Category Archives: Random

April 18, 2012 · 12:31 pm

Sick, busy, blah blah blah…

I’m back. Again. No, seriously, for real this time!

So remember like almost THREE WEEKS AGO when I was like “Wah wah wah I’m sick” and was largely absent. And then it was Easter, and then my grandma died :( and then I got sick AGAIN.

So, I don’t need to give excuses obviously. I was busy and sick, I couldn’t help it. But for you poor souls who are still reading this, thank you and I love you! The wake / funeral for my grandma all went okay. I miss her, but I’m glad that I still have a lot of memories of her, mostly from before her stroke years ago, which is good. Before all funeral stuff I caught some weird string of the flu and was plagued by chills, body aches, headaches, sore throat, etc. And now I’m in that stuffy nose / coughing phase, and my voice is pretty much gone. Fun!

But I am feeling better, and the honeyman assures me that if I would JUST STOP TALKING my voice will return to normal soon :) So, I feel better, there are no major events coming up right now, and I quit my (second) job at Lane Bryant! Yesterday was my last day. Yes, the coming days should be MUCH more free and relaxed. I hope to read a lot, both at work AND at home on my days off.

So, life has interrupted my virtual and bookish life HARD this month. I have not finished a book since March. This is insane. I’m still re-reading The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon, and I’m hoping to finish that in the next few days.

I’m dropping out of Alice’s The Woman in White readalong. Because it’s APRIL FUCKING 18TH and I only managed to get about 80 pages into it before life got in the way. This is a huge bummer, because I was really looking forward to all the reading and discussing and such. I’ll pick the book back up later, I want to focus on finishing TFC first.

I am still going to try to participate in Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon on Saturday. Usually I start the readathon earlier than everyone else because it works out with my work schedule, but I think I’m actually going to start at 8 AM like every normal eastcoast person and just try to read as much as possible throughout the day. I’m working on getting my pile of books for the readathon together today, and I’ll probably do a post about that tomorrow.

So, that’s about it. I’ll talk about more interesting, fun stuff on Sunday. For now I just wanted to remind you all that I am still here and I’m alive and hopefully will be back to posting as normal. I’m gonna go make some lemon tea with honey, hoping it will soothe my throat and help get me my voice back. And then I shall READ READ READ to my little heart’s content.

~Sarah

 

 

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April 10, 2012 · 1:27 pm

My Grandma

Me & Grandma, about a decade ago. It's one of my favorite pictures with her.

 

Hey guys, so you all have seen me mention that my grandma was on hospice care. She passed away Monday (yesterday) morning. She was 91.

My grandma & I were close, at least before her stroke 5 years ago. Since then her health had been declining, and she was having a rough time walking & talking because of the stroke. She died on pancreatic cancer. I love and miss her, but a little relieved that her suffering is over now. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but I hope there’s some sort of afterlife and that her soul can go find her husband’s (he died over 30 years ago).

Now I’m kind of busy with funeral arrangements and all that, so I won’t be online too much this week. I’ll get on twitter & comment on blogs when I can.

Thanks for understanding.

~Sarah

image

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April 6, 2012 · 1:20 am

I’m baaaccck! Kinda.

Hi there guys! Long time, no see!

SO, I’m still a teeny-tiny bit sniffle-y, but I’m feeling SO MUCH BETTER. That cold hit me like a ton of bricks and I have a lot of catching up to do now – finishing some of my bloggiesta tasks, reading and commenting on blogs (my GoogleReader is almost at 400 now), starting the April Woman in White Readadlong, etc.

I just wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who came by and wished me well. I’m sorry I didn’t have the energy to really reply to anyone individually, but each comment made me smile :-)

In other news, Easter is only 2 days away! It’s not a significant holiday for me, but we always had a big dinner with my grandma and it looks like we’re going to get one more with her, so I took Sunday off of work so that I can really enjoy being around family and helping out for the day. Grandma’s not doing so well, so I’m glad to kind of get one last family gathering/holiday in with her. Also, Amanda and baby L are coming into town Saturday night!

