Hello!

Everyone has their own little reading habits – there’s a never ending discussion about dog-earing pages and bending spines – and whether you have a reading goal to read 250 books or you just try to read as much as you can, everyone has their own little quirks so I thought I’d share mine!

I have to read a whole series consecutively

If I start reading a series and I don’t hate it, I have to read the whole thing in one go or I will probably forget what happens or lose momentum. On the one hand, if I grab a series out of my TBR Jar I feel cheated because I only get to put one bit of paper in my ‘read’ jar, but I get to tick off more than one book from my unread list so pros and cons.

I also have a bunch of sequel books that I need to buy prequels for so that makes it more difficult to reduce my unread books too! Which leads to…

I won’t let myself reread books I love while I have unread books on my shelf

I’ve added a few of my favourite titles into my tbr jar so I have a chance to reread them (especially because some of them I’ve not read for probably a decade) but even then I still feel bad about it! Depending on the length of the book, it can take me anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks (maybe months) to finish a book, so it feels silly to use that time on a book I’ve read before when I have so many unread books on my shelves!

Maybe one day I’ll find a better balance, but for now I need to take a chunk out of that tbr jar!

I can’t balance reading physical books and ebooks at the same time

I really thought when I dug out my old kindle and started reading the sequels in the hush, hush series by Becca Fitzpatrick I would read so much more because I’d finally got into the triple platform reading I’ve seen so many people talking about on tiktok, but I just can’t find a balance between ebooks and physical books! For now, I’m separating my reading type by eyes and ears – as soon as someone invents a way for me to sniff stories I might be able to consider reading three at a time!

I track my reading in far too many different places

I use Storygraph, I have an app called Bookshelf for tracking my physical books, I ‘have’ to update my Instagram bio, post a review, add it to my stories and put it in a highlight, I generally make a tiktok about the books I finish, I have a section in my bullet journal, my booktok journal, my wedding library review journal for my book club books and a spreadsheet where I track and record what I’m reading. I know it’s excessive and I know that I could definitely drop some of them, but I don’t want to because they all do slightly different things! I can’t justify it, but I’m not going to stop 😂

I kind of hate bookmarks

Don’t get me wrong, there are some very cute designs and I love the idea of designing my own but I am someone who gets very overwhelmed by choice – I’m a minimalist in that sense – and unless I suddenly develop the brain capacity to read more than one book at a time (unlikely) I will only ever need one bookmark at a time! I have a handy plastic postcard that says ‘I’m not lucky, I’m good’ and I’ve been using it for approximately four years now and I have no intention of changing it out any time soon.

Watch me now develop an obsession for bookmarks!

I feel like I’ve just finished a sort of bookish confessional, but honestly it feels good! I love talking about books and reading and I’m kind of not joking about designing my own bookmarks, so if anyone knows anything about starting an Etsy store or good materials for bookmarks or bookish things, let me know!

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx