethics of zoos

So I didn’t read very much as the first four are just individual poems and then the extract and article were small, but hopefully, I’ll be reading more in next month’s Yearathon.

Due to the changes in my course reading my TBR for October as a whole has changed quite a bit too and so my new list is:

• Extracts from Personal Narrative of Travels of the New Continent During the Years 1799-1804 by Alexander Von Humboldt
• “The Trouble With Wilderness: Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” by William Cronon
• Findings by Kathleen Jamie
• Travels in Alaska by John Muir
• Extracts from Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Roger Deakin
• Extracts from Notes From Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin, Alison Hastie, and Terence Blacker
• At the Yeoman’s House by Ronald Blythe
• The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau
• Some poems by Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snider, and Judith Wright
• Extracts of The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

Thanks for reading and see you next time, comment if you also took part in the Yearathon and if you did more reading in it than me!

October 2017 TBR (Including Yearathon TBR)

Welcome back to my blog after another year-long hiatus because uni always takes up more time than I expect, meaning that I tend to stop blogging or just post sporadically. However,  I wanted to start it up again this year and actually try to stick to it by using the blog as an aid to my uni course. I felt like that would be useful and allow me to keep updating my blog without feeling bad that I’m not doing uni work, so a lot of the books on this blog will be ones that I am studying on my Masters course.

Therefore, this month’s to-be-read list is mostly uni books and I am going to take part in just one readathon as I haven’t done any for so long.

The Yearathon is taking place in this first week of October and therefore I am planning to read a bunch of uni books as I would like to get ahead before term gets busy. This means that I’m not sticking to the theme of the readathon but I will be participating in the challenge. The October Yearathon can be found here and the theme this month is LGBTQ+, while the challenge is to read poetry or short stories.

First off I want to finish reading Findings by Kathleen Jamie which I am really enjoying so far and I am counting as part of the challenge because it’s a collection of short essays (basically the same as reading a bunch of short stories right?). Another course book that I want to get through this week is Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees by Robert Deakin although I only need to read a few small sections so I am also going to count this as part of the challenge. Lastly, I just need to read a section of Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, and At the Yeoman’s House by Ronald Blythe which is a short book so I am actually counting all of these as part of the challenge.

I am also currently reading Northern Lights by Philip Pullman as a non-uni book so would like to finish that this month but it depends if I am sick of reading after my uni books.

Then the rest of my uni reading for the month will be:

• The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
• Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown
• Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill
• And finally some poems by Robinson Jeffers

I’ll do a wrap-up of my Yearathon reading at the end of the week and then a monthly wrap-up at the end of the month, along with possibly doing some posts about specific books if I have time.

Thanks for reading and see you next time, comment and tell me if you are reading any of the same books this month or if you’re participating in the Yearathon this month too!

July & August Book Wrap Up & September TBR

Book Haul

In July I received copies of Cruel Broken Heart by Emma Haughton and These Shallow Graves from a friend, and then went to Yalc (The Young Adult Literature Convention in London) where I bought:

• How Not to Disappear by Clare Furniss
• Lies by Michael Grant (pre-signed)
• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (pre-signed)
• The Manifesto on How to be Interesting by Holly Bourne (which I got signed)
• The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood (which I got signed)
• The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater (which I got signed)

Here are a couple photos from Yalc, one of a wall of books, and one from a panel that I went to:

And here are photos of all the books and other things that I got from there:

In August I bought Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and got Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud as an ebook on the Kindle app.

Reading Wrap Up

In July I read:

• Binge by Tyler Oakley
• Saint Anything by Sarah Dessen
• The Loneliness of Distant Beings by Kate Ling.

In August I read:

• Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
• Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by J. K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, and John Tiffany
• We Are All Made of Molecules by Susin Nielsen
• The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

Here’s a photo of all those books (other than Binge because I read that as an audiobook):

I really loved all of the books that I read over these 2 months which was amazing, and I don’t think I can really pick a favourite but if I had to maybe Fangirl, just because it was the perfect time to read it around going to Yalc, as it was the book I read on the train there and back, and just fitted so well into how excited I was about it all.

September TBR

I’m going back to uni this September so I need to get through quite a lot of uni books but there’s also some readathons I want to take part in and non-uni books that I want to read.

There’s a YearAThon for books under 200 pages that I think I’m going to use to get through the samplers that I got from Yalc, a small poetry book, We Were Liars by E.Lockhart, and to finish Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Freud (a uni book). Then there’s a Duodecathon at the end of the month where I’d like to do the 1200 pages challenge and the favourite colour on a cover challenge but I’m not sure what books this will be with. One that I want to re-read at some point because I’m using it for my dissertation at uni is Scarlet by Marissa Meyer.

I’ll do wrap up posts for both of those readathons and maybe a couple review posts soon, so see you there 🙂 Comment below if you’ve read any of these books or about what you read in these months!