So, besides catching up on my internet life, I’m also going to scramble after work on Friday and Saturday to finish cataloguing all of my books and then cleaning up the house a bit, in preparation for Amanda and L having the spare room to sleep in. Luckily I enjoy cataloguing my books so even though it’s ALOT to finish, at least I’ll be enjoying myself.

Anyways, just wanted to stop in and say hello, and thanks to you guys again. *HUGS* Hopefully I’ll be around more in the next couple days, even with all the hectic-ness going on.

Hope everyone’s had a great week, and has a wonderful weekend!

~Sarah

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April 2, 2012 · 8:29 am

Where’s Sarah?

sick, Sarah

 

Hey guys, so in case you haven’t noticed I’ve hardly been around internet-wise since Friday night. Saturday was super busy and then by Saturday night my throat started hurting, and I felt like crap throughout my whole 18-hour shift on Sunday. I finally caught the honeyman’s cold :(

Normally being sick would mean I could lay around all day and probably manage to get online here and there, but between my 54-hour work week at First Job, and the additional 8 hours at Second Job, I barely have energy to even go on Twitter on my phone. I’m bummed that I kind of missed out on the last half of Bloggiesta, not to mention skipping my usual Sarah Sunday post, and March’s IMM post. I’ll definitely be re-visiting the Bloggiesta posts and mini-challenges to see what I missed out on.

Anyhoo, so I probably won’t be around the internet much until at least Wednesday afternoon / evening, if I feel better. And when I finally come back I will be COMMENTING AND POSTING ALL OVER THE PLACE. Promise.

I’m gonna go lie down now.

~Sarah

 

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March 29, 2012 · 6:00 am

Bloggiesta: My To-Do List

Bloggiesta

Instead of my a Thinking on Thursday post this week, I decided to post my goals for Bloggiesta here. If you’re interested in joining in the fun and accomplishing pesky blog tasks, visit here for more info.

So, here are the things I’m aiming to do this weekend for Bloggiesta, time permitting:

  • Visit and comment at other blogs, of course!
  • Add a Pinterest button to my blog, since I love me some Pinterest and I pin bookish stuff on there.
  • Link the few reviews I’ve done for 2012 Challenge Reads to their respective Challenge-hosting blogs.
  • Make sure all of my reviews are on my ”Reviews by Author” page.
  • Post some of my more favorite reviews on Amazon.

And a couple of things that I’ve been thinking about, but I’m on the fence with (I’d love your opinions!):

  • Add a “Pictures” page in which I post bookish pictures… pics of my bookshelves, booksales, 30 Days of Books pics, etc. Or maybe just add stuff like that to my “About Me” page.
  • Catch up on putting my reviews on Goodreads. I’m hardly on Goodreads anymore, even with my awesome new phone with the Goodreads app. So I’m not sure if this is worth the time. <— Yeah, not gonna bother.
  • Work on my “Sarah’s Top 100 Books” list, maybe post that.
  • Add link to particularly notable reviews or blog posts in the sidebar.
  • Go through and add rating categories or tags to every review post… a daunting task to say the least, but I thought it might be helpful for you guys.

I unfortunately have to work at least 48 hours this weekend, maybe more, Thursday through Sunday. I’m going to try to dedicate two to three hours each afternoon when I get out of work to Bloggiesta. Except for Sunday, cause that’s date night and the honeyman and I are FINALLY going to go see The Hunger Games movie.

So, any thoughts, comments, questions, concerns?

Yay Bloggiesta!

~Sarah

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March 23, 2012 · 8:04 am

Tell me what you think.

Good morning people! As some of you may know, Bloggiesta is next weekend! Starts on March 30th. Now, I’m not 100% sure I’m going to be able to participate like I wanted to – my grandma has pancreatic cancer, and my mom is bringing her home for hospice care this week, which means the end is near. So I might be with my grandma a lot this week, spending time with her and helping out and stuff. I’m not sure how I’m going to react to all of this yet… If I’m going to be a little sad and too lazy to care about going online, or if I’ll need the distraction so I’ll be online even more than usual. Either way, my grandma is still a tough little lady, so I’m thinking that we still have a few weeks.

