Best Books of 2019

2019 was an interesting year for me in terms of books and reading. I completely smashed my Goodreads Challenge goal in 2018, reading 31 books over my goal and 55 books more than I did in 2017. Although on the surface that looks fantastic (which it was!) it was also a little misleading as 2018 was the only year where I wasn’t in education, with the exception of the last few months of the year when I started my Masters in September, which meant I had a lot more time for reading! At the beginning of 2019, I naively set my Goodreads Challenge goal at 75 books and managed to read 51 books due to a combination of academia, depression and reading slumps. Not too bad overall but I’ve definitely learned my lesson about setting unrealistic goals haha.

Although I didn’t read as many books as I had wanted to, I did read a lot of great books – books that I thoroughly enjoyed and books that I fell in love with. Ultimately that is more important to me than how many books I ended up reading – I would rather enjoy my books than reading loads of books I end up not liking. Whilst I enjoyed almost all of the books I read in 2019, I’ve picked out 10 books that really stand out to me as the ones I loved the most which have made my best books of 2019 list.

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 ❤

2019 Goals| Quarterly Check-In #1

Don’t even get me started on how the hell it’s even April already. I feel like I only wrote my 2019 goals post a few weeks ago and yet, here we are – a quarter of the way through the year in the blink of an eye. As one of my goals for this year was to introduce a quarterly a check-in, in order to keep myself accountable and share my progress with you all, I thought I’d kick April off by reviewing where I’m up to with my goals.

2019 Reading Challenges

This year I took part in my first proper reading challenges, Beat the Backlist and the Goodreads Challenge, with varying success. Although I absolutely smashed my Goodreads Challenge, I struggled to balance backlist books with new releases and ARCS as well as log my reading progress with the BtB database to register points. However, I had a lot of fun with reading challenges and found that they (mostly) helped me keep on track with my reading!

For 2019, I’m committing myself to even more reading challenges and am super excited to take part. I’ve matched my challenges up to my reading goals, which I’ll be sharing with you all on New Years Eve, but for today I’m sharing with you all which challenges I’ll be taking part in and 8 books I will read for each as well as linking you up to the hosts so you can sign up too if you want! A massive thanks to the wonderful Tina for her 2019 Reading Challenge Index which helped me find some new challenges to take part in.

Wrap Up | May: AAPI Heritage Month

Hey Panda friends!

I absolutely cannot believe that it is the end of May and we’re already halfway through 2018. Whaaaaaaaat?! Idk how time is flying so fast and I always seem to be so behind on everything. May seems to have been a massive blip for me in terms of organization so sadly I didn’t get to post most of the topics I had planned and only read 3 out of 8 on my TBR! Oops… BUT I did read some fantastic books this month anyway and am smashing my Goodreads Challenge (which I have now increased from 50 to 75 books).