Weekly Recap #10: Week of 7/16 – 7/22

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Hey everyone!  It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

This past week was our hottest week of the summer thus far, so needless to say, this bookworm stayed inside all week because I don’t do 100+ degree temperatures.  Because I was stuck inside all week, I did manage to get three books read, two of which were for my Summer TBR Wipeout challenge so now I’m making pretty good progress on that.  Where I didn’t do so well this week though was writing reviews.  I actually only posted one last week and have 5 I need to sit down and write.  I’m struggling with a couple of them because even though I loved the books, I’m having a hard time putting into words exactly what it was I loved about them.  Do you ever  experience that?  Anyway, I hope to get a few written today to get back on track.

What else happened this week?  Oh, I FINALLY got to go see Wonder Woman in the theater. OMG, such an incredibly badass movie.  I loved everything about it.  Gal Gadot was perfect for the role, and I was especially blown away by all of the Amazon warrior training scenes at the beginning of the movie.  I loved the movie so much that if I could have, I would have stayed and watched it all over again.  Can’t wait to get that one on DVD and I highly recommend it if you haven’t already seen it!

Well, that’s pretty much it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

     
 

 

STACKING THE SHELVES

 

  

TOTALLY RANDOM

Weekly Recap #9: Week of 7/9 – 7/15

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Hey everyone!  It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

It has actually been a pretty quiet week for me.  The summer heat has arrived and with temperatures hovering near 100 and the humidity making it feel well above that, I’ve spent way more time inside than I would have liked.  One of these days I really want to have a swimming pool put in to make days like these more tolerable.  A girl can dream, right?

I’ve also been one of those moods lately where I want to watch movies, but not new or recent releases.  This week I watched Sister Act, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poet’s Society, The Empire Strikes Back, and the animated Beauty and the Beast.  Those just made me hungry for more older movies so I have E.T., The Goonies, and Raiders of the Lost Ark on deck for the upcoming week. Still plan to get lots of reading done though!

On the blog, I’ve had a good week as well. I posted the last of my July publication date ARC reviews so I’m keeping up with those nicely.  I also published another discussion post (finally!), so I’m excited about that since doing more discussion posts was probably my biggest blogging goal for this year. I also knocked 1,200 pages from my TBR this week (It was only 2 books, but they were huge, okay?  Haha!) I’m not doing great on my Summer TBR Challenge though – so far I’m only on my second of 12 books but hopefully I’ll turn that around soon.

On the agenda for today is lots of blog hopping and commenting since I’ve been kind of lax about that the past couple of days while trying to finish up Strange the Dreamer.  Incredible book, by the way. One of those that’s so amazing, it’s almost hard to put it into words for a review.

Well, that’s pretty much it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

     
 

 

STACKING THE SHELVES

 

   

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

via cartoonstock.com

Weekly Recap #8: Week of 7/2 – 7/8

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Hey everyone!  It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

I hope everyone who was celebrating had a happy and safe 4th of July holiday.  My husband and I let our son dictate the festivities and ended up hosting the neighborhood kids in his age group for smores and a few fireworks.  It was great fun and the kids even helped with clean up, so that part was even better!

This weekend my husband and I are celebrating our 18th wedding anniverary, which doesn’t even seem possible.  I’ve almost reached that point in life where I’ve been with him for more years than I’ve been without him.

It was a pretty busy week for the blog too.  I managed to get those writing days I was hoping for and am now all caught up on my book reviews (well, for the moment anyway!).  Right now I’m in the process of writing a discussion post for later this week and am starting to read some of the books on my TBR for the summer reading challenge I’m participating in.  Up first is A Court of Wings and Ruin, followed by Strange the Dreamer.

I also had my first DNF in a while this week.  I just couldn’t connect with the characters in Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. I found them abrasive and annoying so I ended up ditching that book.  I’ve had a run of great reads though, so I guess I was due for a DNF.  Hopefully that won’t be the start of a run of bad books.  Fingers crossed!

Well, that’s pretty much it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

   

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

      
 

 

STACKING THE SHELVES

 

 
 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap # 7: Week of 6/25-7/1

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Hey everyone!  It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

Happy 4th of July weekend to all who are celebrating!  I’m actually headed out of town today to attend a 4th of July bash at my aunt and uncle’s house.  It looks like we’re in store for some nice weather so I’m looking forward to spending some quality time outdoors, catching some rays and reading some of the July ARCs that have snuck up on me.  I had to backburner Heather Graham’s Perfect Obsession, which I had been planning to read this weekend, because I received an ARC for Final Girls, which comes out on July 11th so I really need to get that read first.  I started it today and it took me a while to really get into it, but now I’m flying through it and hope to finish it by tonight.  Then I need to read Conversations with Friends and The Library of Fates, which also have upcoming publication dates.

I’ve gotten a little behind on writing reviews, so I’m hoping that having a couple of extra days off this week will allow me to make some progress on that front.  Adjusting my schedule so that I get in my 40 hours at work and can still be off by noon on Fridays is taking some getting used to, and so several of my planned writing sessions this past week turned into impromptu naps instead.