Anyways, so I’m going to assume that I’ll still be able to participate in Bloggiesta next weekend in some capacity. I have a few things I want to add (like a Pinterest button) and a couple other ideas, but I really want to hear from you guys!

So, if you have any suggestions for my blog, I’m all ears. Widgets to add, changes to make, improvements, something to fix, etc. Use this opportunity to tell me if there’s something you don’t like – too few reviews, too many reviews, too many non-review posts, etc. I won’t be offended, I want some real honest answers from you guys. Don’t be shy! Give me some things to mull over this week, kay?

Looking forward to hearing your ideas!

~Sarah

 

 

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March 16, 2012 · 9:43 am

ramble ramble ramble

So, it’s Friday. And I haven’t posted since Tuesday. AGAIN. I suck. But then again, my sis and baby L were at my house for 3 days and I was all busy adoring my nephew in his finite-baby-cuteness. I’m sad he’s already over 7 months old, cause kids really start to go downhill once they turn 1. He’s crazy cute now though, and I’ll have pictures in my Sarah Sunday post.

Anyhoo, there WILL be a review this weekend of some sort. I’m reading In Search of the Multiverse by John Gribbin which is awesome and I’m learning all sorts of super-smart things and I only have like 70 pages left. But I take my time reading it so I can actually grasp the super-smart science concepts in it, which means I had ZERO time to read this while I had house guests.

I’m also reading a fluffy romance called The Tattooed Duke by Maya Rodale, which is surprisingly good so far. It’s kind of funny, I like the characters for the most part, and the characters are actually getting to know one another. This is the book I read during the busy hours at work when I can’t concentrate on the multiverse book.

Also, killing time online today while I ate lunch, I discovered this annoying post – in which the writer basically disses a bunch of comedy shows, most of which are quite funny. And I took offense to her not liking Whitney, because Whitney is hilarious and IS well-scripted. The honeyman and I were talking about how the show does such a good job of approaching relationship problems from different angles, and from tackling the same “theme” for each episode differently among all of the characters. For example, in one of the recent episodes Alex learns that Whitney literally runs away in any kind of emergency – muggings, fire, etc and of course feels like she doesn’t have the team mentality for a relationship. Another character is going through a break-up and drinks, goes out, and generally keeps busy at all times  – another “running away” theme, but so different from Whitney and Alex’s issue. If I wasn’t at work, I would totally post clips from Whitney. Instead, you should just go on Hulu and watch it. But watch lots of them, cause I don’t think it’s fair to judge a show just on it’s first few episodes. And even I was kind of “ehhh” about it at first.

I know everyone’s entitled to their opinion and stuff… but so am I, lol.

I also came across this little thing, the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels. There are two separate lists, one is “the Board’s” and one is “the Reader’s”. I have to say, the Board’s list kind of sucks. In that I don’t recognize too many of the titles, and I have only read 6. The Reader’s list seems a bit better, and I like that there are lots of sci-fi novels listed. YAY sci-fi! Still though, I’ve only read 10 off of that list. BOOOO.  Sadly, The Catcher in the Rye is included on BOTH lists. Why, why, why? There are so many better books out there.

I THINK I shall someday soon come up with “Sarah’s 100 Best Books” and post it here… but that will be a project for another day.

There’s a tumblr (still don’t quite get what tumblr is…) called I Hope Rick Santorum, and if you also IMMENSELY DISLIKE A.K.A. HATE Santorum, you should check it out. I can’t post the link because I’m at work, but it’s hilarious. You can also check it out on Twitter, @ihoperick. It’s basically people posting all these little evil annoying things that they hope happen to Santorum, such as:

“I hope Rick Santorum gets off at the wrong exist and his GPS takes forever to re-route.”

or

“I hope he makes some toast, but the butter is still hard so when he tries to spread it, it tears the bread.”

