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 ❤

Book Tag | Spring Cleaning

I’ve seem quite a few people joining in with this great Spring Cleaning tag and couldn’t resist joining in too, especially given our recent spring cleaning session.

The struggle of getting started: A book or series you struggle to begin because of its size

 

At 600 pages, Children of Time is a beast (in more ways than one) and definitely intimidated me before I picked it up. It was sat on my TBR for a long time before I finally got my hands on a physical copy, and then sat on my bookshelf being a large book friend for a few months before I finally read it. Once I started though I couldn’t stop because it’s a phenomenal book.

WWW Wednesday | 26th 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!

Most Popular Books versus the Highest Rated Books on my TBR

This past week has ended up being a very Goodreads inspired blogging week. This time I’ve been inspired by Destiny’s super fun post. The aim is to sort your Goodreads TBR shelf according to the number of ratings (“num ratings”) and share the books which are the most popular.

When I tried it out the other day I thought it was really interesting alternating between the most popular books and the highest rated books on my TBR because those two things are very different. So I’m going to divide this post into most popular versus highest rated for a fun comparison! As there are quite a few books which appeared on my highest rated list that either hadn’t been reviewed as the book isn’t released yet (and no ARCs released) or only had less than 5 reviews, I will only be including books that have been released (including ARCs) and that have more than 30 reviews.