I had so much going on this weekend (sort of), so I didn’t have the time to post another time. Which kinda sucks, but that’s life.
I did completely reorganize my bookshelves though, so that’s definitely something. Now all the new books I’ve gotten this year have a home!
Anyway, here’s another weekly wrap-up for everyone. Let’s wrap-up last week!
Tuesday 5/9: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook Review
Last Tuesday, I reviewed Brandon Sanderson’s new standalone science fantasy novel, The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England. It’s quite the band for such a fun book. I gave it ★★★★☆.
Thursday was a day that I was excited about. I did a little something different then – I blogged about books I read that reminded me of The Legend of Zelda games (and exposed myself as a huge geek). What can I say, I was excited about May 12th.
On Friday, even though it was exceptionally late, I actually managed to participate in First Line Fridays. First Line Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers (formerly) hosted by Wandering Words.
So, I didn’t quite meet the goals I set for myself last week, but it was so worth it. (The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is absolutely incredible, and so much fun, and super addicting.) But I’m determined to post two book reviews this week, and gosh darn it, I’m gonna do it! Also, I want to finish The Stardust Thief, and participate in the usual weekly posts I do.
Maybe I’ll do a couple of other posts too, but I’m not quite sure yet. We’ll see what happens.
Anyway, thank you so much for reading, and have a wonderful day/night!
Sooo… this is later than I hoped it’d be, but here it finally is – the April 2023 Monthly Reading Wrap-Up!
The first of May falling on a Monday really messed with my posting, and I never post a reading wrap up until the month is done, so I had to wait till today to post this. Better (slightly) late than never, I suppose. Then again, I don’t think I got February 2023’s out until the fourth of the month either…
Anyway, talking about April – I’m very happy with how much I read last month. My statistics were great on The StoryGraph. It was the most reading that I’ve done yet this year! I also finished my reading goal for this year! Yay!
But I’ve prattled on enough. On with the stats!
April 2023 Reading Stats
I read 6 books and 1750 pages
😐 MOODS:Adventurous and Emotional were once again the biggest slices in the Moods pie chart. Mysterious, Tense, and Dark were much smaller slices than they’ve been in the past.
👢 PACE: Medium-paced books were once again king this month, but I did read a decent slice’s worth of a fast-paced novel.
🔢 PAGE NUMBER: I read a lot of shorter books in April than I did in March. 300 to 499 was still the biggest part of the pie here, though.
📖 FICTION/NONFICTION: Once again, all fiction. I have a nonfiction book I’m reading right now though, so May’s F/N pie graph will finally look different.
🎭 GENRES:Science Fiction and Fantasy were the two biggest parts of the graph this time, but that’s cuz I was in a sci-fi mood this month. Dystopian and Romance also made their way onto the Genres bar graph, as well.
📄 FORMAT: The little StoryGraph pie chart for this is wrong once again. (At this rate, I don’t think I’ll ever fix this, haha.) 50% were printed copies, and 50% were digital. (And this is even counting the manga I read, which I didn’t add to my StoryGraph reading stats.)
⭐ RATING: My median star rating for the month of April was 3.54. I was even more all over the place with my enjoyment of the books that I read last month than I’ve been all year so far.
📉 PAGES READ DAILY: I read quite a bit during the first week and a half, but dipped down in the middle. During the last third of April though, I read a ton.
April was my most successful month for reading so far, and I’m so happy about that. I hope to read even more in May if I can, however. That’s every bookworm’s dream, though, isn’t it? Haha.
The goal for May 2023 is to read more (as I just mentioned), and to blog more. Cuz the latter could’ve gone better. However, I’m having a very good start to the month, so far. Here’s hoping I can keep it up! And the April 2023 Reading Wrap-Up comes to a close.
Thank you so much for reading, and have a wonderful day/night!
It’s April now, and spring is in full swing! But that also means that March is over. So I’m gonna go over March’s statistics on The StoryGraph!
I read waaayy more books last month than I could’ve hoped for. Especially compared to how much I was able to read in the first two months of the year. Six books! That’s two whole books more than February (and January too, now that I think about it).
Now, on with the stars…
March 2023 Reading Stats
😐 MOODS:Adventurous was once again a huge chunk of my Moods graph, but Emotional and Hopeful were the other two big ones. Which is waaayy different from February’s, which has Mysterious as one of its big chunks. (Dark is on both graphs.)
👢 PACE: Over 80% of this chart is medium-paced, so I’d say that’s still my favorite type of book to read.
🔢 PAGE NUMBER: The ACOTAR series mostly consists of long books, and seeing as I read over half of them in March, it’s no surprise seeing that a third of the graph is given to 500+ books. Once again, my preferred length seems to be between 300 and 500 page books.
