April has been a quiet month for the most part. I’m still adjusting to medication changes, although that has been slowed down a bit now, so I haven’t felt up to doing much beyond my normal daily stuff. I did go out once this month with my husband, which was fab. We went record shopping on record store day, you can read about that in my weekly wrap-up post from yesterday. My husband collects records in the same way I collect books so our house is getting a bit full with both of our collections but at least we understand each other’s hobby!
In terms of blogging it’s been a good month. I was thrilled to have a few of my reviews from this month move into my most liked posts on my sidebar – and even had the top spot change a couple of times. First SweetPea got there and that was then knocked into the number two spot by See What I Have Done. Yesterday I got a notification telling me that I’d had my most likes in one day ever so that was lovely to read. I don’t obsess over my stats but it’s always nice to have a gauge that my blog is steadily growing as time goes by. I was also thrilled to discover that my review of See What I Have Done has been quoted on the new Lounge Books website, it made my day!
Here are the 19 books I read this month:
First Love by Gwendoline Riley
One of Us by Asne Seierstad
Deconstructing Dirty Dancing by Stephen Lee Naish
The Power by Naomi Alderman
The People at Number 9 by Felicity Everett
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
No Turning Back by Tracy Buchanan
Luuurve is a Many Trousered Thing by Louise Rennison
He Said / She Said by Erin Kelly
Titanic Lives by Richard Davenport-Hines
Radio Silence by Alice Oseman
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
Foxlowe by Eleanor Wasserberg
The Wild Air by Rebecca Mascull
April Blog Posts & Reviews
I managed to write and post eight reviews in April, which isn’t quite the three per week I was hoping to achieve but an average of two a week isn’t too bad. I did also post my regular posts: WWW Wednesday, Stacking the Shelves and Weekly Wrap-Up every week, which I’m happy about. Then I was lucky enough to interview two authors for my blog this month, and I got to feature a lovely author’s guest post. So all-in-all I’m happy with how many posts I shared on my blog this month but I would like to try and get some more reviews written and posted in May if I can.
Here are my reviews from April:
Deconstructing Dirty Dancing by Stephen Lee Naish
Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
Here are the author interviews I was lucky enough to do in April:
Jennifer Gilmour, author of Isolation Junction
Kay Langdale, author of The Comfort of Others
I also featured a guest post on my blog in April:
Lynda Renham, author of Remember Me, wrote a guest post about changing genres for her new novel
The state of my TBR:
The state of my TBR is something I’m starting to wish I’d never shared on my blog as every month I’m becoming more aware of how little willpower I have when it comes to books! I started the year with 1885 books on my TBR (these are all books that I own but haven’t read yet) and as of the end of April I now have 1933 unread books! I’m very aware that the number is going in completely the wrong direction but have so far being quite powerless to stop it.
I joined the Mount TBR challenge on Goodreads a little while ago and challenged myself to read at least 100 books that were on my TBR before the start of this year. I began to realise that I would struggle with getting my TBR reduced (although I am still trying to work on that) so am now trying to at least make sure that I’m reading a similar number of books I’ve owned a while to the new books I acquire. I’ve so far read 90 books this year and 41 were on my TBR before the start of 2017 so I’m happy with that ratio and hope to keep it up.
How was your April? I hope you all had a good month and that you read good books. Did you read many books? What was your favourite book of the month? Please tell me in the comments, I’d love to know. Also, if you have a blog please feel free to leave a link to your month’s wrap-up post and I’ll be sure to read and comment back. 🙂
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