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 | April 2019

I haven’t done a wrap up since my January wrap up earlier this year, although I’m not really sure why. Anyway, April turned out to be a pretty good month for me reading and life wise. I had a great birthday on April 15th and then attended Easter Con over the Eater weekend which has helped to greatly improve my mood over the past two weeks. I’m still struggling quite a lot with a particularly nasty Masters report I have to submit soon but that’s for future me to worry about. For now, let’s recap on all the great April things ❤

Book Haul | April: 27th Birthday and Easter Con

I don’t often post book hauls, in fact my last one was in November 2018, but I got some really lovely books for my birthday on the 15th April and during Easter Con last weekend that I really wanted to share with you all. I’ve been really lucky and thankful to receive so many wonderful gifts as well as have the financial means to afford to buy more books this year, so I hope you all don’t mind me sharing these with you all!

WWW Wednesday | 17th April 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 was my birthday on Monday so I haven’t been able to get much reading done as a result of all of the birthday prep, celebrating and resting I’ve been doing! I did get a surprising amount of books for my birthday though so I am very happy about that (let’s not talk about how that makes my TBR pile feel though)

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!