I’m especially excited about the upcoming week because I’ll be posting my very first author interview!  Yay for a blogging milestone!  I’ll be posting that tomorrow, along with a giveaway to celebrate my milestone, so be sure to stop by and check it out. 🙂

Well, that’s pretty much it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

  

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

      
 

 

STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

 

Weekly Recap # 6: Week of 6/18-6/24

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It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

Hi everyone! I hope you’ve all had a wonderful week.  Mine was interesting, mainly because my son was at his grandmother’s house all week and my husband was out of town for work, so I was home alone the entire week.  I thought for sure that meant I would get a ton of reading done, but somehow that didn’t happen. I finished The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, which I really enjoyed, and got a pretty good start on A Conjuring of Light, which is absolutely fantastic so far, but that was pretty much it.  I don’t even know where the rest of my week went, haha!  I did watch Moana on Netflix and finished Season 5 of Orange is the New Black, which I have very mixed feelings about.  Oh and I’ve been having issues with some people not being able to comment on my blog posts so I’ve been trying to resolve that.  It’s times like that when I wish I was a lot more computer savvy than I am.  I feel a little helpless right now waiting for someone else to help me.  A huge thanks though to those who have contacted me and let me know there was a problem.  Otherwise, I would have just assumed it was a light traffic week on the blog and been oblivious that there was a problem.

This week I’m hoping to finish A Conjuring of Light and then move on to a couple of ARCs that I need to review soon.  ACOL is over 600 pages long though so we’ll see how that goes.

Last week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic really got me thinking about how many series I’ve started but not yet completed, so my big goal for the summer is to finish up a couple of lingering series so that I can move on to the ones I’ve been meaning to read for ages.  Once I finish ACOL, which wraps up the Shades of Magic series, I plan to move on to A Court of Wings and Ruin to finish out that series, and then move on to The Illuminae Files.  Somewhere in there or maybe in August, I also need to finish up The Lunar Chronicles.  So yeah, probably ambitious goals for me but I feel pretty good about making them happen.

Well, that’s pretty much it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

    

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

      
 

 

STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

Weekly Recap # 5: Week of 6/11-6/17

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It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

First, let me take a minute to wish all of the Dads out there, mine included, a very Happy Father’s Day!  I took my dad out to lunch yesterday to celebrate and we had a lovely time.  Today I’ll be celebrating with my husband, son, and Father-in-Law so it has been a full weekend of Father’s Day festivities.

Off the blog, this week was all about my son.  This week he finished up the fourth grade so we were busy with awards ceremonies and other end-of-year activities.  He finished the year with straight A’s so that was definitely a proud mom moment for me.  I took him to the library yesterday to pick up a few books for summer reading. Right now he’s really into the Henry Huggins series from Beverly Cleary, which were some of my favorites growing up so it’s fun to watch him enjoy the same series I did.

Let’s see, on the blog I had a pretty good week, although I came down with a head cold on Thursday and so have had such a case of medicine head since then that I haven’t read much.  I did start The Inexplicable Logic of My Life and it’s fabulous. Great pick for Father’s Day weekend because it features a wonderful father/son relationship between the main character and his adoptive Dad.  As you’ll see from my Stacking The Shelves section below, I also had several books on reserve at the library that became available this week so I need to get moving on those and I also got approved for a couple more ARCS so I have plenty of books to keep me busy for a while. 🙂

That’s it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

 

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

   

 

STACKING THE SHELVES

 

     

   

 

TOTALLY RANDOM

Weekly Recap # 4: Week of 6/3-6/10

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Hey everyone!  It’s time for another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

I had a pretty good week in terms of all things blog-related. With the reviews that I’ll be posting this week, I’ll have met the deadlines for all of those June ARCs that snuck up on me while I was so obliviously working on my backlist challenge.  Now that those have been met, I have a little breathing room on the ARCs until next month.  That means I’ll be focusing on knocking out some of the library books that I’ve been hoarding so this week I plan to read One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid and The Inexplicable Logic of My Life by Benjamin Alire Saenz.  If I’m able to squeeze in a third book, I’m thinking I’ll start It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover.

Off the blog, it has been a nice week too.  We’ve started special summer flex hours at work. What that means is that I’ll work longer hours Monday through Thursday, but that I’ll be off by noon on Friday instead of 5pm.  I’m pretty stoked to have my Friday afternoons free for extra reading time or whatever.

This week has also been another big TV watching week for me because season 5 of Orange is the New Black dropped on Netflix Friday morning.  I’m pretty obsessed with that show so as of right now, I’ve already watched 8 of the 13 episodes and really hope to finish it today.

Let’s see…what else?  Oh, I’m dying to get to the theater to see the new Wonder Woman movie.  From what I’m hearing, it more than lives up to the hype surrounding it.  My husband and son blow me off every time I mention it, so my first half-day Friday might be spent heading to the theater to go watch it solo!

