Yes, it's a pattern with me. I never quite do what I say/what I set out to do. I have good intentions, but then real life gets in the way...and my poor blog, which I love so, is so neglected.
I've been doing a lot of reading, as always, but just not posting my thoughts as much. I just get bogged down and then I don't want to talk about what I read. Sometimes I think it's because I think my thoughts should go a certain way, or the review should be just so, according to some standard. I'm not reviewing as many books for authors. I've pretty much decided to only accept books from authors I know/have reviewed for before (and that's mostly horror authors at the moment so will be over at my sister blog,
Castle Macabre). So, my thoughts on books from my home library, mostly older books, should just be my thoughts. Right? I guess I just need to get that through my head.
I've also been listening to more audio books. Here's what I've listened to since January:
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
Jaws, Peter Benchley
Little Girls, Ronald Malfi (reread)
The Plantagenets, Dan Jones
Black River, Dean Koontz
The Bear, Claire Cameron
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro (currently listening)
I SO enjoy audio books, although I think my boys get irritated. I do find them getting into the stories sometimes though. I've also been listening to some writing podcasts, as I'm trying to focus more on my writing (now that I have a job that takes up more of my time...go figure). This below needs to be in my face constantly...
I wanted to share with you some changes to my two online book clubs (on Goodreads),
TuesBookTalk and
Lit Collective.
TuesBookTalk has always been a genre based book club in which we read a different genre each month (decided by voting). We also have three non-fiction months in January, May and September. Recently, I decided to set genres for specific months to cut down on the amount of voting we do, and to make it easier for members. Below is the graphic outlining what genres we read in which months. Come join us any time. We now do our chats on Slack (we have a "team" on there for TuesBookTalk) and it's so nice not to have to deal with a character limit. Of course, thoughts can also be exchanged in the Goodreads group at any time.
Our June read, which is Science Fiction, is
Dune by Frank Herbert.
Lit Collective is what we call an online reading retreat which takes place in the Spring and end of Summer/Fall. We will nominate and vote on a theme for the Spring retreat and then choose a list of 2-3 books to read and discuss in March, April and May. For our end of Summer/Fall retreat, we will focus on selected works of a particular author which will also be chosen by vote. We will read 2-3 works by said author and discuss in August, September and October. We generally have our chats after we've read the whole book. So, at the end of its designated month. We're also going to have our chats on Slack (Slack is free to join, by the way...forgot to mention that). As mentioned above, thoughts can also be exchanged in the Goodreads group at any time.
We are currently finishing up
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (on which I'm seriously behind, although it is a reread for me) and
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Right now, it's looking like Sarah Waters is going to be our featured author for August, September, and October (I'm pretty excited if it does turn out to be her. I loved
The Little Stranger).
Finally, I'd like to share with you two events coming up on June 1st.
The
SciFi Summer Readathon, hosted at my readathon blog,
Seasons of Reading, starts Thursday and runs until Wednesday June 7th. Details and sign up
HERE.
The
Summer of IT!!! In anticipation of the new movie coming out in September, I'm hosting a three month read-along of Stephen King's massive tome,
IT! This will be hosted via my reading community site,
Gather Together and Read (for schedule/sign-up/discussion) and I'll also have an event for discussions via the
Gather Together and Read Facebook group. Check at
Gather Together and Read later today to sign up and get the reading schedule.
Well, it's summer so dipping my toe back in the pool of this blogging thing. No promises, but I'm going to try. We shall see...
What's going on in your reading life?
