Lost in My Library

I've usually had a good track record with my Goodreads challenges. It was a little bit of a struggle last year, but in other years, I've made it with time to spare and actually increased my challenge in a couple of cases. I was so sure that last year was just a fluke and I'd be back to breezing through my challenges without making any special effort. Not so much. I honestly don't remember what I set my challenge as at the beginning of the year. I had to lower it pretty quickly when I got horribly behind, and as of right now, my Goodreads challenge is to read 100 books. I know that's a lot for some people, but I haven't set it this low since 2013. And every year since then, I've ended up reading at least 140 books. My highest goal was 170 in in 2015, which I broke by reading 174 books. My highest number was actually the next year, when I set my goal lower but wound up reading 180 books. And now, when my goal has been lowered to 100 and we are (at ...

Here's something I haven't tried in a while: a discussion post. And I'm not really sure that I have enough thoughts on this particular subject to make it a particularly in-depth one, but it's something that I've been thinking about for a while, and I'm interested in getting some other opinions. The central question is this: how long is too long to wait between reading books in a series? I don't think there's an exact answer for this, but there are two recent examples from my reading life that suggest that there might be some kind of limit. A few weeks ago, I went through my to-read shelf in an effort to take a lot of books off of it. There were quite a few unfinished series on there, such as the REBEL OF THE SANDS series. I read the first book around two years ago, shortly after it was released, and really enjoyed it. However, when the second book was released, I just never got around to it. And now, the whole series has been released and I...

There's something that I've been thinking about for a while, probably since I read WINTER , the last book in the Lunar Chronicles, almost two years ago. (Or, more accurately, the last novel - there have been a few add-ons since then.) I love the whole series, and I gave all of them five stars, but there was something about that last book that just didn't quite live up to the other three for me. After that, I started thinking about it more generally. In so many cases, no matter how much I like it, the last book in a series is my least favorite. The Firebird trilogy. The Infernal Devices. The Hunger Games. The Wrath & the Dawn. Wolf by Wolf. Graceling. For some reason, it just doesn't measure up to the rest. But why? Are series finales really so consistently different from the other books in a series? I think they might be, simply because they have to wrap everything up. In so many cases, this makes the book pretty different than its predecessors. Sometimes, ...

I've been pretty absent from my blog this month, and I don't really have much of an excuse. I've had summer vacation! I should have all the time in the world! And yet my reading and blogging has been about as inconsistent as during the school year. Why? The dreaded reading slump, and the inevitable (for me, at least) subsequent blogging slump. I haven't finished a book since the first few days of this month. I've tried to pick up a few others, but I just can't get into them. And I kind of miss reading, but I also kind of don't. It's one of those reading slumps - when everything else you do kind of fills in your life so there's not exactly a hole in your life where reading used to be. But this reading slump really hasn't been a bad thing! I've relaxed in other ways. I've watched a ton of Netflix. I've done a lot of organizing. I've spent time with friends. I've read so many things online that aren't books - I feel...

I've been getting more review copies lately, so I've been writing a lot more long reviews than I was a while ago. And I've learned that they can either be my hardest or my easiest posts to write. Once in a blue moon, my thoughts about a particular book just come flowing out. But most of the time, I really struggle to put my feelings into words. I haven't been able to figure out why that is yet, but it's made me spend a lot of time thinking: what makes a good review? So far, I've come up with a few specifics: Overall impressions. The first thing I want to know when I'm reading a review is whether or not the person liked the book. After that, I want to know the two or three best or worst things about it. What stuck out? What are the things that make this book different, whether it's in a good or a bad way? Or is it that nothing stuck out? A few intriguing tidbits can really get me interested in a book or turn me away from it, and that's one of...

I seem to be constantly going back and forth between having too many post ideas and not having enough. The thing is, though, that when I don't have a lot of ideas, it usually just means that I don't think I have enough to say about anything to actually make a post. Which poses an interesting question: how long do posts need to be? In particular, I'm thinking about discussion posts. I have a lot of bookish things I want to discuss, and discussion posts seem like one of the best ways to share my thoughts. But sometimes, my thoughts aren't fully-formed, or aren't that complex. I usually shy away from writing about those ideas because I don't think I have enough material to justify a post. But why don't I think I have enough? I've been a little behind on wr iting posts in advance, so it seem ed like I was running into th is question more and more often. And after a while of thinking about that, I had m y little breakthrough : I'm thinking a...

Last year, I did a post about my thoughts on required reading. This is a rough follow-up to that. It's that time of year again - the start of a new semester! I know my school starts later than most, so if you're a student, you've probably already started. But I just started my classes a couple of days ago...which explains why my Friday post is going up on a day that's definitely not Friday. (Oh, well.) It also means that it's the perfect time to talk about required reading again. Quick recap of the last post: I was required to reread PRIDE AND PREJUDICE , which I'd originally read on my own and loved, and hated it. Update: last semester, I was required to reread THE GREAT GATSBY , another book that I'd originally loved. But this time, the required reread made me love the book even more. But I can't put my finger on anything that made rereading the two books different, except for the fact that I already knew I wanted to reread Gatsby at some p...

