Hello!

This blog post could be an incredibly short one because I only managed to read one book this month – I had a lovely weekend with my mum at the end of July where I finished Five Feet Apart, Heartstopper Volume 3 and Heartstopper Volume 4, then starting Stormbreaker – the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz – finishing that relatively quickly ready to move straight on to Point Blank…

Then I spent most of the month in severe burnout so my two prime reading times – audiobooks on my drive to and from work and in bed before I go to sleep – were lost. If I listened to my book while driving it made me dangerously tired, so I had to listen to music instead then in the evenings, I would fall asleep almost scarily quickly the second I got into bed – I wouldn’t have made it through a page.

So Point Blank hasn’t been started, I’ve not finished listening to Daughter of Burning City by Amanda Foody and the amazing start I made in the last weekend of July did not follow through to August.

And you know what… that’s fine.

I think the danger with places like BookTok and Bookstagram is that the popular creators are the kind that can read a 300 page book in just a couple of hours and listen to audiobooks on three times speed (I can’t even fathom being able to listen to it that fast) so their reading goals are, like, 200 books a year and that seems a million miles away from my goal of 36 (which according to Storygraph, I’m still two books ahead of my target!).

I don’t know why I thought blogging about my reading once a month or setting up a bookstagram would make me read faster, because it absolutely doesn’t do that – I love writing reviews, sharing what I’m reading and seeing other people’s posts, but I’m really glad I haven’t starting forcing myself to read faster in order to keep up with the pace that I see others reading.

There’s a fine line between reading for enjoyment and reading to play the numbers game or post about it online, but I’m glad I’ve been able to focus on enjoying reading more than anything else.

So the one book I did finish this month was Stormbreaker, by Anthony Horowitz. Although I’ve owned a box set of the first six books probably since the film came out in 2006 (when I was approximately 10 years old… I’m 26 next month) I’ve never read them and the only thing I had to go on was the film.

The writing style was definitely middle grade / YA, which makes sense with the protagonist being 14 years old, but it was a lovely narrative that well balanced the experience of being a teenage spy and a little bit of a sarcastic know-it-all, but set in the early 2000s so no iPhones or XBoxes! It was very easy to read whilst still being engaging and actually quite funny, which is an all round win from me.

Although I’m 16 years late to making the comparison, the film adaptation was actually very close to the book – it’s a very accurate page to screen transfer but as with every book-to-film, there was just more in the book that made it more exciting. There’s a whole scene where Alex has to swim blind in this underground cave thing to find out what’s going on in the lab with the Stormbreaker production and that would have been so tense on film, but perhaps a little much to watch a teenager nearly drown.

Considering how much I enjoyed reading Stormbreaker, I definitely had (and have) the enthusiasm to launch straight into Point Blank, the second of the six books I own and the now fourteen book series, but the amount of sleep I require to function disagrees.

I’m slowly getting my mojo back and I’m pretty sure I hit my breaking point earlier this week, so hopefully it’s all up from here and maybe I’ll actually get back to reading more consistently! Rather than reading 4-6 books in a month then only reading one, if that.

But that’s the thing about reading as a hobby – it’s not about how much you feel you ‘should’ be reading or the titles you think you ‘should’ be reading – it’s about reading what makes you happy, when you have time for it.

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx