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.

September TBR | The Calm Before the Storm

Hello, hello friends!

I can’t believe that September is already here?! I know I’ve said that pretty much every month this year but it is even truer for September. It feels like not that long ago that I was starting my Masters last September and now we’re back in September and this time I’m about to start my PhD?? I honestly do not really know how I got here but September/October is going to be a pretty big month for me and the start of another 3-year foray (at the very least) into education. I am clearly a glutton for punishment.

Speaking of being a glutton for punishment, I still want to keep up with my blog in whatever way I can manage so I don’t foresee myself going anywhere over the next months. Not only am I going to be sticking around but I’m hoping to introduce a new feature to put the spotlight on indie and/or diverse authors. I’ve been wanting to introduce this since the start of the year and feel particularly inspired to after World Con in August. I’m also hoping to set up a book blogger streaming collective with a few blogger friends. So, lots of exciting things ahead. Do you think I’ll have time for reading too? 😂

WWW Wednesday | 31st July 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?

It has been a damn while since I did my last WWW Wednesday (over a month) and I almost missed it today because I somehow forgot today is Wednesday? Luckily I have remembered just in time so I am here to share my progress with you all (now that I actually have some progress to share!)

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!