One thing I'm usually pretty good at is pretending that I know what I'm doing. It's probably one of the most important things I learned in school! (Don't worry, my education wasn't that bad - that doesn't mean that faking it isn't a life skill.) But there are still a lot of times that I don't actually know what I'm doing. And that extends to blogging. Actually, it's especially true of blogging. Most of the time, I figure "my blog, my rules" and do what I want, which is usually making things up as I go along, but there are things I actually don't know. (For example: does this count as a discussion post when it's basically just me asking for he lp and advice and not really offering anything ? Who knows? Not me. But we're gonna call it a discussion for tagging pu rposes anyway.) Lately, I've been thinking a lot about two dilemmas posed by ARCs. I'm pretty new to the world of ARCs - I've known what they are...

This may or may not be part of a series about various bookish pros and cons. A few months ago, I wrote about the pros and cons of TBR sizes , and now I have this post. Will I ever do any other pros and cons posts? Maybe, maybe not. I'm keeping it open. As of a few months ago, I hated the idea of putting together a monthly TBR. I was reading anywhere from 10 to 30 books a month, and my reading schedule would pretty much be whatever books I got from the library. I considered making monthly TBRs a couple of times, but they always ended up with maybe two books on them and then a whole bunch of "we'll see" spaces. But now, things have changed. I actually have TBRs planned for the next two months, order and all...and I'm really liking it. Why? Maybe it's because I'm going to the library less often, so I don't have an influx of brand-new books every couple of weeks. Maybe it's because I have less time to read in general, so I have to prioritize th...

This post has minor spoilers for It Looks Like This, mostly having to do with the tone of the book. The world in general is becoming more accepting of difference. You don't have to look far at all to find evidence against this, but we're on a definite, if slow, upward trend. And YA fiction is generally pretty good at reflecting those changes. It's no longer quite so difficult to find books with queer characters (though there are definitely still representation problems). And more and more, those queer characters are given what more and more queer people are getting: hope. Hope that someday, they can live in a world where they no longer have to be careful about who they are. Hope about so many things . I know that not all queer people have this hope or this freedom. The world hasn't changed that much, not yet. And in order to have books that really represent queer people, we need books that represent that struggle, that tragedy. But even so, there's somethin...

First things first: I know that there are thousands of people, from book bloggers to literary critics, who have written about this topic before. I wasn't inspired by any particular one of them, but it's a common topic that I happen to have a lot to say about. And because of that, I'm probably just going to be rambling here. There are billions of lists entitled something like "X Books Everyone Should Read in Their Lifetime," with X being any number from 5 to 1,001. (And probably more than that,t those are the really intimidating ones. And most of the books on these lists are "classics," a term that no one can ever quite define beyond the basics of a) lots of people have read it and b) it was probably published a long time ago. Classics has become a genre of its own, uniting books as different as Animal Farm , The Iliad , and Persuasion . So why are these lists so popular? Why do we read classics? I've come up with a few possibilities that I th...

Up until last December, I almost never DNFed books. It pretty much only ever happened when I had to return a book to the library before I finished it and just never bothered to get it again. So really, I'd never decided to DNF a book - it just happened. And then Dash & Lily's Book of Dares happened. I wanted to like this book. I really like David Levithan, and the concept sounded really fun and interesting. But by the time I was about 20 pages in, I knew that this was not workign for me. I managed to push through for another 100 pages or so, mostly because I literally had nothing else to read, but at that point, I just knew that I didn't want to finish the book. Since then, I've DNFed 3 books. THREE whole books. That's almost as many as I'd ever DNFed before in my entire life. And after I thought about it for a while , I figured out that the books I DNF fall into 2 categories: 1) I really dislike the book and I can't bear to read it any ...

When I first started getting really into the book community, there seemed to be a lot of focus on making your TBR as small as possible. I know that there are still people who focus on that, but it definitely isn't as prevalent anymore. I used to be firmly in the crush-that-TBR division. but over the past few months, I've heard from a bunch of people who have HUGE TBRs and love it. Which brings up the question: what is the ideal TBR size? Does it even exist? I don't even know which side I agree with as to my own TBR. So I decided to make some pros-and-cons lists. BIG TBR: THE PROS You'll probably always have something on your shelf that you're interested in reading. The bigger your TBR is, the more likely you are to be able to read the kind of book you want to read without having to run to the bookstore to get it. And less time spent running to the bookstore means more precious time reading. It'll take a long time for you to run out of new things...

In each of my monthly wrap-ups, I count the number of diverse books I read. Normally, that's pretty easy to do. Occasionally, however, it isn't as simple as I think it should be. I have to think a lot about whether a book is diverse or not. Which brings me to my question: what makes a book diverse? ~ Warning: The next couple of paragraphs contain minor spoilers for the books mentioned. ~ Since I don't think I've been quite clear, let's look at a few examples from books I've read in the past few months. First, there's The Accident Season by Mo ïra Fowley-Doyle. In this book, we have Alice and Bea. Bea almost certainly likes girls. At one point, she kisses the female protagonist. Alice also probably likes girls. At one point, while discussing her romantic interests, she says something along the lines of there having been someone all along. It's implied that this person is Bea. One of them might even outright admit to liking the other at one point...