With the second half of 2018 starting tomorrow, it's time to look forward to what books I've got my eyes on for the rest of the year. My TBR (to be read) is sitting at 484 books today so I scrolled through it today on Goodreads to see what I wanted to prioritize and broke them up into categories. 

​Digression: I spend a lot (A LOT) of time browsing for books, organizing the books I want to read into categories, talking to other people about books, and making various plans to read these books (which I almost never keep, by the way). I do not pretend this is normal behavior, this is book dragon behavior. (Shout out to all my fellow book dragons who know what I'm talking about)

I stalled out on Leigh Bardugo when I got sick of YA,  but finishing the Grisha Trilogy and Language of Thorns is a high priority, especially with King Nikolai coming out next year. Bardugo also wrote Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom, which I just love, set in the same Grishaverse. I am reading The Inheritance Trilogy as an omnibus, and I have the last two books  (The Broken Kingdom, The Kingdom of Gods) to go. I did read The Killing Moon, but The Shadowed Sun is on hold indefinitely until someone else reads it and lets me know how prominent the sexual violence is. I really enjoyed The Killing Moon and the story stands on its own, so for now it's just keeping me from checking a box.

This year I am actually participating in the Read Harder challenge and making reasonable progress. These are the tasks I have left and the books I intend to read for each one.

• Oprah Book Club Selection: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones or One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• A book of colonial or post-colonial literature: Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
• A book of genre fiction in translation: The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  
• A book with a cover you hated: On a Red Station Drifting by Aliette De Bodard
   

I am on a mission to learn about tea. In June I read The Tea Book by Linda Gaylard and The Art and Craft of Tea by Joseph Wesley Uhl, covering tea 101 pretty thoroughly. Fun fact: that herbal "tea" you're drinking is not Tea. Only tea made from one of the 3 varieties of the Camellia sinensis plant are Tea. Those other things are tisanes. You're welcome. So I'm moving along in my studies to The Tea Enthusiasts Handbook by Mary Lou Heiss, Darjeeling by Jeff Koehler, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See (this is a novel, but that's how you round out studies, historical fiction), and For All The Tea in China: Espionage, Empire and the Secret Formula for the World's Favourite Drink by Sarah Rose.

I guess I'm doing kind of an African American Studies independent study. I didn't learn nearly enough about my own history in school, so no time like the present. What's really exciting is all the contemporary authors telling their stories as Black Americans. What's not exciting is how for every forward push, there is a substantial backlash, most recently the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Drugs and mass incarceration.

..that's a lot of books. 30 to be exact. I'm probably not going to read all of those books but it is statistically possible, so we will see.  I really really did narrow it down. And there is something about each one of those books that kept me from being like, nah book, I'll see you in 2019, but I honestly feel like every book is just something to read until Muse of Nightmares comes out in October. 

Thanks for reading this very, very long post. What are you most looking forward to reading the rest of this year?

So I have been reading my ass off this year. Far more than I have read in any other year of my life. At the beginning of the year I set my Goodreads challenge at 48 books. One book a week felt like too much, so I went with 4 books a month and set a stretch goal of 100 books. Because why not, right? It's good to have goals. I also set a goal to read (eyes on print) every day this year, 365 days, and am currently at 173 days.

For the last 2 years I have been keeping a pretty detailed reading spreadsheet that I got from Rachel Manwill from Book Riot. (NEW YEAR, NEW GOALS, NEW AND IMPROVED READING LOG). It's way more than a casual reader needs, but I'm not a casual reader, yo. And here are my stats:

As of June 23, I have read and listened to:

• 85 books: which works out to 11, 956 pages and 192:01 hours. 

Format:

• 65 print/digital
• 20 audio

Form:

• 38 Prose
• 40 Comics
• 5 Poetry

I started the year with a handful of comics on my TBR. I wanted to use Pretty Deadly as my western for the Read Harder challenge, finally check out the new Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Monstress which I picked up on kindle sale. So first off, the artwork in Monstress alone is worth a read. But Vol. 2 was so compelling I couldn't wait for Vol. 3 and bought all the singles. I was kind of disappointed with #17, though. ANYWAY. That was my plan, But then I discovered Lumberjanes, and that really became my comfort read when I was too tired or stressed to read anything else, so I read through Vol. 8.  And I thought that was my favorite. AND THEN, I found Phoebe and her Unicorn and immediately read all of those. So there has been A LOT of comic reading this year. I'm slowly working my way through Saga and about to read volume 3 of Goldie Vance.

