December 2019 | Last Haul of the Year

Hey friends! I am back just in time for the end of 2019 and the end of the decade after several very impromptu absences from blogging. I don’t normally post haul posts apart from on special occasions so as it’s just after Christmas and I need an easy-ish post to ease me back into blogging again I thought I’d share my Christmas gifts with you all.

Christmas is often a difficult time of the year for me for money reasons, primarily family and financial, and although I love Christmas it is also a pretty stressful time of the year. Thankfully, I am incredibly lucky to have a supportive partner and loving friends who help to make Christmas an enjoyable time of the year . I’m also super grateful for any and all of the presents I get, and I got some really nice ones this year ❤ A huge, huge thank you to anyone who sent a present, messaged me or who are just around in general being lovely friends.

WWW Wednesday | 19th March 2019

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam @ Taking on a World of Words! All you have to do is answers the following three questions:

What are you currently reading/playing?
What did you recently finish reading/playing?
What do you think you’ll read/play next?

Top 10 Tuesday | Spring TBR

Top 10 Tuesday is a weekly book tag that was run by The Broke and the Bookish but has now moved to That Artsy Reader Girl. Each week she provides a different bookish theme those deep-seated desires to list! Anyone is welcome to join in on their blog, in the comments or any other way. 

I haven’t done a Top 10 Tuesday post in what feels like forever, in fact, the last one I did was at the end of January! However, after seeing everyone else’s TTT posts today with their Spring TBR’s I felt inspired to join in for this week’s prompt. You know me, I can never resist an opportunity for a good TBR list!

Recently I’ve been feeling a lot of pressure over what I “should” be reading – my ARCs, my backlist books, my owned books… – and it’s been taking some of my enjoyment out of reading. Obviously there are quite a lot of books I “should” be including here on my Spring TBR but I want this to be a TBR of Spring goodness and fun rather than misery and pressure!

Down the TBR Hole | Using the #KonMarie method for my Physical Shelves

Today I had planned to do the next round of Down the TBR Hole but considering that I have just done a major reorganization of my actual bookshelves using the Marie Kondo method I thought it would be really fun to share this progress with you all instead. Apologies for the crappy photo quality in advance, my phone camera is not great!

The second stage of Marie Kondo method, books, was one that I was simultaneously dreading but also really looking forward to. I find it quite difficult to sort out my books as these are objects that I am obviously quite attached to but I was also finding myself becoming frustrated with my bookshelves looking cluttered with too many books. Rather than just buying another bookshelf to fix the problem, I decided that I wanted to have a good sort through the books I own to see which ones I was invested in keeping and which ones I could donate to new homes. 

The thing I love the most about the Marie Kondo method is that she encourages us not to think about getting rid of things but to make space for the things that we want to appreciate more and that spark joy for us, rather than them being hidden away in amongst a mess of other things. This definitely helped me to sort through my books in a way where I didn’t feel guilty about “getting rid of” books but instead focus on the beautiful books that spark joy for me that I wanted to spend more time with.

WWW Wednesday | 30th January 2019

WWW Wednesday is hosted by Sam @ Taking on a World of Words! All you have to do is answers the following three questions:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

This week started off as a great reading week but ended up with a bit of a reading slump due to some issues I’m having with one of my current reads. I’m also pretty tired from juggling working part time, studying, writing my PhD applications and trying to have some other sense of life outside of these things. Finding time to read is hard and my brain is very tired!