TOO FUNNY. Of course, for a man who is so extremely anti-women it isn’t funny at all, these are just the beginning of the horrible things that I wish upon him. But still. They make me giggle.

 

OK and that’s my randomness for the day. It’s not too busy at work right now, so I’m gonna try to squeeze some reading in. Hope everyone is having a great Friday!!!

~Sarah

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February 13, 2012 · 8:20 am

Tag! Tag! Tag! You’re IT!

Most annoying title I think I’ve ever come up with.

So, I finally sit down to get some bloggin / commentin done, and what happens is that I stumble upon Alley’s post at What Red Read, in which she tagged me. And because I admit that writing posts is more fun than going through my Google Reader, I figured why not.

So, here we shall go.

What to do

1. Post rules.
2. Post 11 fun facts about yourself.
3. Answer questions from the person who tagged you.
4. Make up 11 questions for people you tag.
5. Tag 11 people. (Yeah I’m not tagging 11 people.)
6. Let them know they’ve been tagged. (I’m also not bothering to do this… if you see the post and see that you’ve been tagged, cool. Feel free to participate or not.)

11 Fun Facts About Sarah

1. I went to a Catholic school up until 8th grade. I’m an atheist. Even as a kid, I used to argue with the teacher in Religion Class. For some reason though, all the teachers really liked me. I even stabbed a boy with a pencil once (he had it coming, and I warned him), and they still liked me. I didn’t even get in trouble. Yay!

2. The honeyman actually met in 9th grade, when we were what… 14-ish? I thought he always looked really sad and tried to cheer him up, which made him feel really annoyed and he hated me. We lost touch, started chatting again when we were 20, and BAM! started dating. Aww.

3. I dropped out of school in the beginning of my junior year. I went to some “alternative” hippie high school, which basically meant that when I started to skip class and stuff, I never got in trouble… and yeah. I eventually decided that I wasn’t learning anything and dropped out. I got my GED when I was like 21 or 22 because I was worried I wouldn’t get this job I wanted if I didn’t have it.

4. I was an assistant manager at Waldenbooks when it closed, and I was on unemployment for 6 months. That was the best summer ever – and it was when I ran into the honeyman and we started dating. It’s also when I realized that I don’t want to work, I’d rather be a housewife (no kids). You know, have a house, a garden, some dogs, etc. The honeyman supports me in this. I can’t wait.

5. I used to want to be a singer when I was little. I spent hours singing along to Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera in my bedroom. I’m sure this annoyed my family to no end.

6. I really hate turning left out onto a busy street, like from a parking lot or gas station where there’s no light. There are some streets that I just will not turn left onto. I often plan my routes on whether or not I’ll have to turn left… I’m like Zoolander, but in a car.

7. I hate almost anything athletic. In middle school, I always came up with some excuse and just sat there during gym. I’m just too self-conscious for sports. I have to get tipsy just to go bowling. I like walking… and probably would like hiking. I’ve never seriously hiked before, so I’m not sure.

8. I love movies / stories about omnipotent characters. Like the Phoenix in X-Men, or those weird creepy kids in that new movie Chronicle. I’d love to be that super bad-ass and powerful. It’s weird that I didn’t read comics as a kid… and I feel like I’m too old to really get into them now.

9. I don’t want to live past like 75. I hate old people, and I have a huge fear of being old and invalid.

10. When I was about 10, I tricked my little sister. I told her that in order to turn 7 years old, she had to drink this disgusting mixture – I put mustard, chocolate syrup, ketchup, pickle juice, and basically any other liquid I could find in the fridge into a glass. She took one sip and puked all over the place. It still makes me laugh :-)

11. I’ve never broken a bone. I know this isn’t a fun fact, but dude… it’s hard to think up this many fun facts about myself. I lead a boring life.