📖 FICTION/NONFICTION: 100% fiction once again. I swear I have a couple of nonfiction books on my TBR. I swear.
🎭 GENRES: Fantasy was once again the frontrunner of the Genre bar graph, being featured as a genre in all of the books that I read in March. Not as much YA this past month either, but definitely more Romance than usual.
📄 FORMAT: The StoryGraph Format graph is once again wrong (I need to try to fix that… Maybe). 50% of the books that I read were digital, and the other 50% of the books I read were print.
⭐ RATING: I had two average ratings in March: 2.75 stars and 4.0 stars. I was a bit all over the map last month with how much I enjoyed the books that I read.
📉 PAGES READ DAILY: I was a little more consistent with my reading this past month, as opposed to February. I didn’t read nearly as much as I’d have liked during the first half of March, but I was reading a lot during the second half.
I read a lot more in March compared to the first two months of the year, so I’m pretty satisfied. Of course, I’d like to read another six books this month (April), or maybe even more! We’ll see what happens.
What books did you read in March? What did you think of them? Did we read any of the same books?
Thank you, as always, for reading, and have a marvelous day/night!
It’s another new month, and that means it’s to go over the previous month’s reading statistics. January Reading 2023, here we go!
Before I move on to the stats and pie charts and other assorted graphs, I want to mention how seriously happy I am with the amount of books that I combed through. It’s a huge improvement from December’s reading, and I’m hoping to read even more this month (February).
And now, on to the stats…
January 2023 Reading Stats
😐 Moods: For January, I had five moods – mysterious, adventurous, dark, tense, and challenging. No surprise there – I read a ton of either dark fantasy or horror.
👢 Pace: All of the books I read last month pretty much all turned out to be medium-paced. Most actual books are, so I’m honestly not surprised with that one, even though I did find Spinning Silver to be kind of slow, and What Moves the Dead to be generally fast-paced.
🔢 Page Number: Most of the books I read were between 300 and 500 pages, which is pretty average for me. (It’s my favorite length of book to read, after all.) What Moves the Dead was essentially a novella, or a short novel though, so it only clocked in at 165 pages.
📖 Fiction/Nonfiction: All fiction, once again. I promise that I occasionally (very occasionally) read nonfiction books, though.
🎭 Genres: I had four genres that I generally read last month. Fantasy (hello to you too, favorite genre), YA (not exactly one of my favorites, I just happen to read this one often), Horror (when I’m feeling like having a bad time), and LGBTQIA+ (What Moves the Dead had some pretty good rep).
📄 Format: I read three physical copies of books this past month, and one e-book. (Or so the chart says…)
⭐ Rating: My average rating was 4.19 stars, but that’s what happens when you read 4 books, rate two 4/5, one 3.75/5, and one 5/5.
📉 Pages Read Daily: I’m kind of all over the place in January, in terms of how many pages I read in a day, let alone a week. I peaked pretty early on, because I read the entirety of Unraveller in one day, but I read all of the other books in multiple sessions.
So yeah, I read a lot more – annnd I posted a lot more, now that I think about it – in January 2023 than I did in December. And that really makes me happy with myself, and just my ability to be proactive in general. (Especially with how hard winter can get on my mentality.)
What books did you read last month? Did we read any of the same ones? What did you think of the stuff you read in January?
Thank you for reading, and have a marvelous day/night! Tune in next post for more bookish stuff!
You might have noticed, but 2023 is upon us. Which means that 2022 has ended.
And so has my first year on The StoryGraph.
And the year that I started blogging dedicatedly.
It wasn’t the best year, for me and for lots of other people, but it wasn’t the worst year. And I read more books than I had in years, a lot of which I really enjoyed. So, you know the drill – it’s time for the reading stats.
(Note: I actually read twenty-two novels last year, not twenty-one! I forgot to start my Goodreads reading goal thing until after I read Mickey7. And whatever I did, I couldn’t correct it. So, thanks Goodreads… 😒)
😐 Moods: I had a lot of moods on the mood pie graph last year. The biggest ones were adventurous and funny; and considering that I read seven Dresden Files books and the entirety of The Murderbot Diaries (minus one short story – don’t @ me!!) it really isn’t much of a surprise. My third biggest slice was mysterious which also wasn’t a surprise – most plots have at least a little bit of it, after all, since it makes a lot of different plots more compelling.
👢 Pace: As you can see, my favorite books to read are generally fast-paced. Medium-paced is also usually pretty okay some of the time for me as well, but I cannot get into slow-paced novels. I’m sorry Legends & Lattes. I’m so sorry.
🔢 Length (or “Page Number”): I usually like to read books that are between 300 and 500 pages, otherwise books sometimes feel like they’re dragging me down or they’re too short. There are exceptions, of course, but 300 – 500 is generally my comfort zone.