• 62 Fiction
• 20 Nonfiction
• 30 Adult
• 13 YA
• 16 Children's/Middle Grade (this is primarily Lumberjanes and Phoebe and her Unicorn).
• 55% Fantasy
• 10% General Nonfiction
• 8% Sci Fi
• 7% Memoir/Biography
• 45 female identifying authors
• 9 male identifying authors (I'm not really trying to give too many men air time in this year of our lord 2018. Especially not white men.)
• 29 POC authors
• 18  Queer main characters

Clearly I'm a fantasy reader. And I understand people who don't like fantasy and other world building and prefer their literature, well, real world or sci fi-y. But don't try to genre snob me with your love of whatever that's not fantasy. Fantasy encompasses the characteristics of ALL other genres, WHILE simultaneously world building. <hops off soapbox> 
While I've always preferred YA, I hit a serious wall with YA in April and then all fiction in general. Nonfiction was the only thing that didn't just irritate me (Lumberjanes aside). So in the last couple months I have read The New Jim Crow (infuriating), I Contain Multitudes (fascinating, you actually do have cooties), The Nature Fix (go outside folks), The Orchid Thief (the geographical history of Florida and the world of orchids, my god. I had no idea), The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up, and two very comprehensive books about tea. (I'm kind of a tea expert now).  The only fiction that snuck in was A Gathering of Shadows and A Conjuring of Light, both on audio, and both amazing. 

Mini Challenges: 
Read an author's library:

• N.K. Jemisin: (just her series) I finally finished off The Broken Earth trilogy in February and read the first books in The Dreamblood Duology and The Inheritance Triology. 
• Leigh Bardugo: I read Crooked Kingdom and Shadow and Bone but had to give up on Siege and Storm when I banished all YA from my reading life. I'll get back to it this summer. I have the 2 remaining books in the Grishaverse and The Language of Thorns. 

So that's where I am as of now. One of my goals for the rest of 2018 is to read and listen to books I own, instead of checking 15 books out of the library, but the struggle is real. 

Thanks for checking in with me and happy reading! 

Aka: Somehow the internet can make you feel inadequate about the thing you love to do most and thought you were real good at

Whoooo. It's been awhile. But here we go.

I have always been a reader. And I thought I had read a lot. I thought I was a book nerd. But when I decided I wanted to start a book blog, and ventured into the bookternet I realized I am not a book nerd. I am more of a recreational reader. (My desire to hoard books of all formats aside.) Which started this whole questioning who I even am if not a book nerd. And if Bitches Love Books even has a future if I can’t impress the world with my “have read” list and witty book reviews. So I’ve done a little reflection that looked something like this.

I guess I’m a niche reader. I can’t account for the 27 years before I started teaching (since 5 of those years involved almost no fun reading, since I was in school) but growing up I read what they told me to in high school, and I remember Anne of Green Gables, Judy Blume, and a fleeting love of Stephen King. I taught 6th grade for 12 years, so in the belief that I should read what my students are reading, I read a lot of middle grade books. And only in the summer. (What teacher has time to read during the school year? Not this teacher.)  At some point I gradually moved into YA. Even then my tastes sat pretty firmly in sci fi and fantasy.  I discovered while trying to get my English credential, there’s a ton of “classics” I haven’t read, either. So, I’m not that well read, apparently.

And, I don’t write book reviews, because I don’t read them. I like to discover books as I read them, with as little information as possible to get a general sense of the plot line.

So then, what good am I to the reading community? Pause for reflection. Dramatic pause for effect.

Fucking plenty.

One of the goals of Bitches Love Books is to read and promote more diverse books. The publishing world is still mostly white and male, unless it’s YA, and then it’s white and more female. But other voices are out there, and I want to read them, and amplify them.  So that’s what we’re going to do. Alla this is about our journey to read more and more diversely. 

Read on!
​Harmony

Did you find something bookish this week? Leave us a note in the comments. Until next week!
-H.

AKA: How to horde invisible books

I like books in all formats. Paper, kindle, audiobooks. I want them all. ALL THE BOOKS. Far more than I’ll ever be able to read in my lifetime, I think. I have a book buying moratorium on paper books since both of the bookshelves I have are double stacked and it would be unacceptable to the people I live with to just stack them on the floor. Which, for the record, I think is a fine way to keep books.

There’s a lot of ways to pick up cheap books. But I like the internet and instant gratification (read: instant download). So there are a few places I frequent to add to my growing Kindle collection.  There’s something for all literary tastes.

Newsletter

• Book Riot's Daily Deals
  • ​ Links to the Kindle version
• Book Bub: 
  • You can choose from a wide selection of genres and follow authors to be notified on deals and news.
  • Links to all formats available (Kindle, Nook, iBook, Kobo and, Google).

• Goodreads Deals  (Goodreads account required)​
  • I recently discovered that Goodreads will send you an email when they discover a deal on a book on your Want to Read list.
  • You can also sign up according to genre and author.
  • Links to all formats available.​

​
Internet Scavenging

• Amazon Kindle Daily Deals
• Amazon Monthly Deals​
• Nook Daily Deals
• Nook Books Under $2.99
• Nook Books Under $5

I usually scour the Amazon monthly deals right after the beginning of the month. The cheap price makes me adventurous and I usually find a couple titles outside of my usual genres to add to my TBR.

Also!! Many classics have moved into public domain and both Amazon and Barnes and Noble keep their own stock of these titles in ebook for free. Or you can visit Project Gutenberg or Google Books.

Happy Reading!
-H.

A lively discussion from some bitches who really love books.