Questions from Alley

1. What’s your favorite bookish movie? (Movie based on a book, movie with literary tendencies, whatever) Ummmm… Wuthering Heights, the one with Tom Hardy in it. Love that movie, I need to re-watch it soon.

2. How often do you re-read books? Not often enough. I’m still in the middle of re-reading the Outlander series.
3. What’s your favorite reading spot? Hmmm… probably in the spare room. All my books are in there, there’s lots of light, there’s a futon and an end table. It’s awesome.
4. Which season is your favorite? Spring. I like seeing all the little green buds on the trees. That’s my favorite time of year.

 
5. What’s your profile picture? I’d have to look to be sure, but I think it’s my on our couch smiling like an idiot.

 
6. What’s your ideal meal? Man… some sort of chicken, some sort of potatoes, and then veggies. Simple, I know. I love chicken and potatoes though.

 
7. What’s your guilty pleasure TV show, movie, book? Hmmm… probably Glee.

 
8. How do you like to spend a rainy day? Home, cleaning and reading and cooking. I’m a homebody.

 
9. Do you have any good Tumblrs to recommend? No, I don’t really understand tumblr…

 
10. If you like to cook (or bake), what’s your favorite thing to make? Hmmm… good question! I like making chicken pot pie… It’s a lot of work with the pre-cooking the chicken, chopping a bunch of vegetables, etc. but I think that’s why I like it. I like spending a good hour or so putting it all together. Plus it’s the honeyman’s favorite, and I like hearing him tell me how good it is.


11. Do you have a big TBR list? Or do you wait until you’re done with your current book to buy (or borrow from the library) your next reads? GIANT. I have almost 900 books, and I still have to read over half of them. Someday…

 

OK, 11 Questions for You to Answer…

1. Do you like where you live?

2. What would you do if you were omnipotent?

3. What’s your favorite holiday?

4. What music did you like to listen to 10 years ago?

5. What are your favorite websites?

6. What’s your favorite plant or flower?

7. Do you have any pets?

8. What are some of your favorite tv shows right now?

9. If you could jump into any book, which would it be?

10. What’s your favorite joke?

11. If you could buy anything right now, regardless of the price, what would it be?

 

OK, and here are the folks I’m tagging…

Jenn at Booksessed

Daisy at Between the Pages

Pepca at Beyond Strange New Words

L.L. at The Story Girl

Kristilyn at Reading in Winter

And you know, if anyone else wants to grab this, do so. Have fun!

 

~Sarah

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February 2, 2012 · 4:11 pm

Thinking on Thursday… LITERARY TATTOOS

So I was actually going to write a post about the whole “Franzen hates e-books” thing, but I decided that wasn’t really worth the post. I mainly would have been saying “dude has a point”, but ya’ll know my anti-ereader sentiments already, so ehhh. I’m too lazy to go through it right now.

INSTEAD, let’s talk about something definitely on my mind this morning – Tattoos! I don’t love ALL tattoos - I prefer my tattoos to be small and pretty, but who in the book blogging world doesn’t love literary tattoos?

Now, I’m purposely saying “literary tattoos” instead of “bookish tattoos”, because I think literary covers a broader scope – any quotes, the alphabet, common phrases, pictures of authors/book/book scenes, etc.

I have two tattoos right now, (one more literary than the other) and I’m craving a third one… and since my birthday is next month, tht might just happen. But first, the ones I currently have:

“Live Laugh Love” circled around my left wrist. And yeah, I know LLL is kind of cliched, but I love it. It reminds me to be happy and enjoy life, even when stuff sucks. Also, I’ve realized I take very few pictires with my wrist in the shot, lol. This was from about 2 years ago and the clearest picture I could find right now.

 

“I’d rather be reading.” scrawled across the top of my right foot. I had trouble deciding exactly how to express my love of reading and books, without choosing a long-ass quote or getting a picture of a stack of books, which would be ugly and boring. I think this came out awesome, and since I got in October right before it got cold out, I’m really looking forward to flip-flop weather.