And that’s it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

UPCOMING REVIEWS

   

  

STACKING THE SHELVES

     

TOTALLY RANDOM

source: parajunkee.com

Weekly Recap # 3: Week of 5/28-6/2

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Hey everyone!  I’m back with another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

I hope everyone has had a wonderful week.  Mine was pretty good. Getting Monday off so that the work week is short is always nice, and then the weather finally sorted itself out and we were able to get that championship soccer game in. My son’s team won 2-1, so yay! Now all that’s left on the soccer front is the end-of-season party, which we’re going to do at one of those new indoor trampoline parks so that should be fun for the kids.

Because the weather was so nice, I spent a lot of time outside reading, which was amazing.  I had an excellent reading week, but a horrible writing one.  I’m only planning to finish reading Six of Crows this week and then starting Saints and Misfits because I have four reviews I really need to get written before I forget everything about the books I’ve read recently.  I really loved The Sunshine Sisters and The Upside of Unrequited, so I’m looking forward to reviewing those.

I’m also trying to work on my personal fitness goals now that the weather is warm again.  I’ve worn a fitbit for a couple of years now but have always been hit or miss about actually making my daily goal.  I’m trying to get in 12,000 steps everyday to offset the fact that I have a desk job and spent wayyyyy too much time sitting every day.  This week I made my goal 6 out of the 7 days, so fingers crossed I can keep that up.

And that’s it for me.  Have a great week, everyone!

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

UPCOMING REVIEWS

     

  

STACKING THE SHELVES

     

TOTALLY RANDOM

Weekly Recap # 2: Week of 5/21-5/27

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Hey everyone!  I’m back with another weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. This week I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

Happy Memorial Day weekend to all who are celebrating and a huge thanks to all who serve in our military and keep us safe everyday.

Mother Nature has not been very cooperative this week so that championship soccer game my son was supposed to be in last week?  Yeah, still hasn’t happened yet. It was rescheduled for Wednesday and then Thursday, but each time, the weather had other plans.  We’re now tentatively rescheduled for this Tuesday though so hopefully we’ll have an exciting finish to the season.

I got a fair amount of reading done this week but also spent a lot of time binge watching some of my favorite TV shows, mainly because my DVR was so full I didn’t have room to record anything else, haha.  I got caught up on Empire, Pretty Little Liars, The 100, and The Big Bang Theory.  I also finished binge watching season 3 of Grace and Frankie and am working on season 2 of Shameless.  Shameless is a great show to watch while I’m on the treadmill. It’s so outrageous and so funny that I stay distracted and don’t even realize that I’ve walked for 45 minutes.

My holiday weekend plans had originally been to lounge outside most of the weekend since we just installed a new pergola and all new patio furniture, but again, Mother Nature can’t seem to decide what she wants to do.  One minute it’s sunny and gorgeous, the next it’s gray and looks like it’s about to pour.  Hopefully she’ll sort herself out soon because I really want to get out there and enjoy some sunshine.  I’m so ready for summer!

I had a pretty productive week on the blog as well.  I got several of my backlogged ARCs read so I’ll be writing reviews for those this week in order to meet my deadlines.  I’ve also been working to post a little more often this year (last year I usually only did 3 posts a week).  I don’t think I’ll ever be one of those folks who can post everyday, but I feel like I can pretty comfortably do 4, sometimes 5, posts a week now so I’m pretty excited about that.  I’ve also been trying to do more with discussion posts as well.  I’m always bashful about doing those for some reason, so I was happy that I pushed past that shyness and got a discussion post up as well this week.

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

    

UPCOMING REVIEWS

    

    

STACKING THE SHELVES

      

TOTALLY RANDOM

Weekly Recap # 1: Week of 5/14-5/20

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Hey everyone!  This will be my first time doing a weekly recap post of all things happening on and off the blog. I’ll be linking to the Sunday Post, which is hosted by Caffeinated Book Reviewer and to Stacking the Shelves, which is hosted by Tynga’s Reviews.

First, let me apologize for my lapse in responding to comments on my blog and on blog hopping this past week.  My son’s soccer team, which my husband coaches, has been preparing for their playoffs all week and had their first playoff game yesterday (we won, yay!), but it has made for a busy week of hauling my son back and forth to practices, etc.  Aside from some pre-scheduled posts, I wasn’t very active at all in the blogosphere.  Weather permitting, the championship game is Tuesday night, so after that I should be much more active around here.  Thanks so much for your patience while I fulfill my soccer mom duties. 🙂

As far as blog life goes, up until this month I had been making great progress on my Beat the Backlist challenge, having read 14 backlisted books so far this year.  Sounds great, but I did get so caught up on that, that I’m now playing catch up on ARC reviews because some publication dates have crept up on me that I had let slip through the cracks.  It’s all about that balance that I’m still trying to perfect, haha! Anyway, so I’ll be churning out quite a few ARC reviews during the next few weeks to meet those deadlines.

 

WHAT I POSTED LAST WEEK

 

 

WHAT I’M READING THIS WEEK

 

      

UPCOMING REVIEWS

 

       

STACKING THE SHELVES

 

    

TOTALLY RANDOM