Wrap Up | May 2019 + the unintended hiatus

Hey friends!

Some of you may (or may not) have noticed that I’ve been absent for pretty much the entirety of May. I had planned to take a little step back from blogging anyway as this summer is going to be really busy for me on my Master’s degree, but then I managed to catch/develop gastroenteritis – a nasty contagious stomach bug – which completely knocked me out for almost 2 weeks. Then I had to return to work, start planning my long summer of uni work, and celebrate my partner’s birthday on Sunday. Before I knew it, I found myself at the end of May? I feel like I blinked and missed it.

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted about my concerns around being able to manage book blogging alongside starting my PhD in September (not to mention squeezing it in amongst all my Master’s work this summer) and I’m still not sure what the outcome of my ponderings will be. It’s definitely something I’m planning on writing a discussion post about so that I can talk about it more in-depth and speak to other book bloggers who manage their blog alongside busy lives. What I do know though, from having my unintended break this month, is that I feel a lot less happy when I’m not blogging and I felt so isolated from my book blog friends. Writing this post is already beginning to lift my low mood but I’m also anxious about how much work I have to do. Anyway, that’s not a decision to be made right now – instead, I want to share with you all what I did manage to get up to during Moody May ❤

The Sunday Post | All the Good Things

Hey friends, welcome to The Sunday Post – a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer to share all the weekly news and feels!

The Sunday Post | Big Announcements

Hey everyone, welcome to The Sunday Post – a weekly meme hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer to share all the weekly news and feels!

As I was on hiatus for almost a month, I wanted to dedicate this week’s Sunday Post to catching up with you all, sharing what’s happened this week and exciting news of upcoming things.

The Sunday Post | New blog announcements!

The second week of April has arrived and I’m slowly getting my blogging butt into gear. With the start of each new month, I always have the best of intentions. Lists and lists in different notebooks full of ideas for new blogging content. A rough idea of a schedule in my mind. Thoughts about new features. Yet, I never seem to be able to organize myself enough to actually get any of these done!

What’s to Come // July 2017

Hey again everyone! Look how good I’m being with posting consistently at the moment (although HA lets see how long this lasts for). 

I thought this would be a great time to post up my first outlook on what (I hope) the month of July might bring in terms of reading, playing and blogging. I’ve found it really hard to regularly blog without a schedule, so I’m hoping that doing this will actually give me some structure and something to aim for so that I can post more! So, here are my goals for this month, what are yours?

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Need to finish

I desperately need to finish Radium Girls. It’s an amazing ARC I got from Netgalley on the 22nd April about the women who worked as dial-painters in America during the 1920s, and who fought relentlessly for years for the Radium companies they worked for to take responsibility for the toxic radium poisoning many of the girls got, which lead to a horrendous amount of death and suffering. Whilst I’m really enjoying the book so far, I’m quite a slow reader and this seems to be a little bit on the lengthy side book. Having said that I’m now on 54% so hopefully I can finish it this month. When I first joined Netgalley I didn’t understand how it actually worked, so requested and was approved for loaaaaads of non-fiction books which always take me forever to read D: One day I’ll finish what I have, so I can actually request some fiction (and get approved for them).

I’m also in the middle of reading the amazing ‘The Spectacle’ edition of Skin Deep’s bi-annual publication which I really want to finish and write a glowing review for. For something which I got for a really reasonable £6, it’s packed full of amazing opinion pieces, art and design work, and interviews on issues of race and culture in an enjoyable, more accessible format than online blog posts and academic articles sometimes are.

TBR

In addition to Radium Girls, I’ve set myself 3 other books I would like to read at the very least. I bought I’ll Give You the Sun with my birthday gift card back in April (!!) but haven’t gotten around to reading it. I just got The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet for £1 on Amazon as I’ve wanted to read it for the past year and am jealous of everyone else getting to read the next instalment, A Closed and Common Orbit. I also want to finish one of my other Netgalley ARC’s, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the end of the 20th Century. If I manage to finish all of those, maybe I can even slip The Ocean at the End of the Lane in!