I want another tattoo, but I take my time in deciding. I mean, it’s permanent! Which is why I’m hesitant to get a direct quote from a book tattooed on me, cause what if I end up hating that book later on in life? Or, quotes that I like seem too long and since I don’t like big tats, that cancels those out.

You guys know how much I love Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series, so of course I want an Outlander-themed tattoo. I have several pieces of Outlander jewelry thanks to the honeyman (seriously, I love that man), including the ring below. I want to get that thistle Celtic pattern tattooed on me, perhaps added to the Live Laugh Love tattoo around my wrist. It would be an awesome way to pay tribute to my favorite series, without having to pick a quote or something. I’ve actually already had my sister draw up the pattern on paper for me, so maybe this will be the one I get next…

There’s one quote from a song that I’ve really been wanting, but I’m not sure where I would put it, or how small I could make it… “This life is temporary but the soul is eternal” from the song Thieves in the Night by Mos Def and Talib Kweli. It’s not bookish, but it’s words, so it counts as literary… right? Along the same lines, I’d really love to get the infinity symbol tattooed, and I’m thinking of maybe doing it in white ink… I’m not sure yet.

ANYHOO, literary tattoos are fun! And meaningful to bookish folk like ourselves. I love looking at them online, and probably my favorite site is The Word Made Flesh. I could scroll through that site forever.

So, what do you think of literary tattoos?

Is there any book, quote, or author that you’d be willing to get tattooed on yourself?

Do you have any already?

Or are you thinking of getting any?

And would you please leave links to your literary tattoos in the comments? I’ve love to see them.

~Sarah

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January 1, 2012 · 8:00 am

Sarah Sunday – A Year in Review…

Hello, 2012!

Well good morning my lovely readers, and welcome to 2012! So, I wanted to do a bit of a reflection over the past year, both personal and bookish.

Sarah’s 2011…

This was the year of constancy. With the exception of the birth of my nephew L, there were no huge major changes in life. We stayed in the same apartment, no one has died, me and the honeyman both have the same cars as the year before. I’m still at my ACO job (the one where I’m basically a security guard), and the honeyman left a crappy job and now has a much, much better one. I picked up a second part-time job, that I may or may not stay at now that the holidays are over. The honeyman and I celebrated 4 years together over the summer, and we’re still crazy happy. Life has been pretty good.

So, let’s take a look at some of the more interesting stuff then, shall we?

In December of 2010 we learned that my little sister Amanda was pregnant! Woo hoo! We had her baby shower in June, which was kind of fun and my first real time helping in planning a baby shower.

Mom, preggo Amanda, big sis Heather, and me.

And in July, I finally got to meet my little baby nephew! Now for almost her entire pregnancy, Amanda said she was naming in Luis, which I thought was awful and decided I would just call him L for short. And then on the day that she had to take him home from the hospital, she changed her mind and named him Jariel. Which is so, so, so much worse, and since “el” is at the end of it, I decided to just keep on calling him L.

L looked like this when he was born :)

and now…

 

... and now 5 months later he looks like this. FATSO BABY :-)

 

In August, I unwisely decided to give red hair a try. It did not last.

Faded in about a week or two, went right back to blonde.

In October, I got my second tattoo!

LOVE IT.

And then the holidays hit, and life has been crazy busy.

Sooooo, looking back on 2011, here are some of the Sarah-things I want to work on in 2012:

~ Be less busy. Not off to a great start, since I just signed up to do a 72-hour work week at the end of January… But basically I need to find a way to be healthier. Since my job require me to basically sit in a chair for 36 -48 hours a week, I am soooo out of shape. And lately I’ve had the urge to go out and take walks, go to the gym, dance around, etc… except it always hits me at inopportune times, like when I’m at work or it’s late at night. It’s frustrating. So I need to find ways to be even a little bit more active. And for me, that directly correlates to how much more free time I have. Also, I need to SLEEP more before work!

