Hello!
Today I’d planned to write a my May reading wrap up, but I’ve only finished one more book since I got back from my holiday and I did a full review of everything I read while I was away last week… I thought that might be a bit dull.
I had a couple of ideas for what to write about this week but none of them were quite right to be a full post so here are three mini bookish blog posts!
Simultaneously eye-reading and ear-reading
On a spontaneously trip into town with my husband (he wanted a new XBox controller, I convinced him to buy me breakfast and let me look in The Works and Waterstones) I picked up a copy of the final book in the Scholomance series, ‘The Golden Enclaves’ by Naomi Novik. The entire reason I read this series was because I saw this book in the half price hardback sale in Waterstones in January and it’s still in the new hardback section five months later, after I finished listening to book 1 and reading book 2.
But I’d already listened to more than half of book 3 by the time I bought it, which begs the question – why did I buy it?
Well, one – it’s absolutely stunning, I mean look at it.
And two – I don’t know if it is because I was listening whilst doing a lot of travelling, but I’ve found it particularly hard to focus on and engage with so I wanted to try reading it with my eyes whilst listening to it with my ears (why does that sound like a children’s nursery rhyme?).
It turns out, double reading (as I have just this moment decided to call it) is an incredible relaxing, immersive experience. So much so that I could actually listen at more than 1x speed (don’t judge my tiny little brain pls)! I’ve spent the rest of this week trying to get ahead on all my tasks so I can sit and finish this off before the end of the month.
checking in on my 23 books for 2023
When I wrote this blog post about the books I want to read this year, it was absolutely for the sake of having something to post – it has a nice ring to it, I could make a nice graphic and make a tiktok video out of it. But because I (mostly) choose what I’m reading by picking bits of paper out of my tbr jar, the likelihood that I’ll pick these 23 out of the 320+ that are in there is slim to none… but here’s a check in anyway!
Though, defying those slim odds, I have read 3 of the 23 and I’m about to start a 4th tonight! ‘Good Omens’ by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon and ‘The Atlas Six’ by Olivie Blake have both come out of the tbr jar and I defied the jar in taking ‘God’s Behaving Badly’ on holiday with me. I also picked ‘Things We Never Got Over’ out of the jar pre-honeymoon but I didn’t quite get to it so I’m starting that this evening and I’m excited for some contemporary romance after some quite intense YA fantasy.
I’ve just had the idea that maybe next year I’ll do an Alphabet tbr for 2024, but god knows how many books will be in my jar by then! I’ve managed to read 32 books so far this year, which is the most I’ve ever read in this amount of time and almost as much as I read in the entirety of 2022 so who knows! I have a mental goal in mind of where I want to be by the end of the year but I don’t want to jinx it by sharing it.
These Twisted Bonds – Lexi Ryan review
The one book I’ve finished since we got back from Greece! I really enjoyed the first book in the duology – ‘These Hollow Vows’ – to the extent that I opted for buying the ebook of this sequel than reading one of the dozen other books I had downloaded on my Kindle because I just wanted to know how it was all resolved!
I ended up rating it 3 stars – one less than the first. Whilst the magic system, the world building and the heritage of the faerie world was engaging and well thought out, the characters lost all personality and became stereotypes of from any YA fantasy romance – the ‘Chosen One with all the power who exists to serve as a love interest for two men’, the ‘Evil Queen’, the ‘Betrayed Stubborn Man-Child Who Won’t Let The Girl Who’s Moved On Go’, the ‘Prince who is her true love and just wants what’s best for his people and will sacrifice all joy in his life for it’… you get what I mean.
It had a nice ending and the plot was really good, I just got so fed up of the characters.
So I’ve just realised why I enjoyed writing these mini posts so much – because it feels like an Instagram caption 😂
Which probably suggests my Instagram captions are too long but I love writing them too much to shorten them!
Thank you for reading,
Sophie xx
sophie counts clouds 
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