I read SO MANY great books this month! Since I don’t really have any major life updates, we’ll just jump right to them.
Read More »Monthly Wrap-Up: August 2023
Category: Month in Review
Monthly Wrap-Up: July 2023
I’m honestly not quite sure where this month went. Looking back on it, there doesn’t seem to be any events that stand out as super significant. It has just all been a bit of a blur. I guess that is a good thing considering how awful June turned out to be. I’ll take the improvement of things returning to humdrum normal. lol. It wasn’t a ‘meh’ month when it came to reading, though. I finished tons of great books! Read on to find out more about them and how I’m progressing on my yearly goals.
Read More »Monthly Wrap-Up: June 2023
June was a rough month. I managed to get food poisoning that had me vomiting and nauseous for days. Then we had severe weather roll through town and knock out the electricity and internet for days, which was not pleasant with temps approaching 100F. I don’t know how people survived before air conditioning because I just couldn’t do it. The only bright side was my Kindle being fully charged before the outage. So, I could read at night without straining my eyes. Well. Enough of my complaining. Let’s get to the books!
Read More »Monthly Wrap-Up: May 2023
May was an awesome month for me. I went on vacation for the first time in forever. My wife and I traveled to Massachusetts and visited Boston, Salem, and Plymouth. I’d never been to New England before, and it was a great experience. I’d definitely love to go back because there was so much to do, and we didn’t have enough time to get to it all. I loved the Museum of Fine Arts so much, and we spent almost an entire day there. Other highlights included visiting Harvard, the Boston Public Library (I could seriously live in there), the U.S.S. Constitution, the Mayflower replica, and the house of the seven gables. Of course, I had to visit some bookstores too. I shopped at Brattle Book Shop and The Harvard Book Store, which was so much fun. I bought so many books there and at all the gift shops that I almost had to buy more luggage to get them home. So, this month’s book haul, which I’ll get posted eventually, was my largest ever. Now that we’re on the topic of books, let’s get on with wrapping up my reading month. It was a bit less than usual because of everything else going on, but I still read plenty of great books.
Monthly Wrap-Up: April 2023
April has been a pretty great month. There were tons of awesome new book releases, and I managed to complete everything for the Magical Readathon. The weather is finally a bit nicer, and everything in my neighborhood is in bloom, which is really beautiful. I spent a small fortune on landscaping this month, and now our flower beds look so much better. I know this is going to make me sound old, but I’m also excited we have a new grocery store close to my house. lol. It opened up right across from my neighborhood, and I love the convenience of being able to go right down the street to pick up what I need. Those are pretty much the major highlights. So, let’s jump into my reading progress for April.
Read More »Monthly Wrap-Up: March 2023
What happened to March? I’m honestly not even sure what I did with the month other than participate in Trope-ical Readathon. lol. That being said, I did read a record (for me) number of books. So, I guess it was a good month…
Read More »Monthly Wrap-Up: February 2023
February flew by. I was sick with COVID for half of it, including my birthday. It was definitely a bummer, but I’m grateful to be feeling much better now and getting back into the swing of things. On the bright side, all the time laid up gave me plenty of time to read. So, the month wasn’t a total loss.
Read More »Monthly Wrap-Up: January 2023
January has been an absolute whirlwind. Between my parents’ six eye surgeries, several vet visits, and ending the month being sick with COVID, it is a wonder I got any reading done at all. I was super motivated this month, though, and read a lot of great stuff. I participated in my first buddy reads this month and had so much fun with it. All in all, it has been a pretty good month despite ending it being sick.
Read More »2022 – Year In Review
Happy New Year! What better way is there to start off the year than looking back on accomplishments from 2022? Last year was a fantastic one for the blog, and I read so many great books. I haven’t decided on my goals for 2023 yet. In usual fashion, I’m a bit late. lol. So, I’ll have another post at some point detailing what I hope to achieve in the coming year. For now, here’s how 2022 shaped up for me.
Reading Stats
When this year started, I planned to track all sorts of stats and had a spreadsheet to track them. I think I gave up on that task by March. LOL. So, all I have to look at this year is the stats provided by Goodreads. For a look at all my reading from 2022, you can check out My Year in Books on Goodreads.
- Books Read – 201
- Pages Read – 77,135
- Shortest Book – The Man and the Crow by Rebecca Crunden (24 pages)
- Longest Book – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (1006 pages)
- Average Book Length – 383 pages
- Average Rating – 4.2 stars
Progress On My 2022 Reading Goals
Goodreads Challenge
I finished out the year doubling my Goodreads Challenge goal. I set out to read 100 books in 2022. I ended up reading 201 books during the year, which is the most I’ve ever read. It was a really great year.
NetGalley Progress
I wanted to end the year with at least 50 reviews completed for NetGalley and a feedback ratio of at least 80%. I doubled my goal of 50 total NetGalley reviews and brought my number of reviews up to 100. I also achieved my feedback ratio goal and finished off the year at 81%. It has been a really productive year when it comes to ARCs, but I think I’m going to try to slow down on them a bit in 2023. Of course, I’ve already gotten a ton of them… So, we’ll see how that goes.
Read More Nonfiction
My goal for 2022 was to read at least 2 nonfiction books. I ended up reading 5 nonfiction books, which more than surpassed my goal. It was a mix of LGBT, politics, and history, and I enjoyed each of them. I’m going to try to keep reading at least some nonfiction moving forward because I really liked it.
Read More Comics
I set the goal of reading all the comics I buy during the week I buy them. This definitely didn’t happen. LOL. I have giant stacks of comic books I need to read. I’m going to need to think of a more realistic goal for 2023…
#BeatTheBacklog
I tried to focus on having a majority of the books I read in 2022 be books I bought, borrowed, or received prior to January 1, 2022. I’m not going to even bother figuring out the stats for this because I know I didn’t even come close to achieving this one. Most of what I read this year was ARCs of 2022 releases.
Finish Some Series
I planned to finish or catch up on the following 5 series by the end of 2022:
· The Broken Earth by N.K. Jemisin
· Arthurian Saga by Mary Stewart
· The Extraordinaries by TJ Klune
· Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
· A shit ton of different Shadowhunters books by Cassandra Clare
I did really great with this goal. I finished four out of the five series, and I did read a ton of Shadowhunters books. I only have one more book to go to be caught up. So, I consider that a major success considering how many I had to read at the start of the year.
Blogging Review
I didn’t formally set any blogging goals for this year. However, I was hoping to get at least 300 WordPress followers and break 10,000 views before the end of the year. I accomplished both of those tasks and consider 2022 to be a very successful year. I’ve also made so many new blogging friends this year, which I didn’t expect. Now I can honestly say that you all are the reason I’m still blogging because you make it so much fun. Thank you to everyone who visited the blog, liked a post, or commented their thoughts. I’ve loved interacting with you all even more this past year and am looking forward to seeing what we all get up to in 2023.
Most Popular Posts of the Year
This year I’ve started getting much more traffic from search engines. These five posts have done particularly well at bringing in views from search results, especially Google. I’m honestly not sure why, but I’m glad that at least some of my reviews are getting a slightly wider audience. Here are my top five posts of the year:
- ARC Review – Heart of the Sun Warrior
- ARC Review – Babel
- Most Anticipated November 2022 Releases
- Book Review – Of Blood and Fire
- ARC Review – The Stardust Thief
Least Popular Posts of the Year
I’ve limited this list to posts published in 2022 because I had a ton of posts from 2021 that received a random view here and there. Much of this list is posts from the last couple of weeks, which makes sense because they haven’t had the time to get as many views as most of my other 2022 posts. There are a couple of meme posts too that did particularly poorly for whatever reason. Here are my five least viewed posts of the year:
- WWW Wednesday (3) – May 25, 2022
- ALC Review – Take a Bow, Noah Mitchell
- My Ranking of the 2022 Star Wars Books
- First Lines Fridays (51) – June 3, 2022
- Book Review – Path of Deceit
Final Thoughts
I hope you all have a great holiday, and I wish everyone the best for the new year. I’m excited about what is to come in the new year, and I’m looking forward to continuing to share my thoughts about great books with you all in the year to come!
Monthly Wrap-Up: October 2022
I enjoyed the month of October. It was relatively quiet, and I always enjoy giving away buckets of treats for Halloween. Our neighborhood is super popular, and it is always a big event with people setting up tables at the sidewalk to give away goodies to the kids going from house to house. I also went on a trip to visit my in-laws. We haven’t made that trip since before COVID started. So, it was nice to make it over there and see them and our nephew. I got approximately the same amount of reading done as in September, and I met one of my goals for the year, which is super exciting (Hint: It involves NetGalley). All in all, it has been a pretty great month. Now, let’s get down to the specifics.
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