A New Year, A New Way of Reading

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and a great New Year. I can hardly believe that it’s the 4th already and I’m so excited to begin another year of blogging. It’s that time of year where everyone is setting their Goodreads challenges and sharing their reading goals so today I wanted to talk a little bit about how I plan to read in 2017.

For the past seven years I have taken part in some reading challenge or another whether it was vowing to read a certain number of books by the end of the year, or to read more from a specific genre, for the last seven years I have pushed myself to meet targets and deadlines and whilst that was really fun and helpful to my reading a few years ago, I have since fallen out of love with the idea of reading challenges.

Over the last half of 2016 I found myself reading very differently to how I have been. I’d started stressing out about how many books I’d read and would feel pressure from myself to be reading a certain type of book to meet a challenge I set for myself and that suddenly made reading feel like a chore.

I noticed that last year if I wasn’t reading a book quickly enough or was falling behind with my goals I’d start to feel really anxious when I was reading and instead of focusing on the story I’d be paying more attention to the number of pages read and how many chapters of the book I had left. Something I’ve always loved to do began to feel really stressful and nobody was putting that pressure on me except myself.

So in 2017 I have decided to ditch reading challenges all together. Other than trying to stay on top of review books and reading books for blog tours I am going to have a free reading year to read as much or as little as I want. Reading challenges are a great way of keeping track of your reading, pushing yourself to read more and discovering new books but for me recently they’ve done me more harm than good.

Because of this new way I’ll be reading in 2017 I will no longer be doing a monthly round up of all of the books I have read each month and where I am on my reading challenge, but I will be replacing this feature with a more personal monthly favourites post highlighting not only the books I have loved but other personal favourites in my life too be them bookish events or bloggers that I have loved following. I hope you all understand and will enjoy the new changes. I will still be sharing everything I read on Goodreads and Instagram as I read it so you can follow me there if you’d like to.

Life is too short to be feeling anxious and stressed over a hobby and I’m looking forward to trying a new, more laid-back way of reading in 2017.

Reading Outside of My Comfort Zone

If you’re a regular reader of this blog then you’ll know that the main pool of books that I like to luxuriate in is YA but in 2015 I’ve found myself dipping my toes into new to me genres. Because I mainly talk about YA on here I thought that I’d share with you some of the gems I’ve been finding in other genres and how my reading tastes have evolved over the past year.

Middle Grade

I re-discovered Middle Grade as an adult when I won a copy of Murder Most Unladylike by Robin Stevens from the lovely Michelle’s twitter giveaway. A lot of my blog friends who enjoy Middle Grade as well as YA had been raving about this book and so I wanted to see what the fuss was about before the second book Arsenic for Tea came out.

Sadly my dog died shortly after the book arrived on my birthday and I needed something to sweep me away to a time when life was simpler, I craved that childhood oblivion again and so I reached for Murder Most Unladylike. I fell in love with the friendship between Hazel and Daisy as the book swept me away to a boarding school set in the 1930s. I feel like I owe my sanity at that time to this series and it has even gone on to inspire me to write my own Middle Grade story.

Graphic Novels 

Graphic Novels have never been something that interested me before this year. I used to think that it was all Marvel and DC Comics – which I am a fan of when it comes to the movies and TV shows but didn’t necessarily want to read about.

Then I noticed more and more people hauling graphic novels that weren’t all about superheroes, no, they covered pretty much every topic imaginable. I was sucked in by glossy artwork and intriguing synopses and decided to check out a little series called Saga which so many people were reading and loving. To my surprise I was swept away to an epic space opera and devoured the series pretty much back to back. I’ve now become a little bit obsessed with graphic novels and am enjoying trying out different art styles and stories to figure out what works for me.

Audiobooks

I tried listening to my first audiobook a year ago but didn’t get through it because, my poor logic at the time, was that I’d rather be reading a physical book. Then when I got a free trial for Audible I decided to try audiobooks again but this time listen to them during the times when I couldn’t be physically reading. I listened when I was getting ready in the mornings, washing up, and on car rides and loved the fact that I could listen to a book at a time when I couldn’t otherwise be reading.

I started to get through more books a month because of the bonus non-reading time spent listening to a book. Audiobooks can be hit and miss for me based on how I get on with the narrator but for the most part I’ve been enjoying what I’ve listened to. My best find has been The Song of Achilles which has gone on to become one of my favourite books and is probably not something I would have picked up otherwise if the audiobook version was not recommended to me by my blogger friend Sophie.

High Fantasy 

While I am a massive YA fantasy fan I’ve always been intimidated by those big chunky epic fantasy books mainly because of the sheer size and number of books that can belong to a series. Being a book blogger I always have a massive TBR pile to get through so can never justify dedicating a lot of time to a big series.

The Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson had been on my must read list for such a long time and I finally decided to read it when Lucy at The Book Belle hosted Mistborn Mondays and I’m so, so glad that I finally picked it up! Reading a big series such as Mistborn feels so much less intimidating when you’re reading it alongside other people and the deadlines to read each book by made me stick to it because I am awful at not completing series. I haven’t read anything quite on the same epic scope as Mistborn since Harry Potter and I loved discovering a new all-time favourite series and an author who I’ve become such a fangirl over and who I will now read anything they write.

This year I have been more diverse and open with my reading choices and it has certainly paid off! The books that I have mentioned in this post have gone on to become some of my favourites of this year. I’m looking forward to delving further into all of these genres and discovering more books to love. In the future I’ll not be so hesitant to pick something up that is a little outside my comfort zone. 

I’d love to know which books outside of your comfort zone did you pick up and end up loving?

When books come to life, the reluctant reader...

Hi guys, today I wanted to do a quick post sharing with you this amazing YALC video that my friend Casey put together. So much work and passion went into it and I think it perfectly captures how when you read you get to choose your own adventure. Watch Casey and her bookish friends bring the YALC characters to life...

   

 I can't believe that this time next week I'll be getting ready to catch my train to London, it has come around so quickly and after watching this video I'm even more excited for YALC! If you enjoyed watching please support Casey and everybody involved by liking, commenting and sharing!

The Books and Bookish Gifts I Got For Christmas!

Hey guys! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas! I know I said that my giveaway was going to be the last post of the year but I thought it might be cool to share with you some of the things I got for Christmas that are either books or books/blogging/reading/writing related in an informal chatty style vlog. I decided to separate them into parts. Part One is purely books and Part Two bookish gifts in case any of you are just interested in watching one or the other and to save it from being one long video. I personally love being nosey at stuff like this so hopefully you’ll enjoy being nosey too!

The Books I Got For Christmas (Part One) 

 Bookish Things I Got For Christmas (Part Two)

 

I hope you enjoyed the vlogs! Happy New Year everyone and I’ll see you in 2013!