~ TAKE MORE PICTURES! I have sadly realized that only a couple pictures of me and the honeyman together have been taken, and they’re not even great ones. Hopefully having an awesome camera on my new phone will help this.

~ Maintain weekly date nights. The honeyman and I have just recently started doing this again, since starting his new job we don’t have a lot of spare time together and want to make it a point to leave some time for romance. It can be hard though – considering that my job gets in the way of half of the week, and we already have a game night once a week, sometimes date night gets pushed aside and that sucks. So we’re going to try for at least 52 date nights this year! And if we can fit in more, even better!

~ Even though I’m already annoyingly busy… try to work on a social life. I hardly ever get to hang out with my sister Heather anymore, when we used to hang out several times a month. And I’m trying to forge more girl friendships… I feel like I’ve gotten out of my shell a little bit this year, and hopefully I can find those spare days or nights for more socializing. I’m a homebody by nature, and kind of a lazy friend, so this in particular will be hardest.

Sarah’s Bookish 2011…

So, I feel disappointed in my reading this year. Obviously I’m a little bummed that I wasn’t able to read more than I had in 2010, but I don’t think it’s just that. I decided not to partake in any challenges in 2011, because I wanted to focus more on re-reads. So I re-read the Harry Potter series, half of the Outlander series, some of the Fearless series, and a couple random novels throughout… But I didn’t get all of the re-reading that I wanted to do, because I started to feel a little guilty re-reading. Especially with the Outlander novels - those are my FAVORITE books, but they’re like 1000- 1500 pages each – they take about a week or more to read, especially if I’m busy. So instead I’d read other, shorter books in the interests of having some reviews to post more often.

Also, in February I started doing the monthly polls, in which I would post a list of like 4 to 6 books, and you guys would vote on which one you wanted to see me read and review. And while that was fun and led to me reading some great books… sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes I slogged through a book I totally would have DNF’d because I wanted to give you guys the review you asked for. So even though the polls were of my own design, I think I started to feel trapped by them. Sometimes I pick a book to put on a poll because I think I should finally get around to reading it, and then I end up disappointed that it won, or I don’t feel in the mood for it anymore…. anyways, WHINE.

On the flip side, I did discover quite a few new authors that I enjoy and will be keeping an eye on for future releases. And I’ve realized that I really enjoy challenges, because they urge me to try new books and expand my reading, but kind of at my own pace, ya know?

So, there are really two changes I’ll be making to the blog this year:

1.  The February poll will be the last monthly poll for a while. The honeyman and I started reading 1 book together a month, and I think that’s really all of the “required” reading I can handle. Reading a year of poll winners was fun and different, but I’m putting it on the back burner for now.

2. I’m going to try to make my review format look a little neater… Maybe include IN the post the title, author’s name, year it came out, publisher, pages, etc… I’m not quite sure yet. I may also occasionally borrow the book descriptions from Amazon or Goodreads, because I often suck at trying to descibe a book in my own words, without giving too many spoilers.

 

And here are my BOOKISH goals for 2012…

~ Read what I want, when I want. I’m going to try not to fret over reading a really long book because it’ll mean less wonderful reviews here. I’ll just have to post random babbling posts instead ;-)

~ Try to read every single day. Even if it’s only 10 pages, or for 10 minutes. I hate that sometimes two or three days can go by and I’ve just been too busy to pick up the book I’m reading.

~ Start a quotes journal. It’ll be quotes from books and authors, as well as from tv, movies, people, etc… I just want someplace to physically write them down so I can look at them later.

~ Take more baths. Doesn’t sound reading-related, but I love to read in the tub. Hence more baths = more reading. Plus more relaxing. And maybe more wine…

~ Comment on blogs more. I’m a lazy blog reader. I MUST be less lazy about commenting, because I love getting comments, and you know. Karma.

~ Post more reviews to Amazon. Especially if it’s a newer, relatively unheard of author and I like their book.

So, HAPPY NEW YEAR! Bring it, 2012.

~Sarah

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