🎭 Genres: Okay, if you’ve been following this blog for a while, it’s pretty obvious that my favorite genre to read is fantasy. And the bar graph on the left displays that very prominently. I also like sci-fi and YA, with some flavorings of mystery, which the graph also shows. After that, it just gets into the more miscellaneous stuff that’s in the books that I tend to read – aka: the stuff that I don’t care about as much when I’m reading, like romance.
📄 Format: Print or digital mostly, but I did read an audiobook this year, which confirmed to me that I don’t much care for them. (Note: This pie graph is inaccurate because I imported almost all of my book data from last year over to StoryGraph from Goodreads, and I think StoryGraph just picked random formats for all the books that I read or something.)
📖 Fiction/Nonfiction: 2022 was a full fiction year for me. I do have a couple of nonfiction books in my TBR, but I haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. I’ve just kept getting distracted by fantasy novels and stuff.
✍️ Most Read Authors: Not surprising at all. As I mentioned in the Moods section, I read a bunch of the Dresden books and all of Murderbot. And I guess that the only other author that I read more than one book by, courtesy of the Prosper Redding duology, I guess that it makes sense for Alexandra Bracken to be on the graph, too.
📚 Number of Books and Pages: This section is pretty self-explanatory, and the line graph can probably explain it much more succinctly than I can with words, but I guess I’ll embellish a little. My peak months were March and November, which isn’t surprising since I read like eight books in the former, and like five during the later.
⭐ Star Ratings: I gave ten books that I read 5 perfect stars. Which I say is pretty good, considering that that’s almost half the books that I read in 2022. Yay!! My second highest rectangle is right in the middle of the bar graph with 4 stars. Also a respectable rating for a good book. Which totals it to fifteen books that got really good ratings! Yay again! The rest are kind of middling height, so I’m happy to say that I didn’t really read many novels that I didn’t like in 2022. (Except for really The Conjurer, but we don’t talk about that in this house.)
§ • § • §
Annnd… that’s a wrap! That’s really a wrap, actually. Wow, a whole other year is gone already. Hard to believe.
But that just means that everyone and everything has a fresh start once again. And there’s so many new books coming out in 2023 to enjoy – and old ones, too! So, Happy New Year once again to everyone and I’ll see you on the flip side for more bookish things!
It’s January now, which means December is over. And with it, my (frankly pathetic) amount of reading, as well. Seriously, I did not read nearly as many books as I’d wanted to. As I had aspired to.
But, it can’t be helped; I was once again dealing with stuff, and there were also a lot of familial holiday obligations. Let’s not dwell on what could have been any further – time to get into the StoryGraph statistics.
😐 Moods: Even though I only finished one book last month, I did read a lot of pages from other books that I either DNF-ed, or just haven’t finished yet. The moods from December weremysterious and adventurous, the latter being a mood I frequently feel whilst reading, or looking for books to read. Mysterious is also a relatively frequent mood for me. It makes sense; after all, every adventure needs a bit of mystery.
🎭 Genres: The genres are also not a surprise. I read a ton of YA, and fantasy has always been my favorite thing to read about. Romance is a common genre paired with these two as well, even if I don’t care for it as much, so no surprise there either.
👢 Pace: The pace of the novels I read (or tried to read) in December was slow, which explains why I (1) had so much trouble getting through the books I was reading, and (2) why I DNF-ed more books than I was able to finish. I should just steer clear of slow-paced books when I see them then, huh?
🔢 Page Number: Despite only finishing one book – and one that was just under 300 pages at that – I read almost 600 pages last month. So I still read a fair amount, even if I (very unfortunately) didn’t finish every book I tried to read.
📖 Fiction/Nonfiction: 100% fiction this time around, as per usual. I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: I don’t read nonfiction very often.
📄 Format: All Kindle e-books this month. I don’t care for audiobook format.
⭐ Rating: I only finished one book last month (The Will and the Wilds by Charlie N. Holmberg), so I only rated one book last month. And it was 3.5 out of 5 stars. I just thought the book was okay, so that’s why.
📉 Pages Read Daily: The line graph on the right indicates how much I was reading every day, if I was able to read at all. As you can see, it really dips and then goes at a complete straight line at 0 pages near the end of the month, because I was busy for the holidays.
Annnd that about wraps it up for December! Not as much of a productive month where books (or this blog) are concerned, but I have faith I’ll do better this month. I’m already starting off pretty strong, so hopefully I can keep up this momentum. We’ll see what happens.
I’ll be doing a yearly reading wrap-up for the whole of 2022 very soon, so keep an eye out for that if you like my monthly reading wraps. It’ll probably be something pretty similar, but on a slightly bigger post. Otherwise, join me next blog post for more bookish things!
