Hello friends!!!
Welcome to February! What a beginning to the year, huh? I don’t know about you guys, but it’s been cold and snowy and cold. Mostly cold. Personally, I find cold weather to be the perfect weather for reading. We (my partner and I) recently fixed our pellet stove in the kitchen of our house, and it’s so nice to sit in front of the stove and enjoy the warmth while I read.
This month, I participated in the January Pages Challenge on StoryGraph. For this challenge, I needed to read at least 1 page every single day in January and keep track of my reading on StoryGraph. This was a great way to start ramping up my reading habit for the new year, and I’m happy to say that I completed this challenge! Woo hoo!
On that note, let’s get into the stats for the month of January!
Since this is a new year, I’m not going to add the previous month’s statistics. After January, I will return to having the previous month and the current month’s statistics present!
You can see here just the effect that reading every day had. I went from reading 2 books in a month to 6, with most around 400 pages. I also unhauled a few books as I redid my shelves and cataloged them all in a new app on my phone (I’ll have a review on the app sometime this year). On the other side, I actually ended up purchasing 5 books on the last day of the year. One of those books was an updated copy of a book I already owned, so I didn’t count the unhaul for that one.
Now let’s talk about the TBR Picks for February. If you’ve been following my blog posts for this year, you’ll know that I’m working on two monthly challenges by BooksandLala. I’m using the prompts for these books to help me pick books from what I already own. The hope here is that I will read books that I have forgotten about or neglected over the years. That means that I’m going to list the potential books to fulfill the prompts instead of a handful of books I have picked out to try to read. If that makes sense.
Buzzword Reading Challenge
Keyboard Keys
Title includes words or symbols seen on a computer keyboard.
These are the three books I could find in my collection that have a keyboard key in the title. Surprisingly, I had no books in my library with the words “space, end, delete, control or shift” that I hadn’t already read. So I was forced into the “&” and “?” world. I am leaning towards either Bookshops & Bonedust or Butcher & Blackbird. I’m personally just not really feeling How Does it Feel? at this point in time. That could change, but I doubt it. I have read Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldtree, which was the book that came out before Bookshops & Bonedust and I really enjoyed that one. I also have heard a lot of good things about Butcher & Blackbird; however, that would mean starting another new series.
Buzzword Cover Challenge
Cover Featuring a Silhouette
A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhouette is usually presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all.
I had more books that worked for this cover than I had thought. Obviously, the elephant in the room is that Butcher & Blackbird is on both prompts for next month. I will let you know right now that I will not use that one book for both prompts. It would defeat the purpose of using the prompts to get through my TBR if I were to use one book for both. If I were to go with the book that is the oldest on this list, that would be The Dead Romantics by Emily Poston. I actually got rid of all my contemporary romance a few years ago but this one survived for some reason. This would be a good opportunity to either keep it in the collection or get rid of it (via DNF).
Outside of those two points, this one is actually quite open-ended. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll choose, but I like that I have various options from horror to historical romance to fantasy to choose from. This one will be interesting for sure.
That’s it for this blog post, friends! I feel like this was longer than I anticipated it being, but I had fun. I think I’m going to try to keep reading once a day, even if it’s only a short chapter. It has helped me read more, and I haven’t experienced frustration or burnout that I thought I would get. Until then, I’ll keep reading! I’ll see you all again next week!
Bye friends!!!
Reading with teafortiffany 
Leave a comment