Wrap Up | August 2019 + updates

There’s almost no point in me doing a wrap up for August because I completely fell out of the blogging and reading worlds. August truly turned out to be the month where time kind of ate itself; I remember preparing for World Con back at the start of August and then before I knew it the first day of September arrived?! I have a fairly good excuse in that preparations for and recovery from World Con turned out to be pretty all-consuming. That combined with a 5000-word report, a statistics exam and writing my 15,000-word dissertation meant I basically had zero time for anything else. I feel a lot less guilty now seeing how much I actually had to do in August written down…

August wasn’t just a complete non-event on the blogging front but I also barely read anything despite it being the NEWTs readathon. In total, I only managed to read 2.5 books before August was over which is kind of disappointing and also means I’m not behind on both my reading and my blogging 😭

Saturday Smalls: 24th August 2019 | Silkpunk, Latinx Poetry, WW2 & NSFW Graphic Novels

Welcome to Saturday Smalls, a weekly review feature which was originally created by Destiny at Howling Libraries!

Each Saturday Smalls will include a handful of mini-reviews for books that I’ve read but didn’t get a chance to review at the time and, once I catch up, I will then use it to review books I don’t feel I can commit to doing a full review for. A huge thank you to the lovely Destiny for letting me adopt Saturday Smalls.

This week’s mini-review round-up includes:

1. Adult Fantasy/Silkpunk novel
2. YA Contemporary/Poetry
3. Adult historical fiction novel
4. Adult graphic novels

WWW Wednesday | 7th August 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?

This past week I’ve been able to get back into blogging a little bit more as well as setting aside more time for reading post-YALC which has been making me feel much happier and more like myself. I’m feeling a little bit anxious because I still feel quite isolated from a lot of the blogging community but hopefully, things will pick up again if I can manage to produce content a bit more regularly.

Saturday Smalls | 3rd August 2019 | Appropriative Magic, Fascinating Algorithms, & a Kick-Ass Latina

I’ve been eyeing up Destiny’s brilliant Saturday Smalls feature for a while now but didn’t get round to introducing it on my blog until now given all of my unintended hiatus’ these past few months. Now seems the perfect time to pick it up though as I have so many books I’ve read that I never got round to reviewing so I’m hoping that Saturday Small can help me to catch up.

Each feature will include a handful of mini-reviews for books that I’ve read but didn’t get a chance to review at the time and once I catch up, I will then use it to review books I don’t feel I can commit to doing a full review for. A huge thank you to the lovely Destiny for letting me adopt Saturday Smalls.

This week’s mini-review round-up includes:

1. YA historical fiction/magical realism/horror novel
2. Adult non-fiction book
3. YA contemporary novel

YALC 2019 | Book Haul

Hey friends, it’s been a while!

I’ve been absent for pretty much the entire month for various reasons which I’ll go into another time, in another post. The weekend just gone through was YALC weekend, one of my favourite times of the year, and I had an amazing time. I’ll be doing a follow-up post talking about the actual event itself like I did last year for YALC 2018, but for now, I wanted to start with something joyous – my YALC 2019 book haul!

This year I got a little bit wild with my book acquisitions despite promising my partner I wouldn’t be getting many books due to financial constraints. However, I was lucky enough to get a good amount of books via the wonderful book swap area as well as win a few in the giveaways run by the publishers. That coupled with the incredible deals (I mean, could you really turn down a 3 for £5 deal?!) meant that in total I acquired 21 books at YALC this year (and still came in under budget)!!! I got about 3-6 books a day which then got taken back to our hotel room so I didn’t realize just how many books I had until I had to pack them all up to transport home. Thankfully my lovely partner was able to help me carry them home and I spent a good few hours yesterday rearranging my bookshelves to make them all fit.

Here’s a look at the books I got from YALC 2019 ❤