November is over, and with it, part one of holiday season hell. Oh, and my StoryGraph statistics for my November reading are complete, too. Can’t forget about that; this is a book blog, after all.
Just like for October, I’m going to do a bit of a reading wrap-up talking about my book stats, a la The StoryGraph. This includes my reading moods, genres, page count, et cetera. So, let’s get started!
To begin, I’m going to highlight three pie charts: my moods, pace, and page number. Regarding the moods (the pie graph in the middle), they were adventurous, mysterious, and lighthearted. That’s one mood up from October! Woohoo. I also read more books this past month, so that also probably affected the stats here. I think you guys can get an inkling of the energy I like in my books.
For the pacing, it can be inferred from the graph on the left that I most likely enjoy fast-paced novels the best. Which is… absolutely correct! I just like their flow, and how, even though the characters still have time to have a few moments to reflect, the plot really keeps chugging along.
Regarding page count, it’s obvious from the rightmost pic that I enjoy primarily average length novels. Nothing too long or too short – something juuusst right.
For this section, I’ll be discussing three more graphs: genres, format, and the fiction/nonfiction ratio. Looking at the bar graph in the middle, you can see that I really, really love fantasy. Which is totally me – it is absolutely, hands down, my favorite genre ever. I just can’t get enough of it. The rest of it is a little more all over the place, so it’s a bit harder to identify what other stuff on the graph I like, so I’ll just tell you. Just this once. (Probably.) I primarily read YA and NA (I know, you totally can’t tell from my book reviews, haha), with the occasional adult or middle-grade book here and there. I read books for the story first, and what section I found it in the bookstore second, though. I also really like sci-fi and horror, though this graph doesn’t indicate that nearly as much (or at all).
For the format, print all the way! I’m just not an audiobook kind of person. Like, I’ve given it a shot a couple of times, and it just didn’t do it for me. I like to do the heavy lifting myself when it comes to reading books. No offense to you audiobook lovers out there or anything.
Concerning the fic/nonfic ratio, it more often than not gonna be mostly – if not completely, as seen on the pie chart on the right – fiction. Occasionally, I will however, read a nonfiction book of sorts. Occasionally.
And here we are, the last two graphs. Two lovely bar graphs, one for star ratings and one for pages per day. For the star rating graph, you can see my average is 3.75 stars. Almost a perfect 4 star average! But I just didn’t like The Conjurer all that much, so they really brought the average down.
As for the pages per day graph, it can be seen that I really picked up reading the second half of November. (The first half was just busier, okay?!?) At the end there, though, I really pick up on the book consumption. Like, it really spikes right after Thanksgiving.
And now that we’re finished with all these stats, let’s get into the actual books that I finished last month. Without further ado…
The Conjurer by Nick Oliveri
This book is about a guy named Mikalla, who works as the Conjurer to the king of Idaza. Throughout the novel, he discovers a terrible plot, and the majority of the book deals with his struggle with serving his kingdom, and with what he believes to be right. As well as a lot of extraneous bullcrap.
Those who have been reading some of my book reviews for a couple of weeks now know just how I feel about this book. I won’t spoil anything for anyone, since it’s technically my first book roast (though I really wish it wasn’t – I really wanted to like this one). I gave this 1.5 / 5 stars. Check out the full review here.
In Deeper Waters by F. T. Lukens
This book is about a prince named Tal who’s going on his coming of age kingdom tour. Through all of the crazy stuff that ends up happening, he encounters a mysterious boy named Athlen. Who is definitely not a merman. Definitely not. More stuff happens, they bond, you might be able to figure out the rest. (I know this is a bit vague, but I like to be as spoiler free as possible.)
I gave this 4 / 5 stars, so I totally liked it. Come read the full review here, if you haven’t already.
The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding [Prosper Redding #1] by Alexandra Bracken
Prosper Redding is the disappointment to the Redding family; as in, he’s a bit of a disaster. (He’s good at art, but unfortunately, no one cares about that. A-holes.) His family’s disdain for him comes to a head two weeks before his thirteenth birthday, where it is revealed that he has the demon, Alastor, Prince of Friends, sharing his body with him. And it all devolves from there.
It was my favorite book that I read in November. I rated it 5 / 5 stars. Check out the full review (if you haven’t yet) here.
The Last Life of Prince Alastor [Prosper Redding #2] by Alexandra Bracken
After the ending of the first novel, Prosper and Alastor must learn to work together, if they want to save the things that they love. But can they? This is really short, but it is a sequel, so I want to keep spoilers to the bare minimum.
I haven’t posted my review for this book yet, but know that I gave it 4.5 / 5 stars. Still a great book, but I liked the first one a little more. The book review for this is coming soon.
And that’s a wrap for the November 2022 Reading Wrap-Up. What books did you read last month? What did you think of them? Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day/night!
