TBRs

(Not) Spooky October TBR

/ Maude / 5 Comments

I’ve never been good at reading spooky stuff and watching scary movies, but I am so excited for Halloween month ! I’m looking forward to making a ton of pumpkin dishes and decorating my small apartment in orange and green – and participate for the first time in Blogtober this year !

I’m planning some more varied content this month, with a few book reviews, but also some discussion posts and – hopefully – some photos I’ll be able to take in my new neighborhood before winter comes in ! I’m hoping that having a set plan for those posts will help me stay focused on my daily to-do list as well as regain some of the productivity I’ve lost through the summer.

October is a month of midterm exams for me, and as weird as it sounds, I’ve found that it actually helps me more to have a lot of things planned in my days. It’s really useful to force me to get out of bed in the morning and follow through on my plans instead of sleeping until the afternoon and not finding any motivation to do much of anything.

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My plan for this month

The TBR part

For this month, I don’t have a fully planned TBR yet – only a few notes in my brand new notebook, which I’ve been carrying around with me at all times these past few weeks in order to keep track of all the books I see during the day that might be interesting to read.

I also have a few ARCs to read from NetGalley – I’ve been granted a wish by a publisher for a book I’m really excited about, but those will have to wait until we’re a little bit closer to their publishing date.

So far, I’ve got, for the first books of October :

The 5 am club, Miracle Morning, and Your dream life starts here – Lately, I’ve been listening to some motivational podcasts and reading some blog posts about motivation, and how to organize your day. I’m not convinced that I’ll actually start waking up at 5 in the morning after reading those (especially during my midterm exams week) but I’m still curious to see what this is all about. And if there’s something I can use and apply to my own personal life, that’d be a pretty good bonus !

Rage becomes her, and Travail gratuit, la nouvelle exploitation (In english : Free work, the new exploitation) – I had planned to read those two a loong time ago, but I just never could get my hands on them. Now that I’ve moved into a much bigger city than the one I lived in before, I’m hoping one of the local libraries will have them – these are the kind of books I feel like I’ll be able to learn a lot from, but that will take me some more time than usual to read.

Digital minimalism and Irresistible – I’ve been watching a lot of videos from Ashley at bestdressed, and saw her mention those two books in one of those. I spend a lot of time on my phone everyday, doing more or less nothing on it – except maybe read a book or two, but nothing I couldn’t do without it. I’ve been meaning to try and see if I could use it a little less, try to be more focused on what I’m currently doing than on who posted a new story on Instagram or what party my ex-roommate is going to tonight.

So that’s it for me today ! I still have to find a way to obtain those books – something I’m hoping to find some time to talk about at some point this month, and we’ll see how it goes.

N.B. : All the photos in this post are from Unsplash.

April Wrap-Up and May TBR

/ Maude / Leave a comment

I’m writing this post from the comfort of a Starbucks chair in the corner of the shop, inside my city’s Chapters bookstore, with a coffee frappuccino and a brand new writing journal (that I might even dare to use in the next few months… if the results are any good, I might post them !). I’m the stereotype of the millennial young woman, and I like it.

The month of April has been eventful, with 6 exams at the end of it, 2 big semester-long projects to complete, a whole lot of stress and not enough time to read any more books, let alone write reviews of them. I’ve been feeling extremely guilty for abandoning my work here for two whole weeks (and then wrote a post about self-care, that you can find here !) , but today is my first actual day off since the semester ended, so here I am !

Even though I didn’t completely meet my reading goals this months, I still managed to finish :

– the Uglies trilogy, by Scott Westerfeld, reviewed here.

– Art Matters, by Neil Gaiman : you can find my review of it here (made when I had the time, at the beginning of the month…)

– Hand to mouth, living in bootstrap America, by Linda Tirado : as I expected, this was a bit too hard for me to review, because of the heavy topic of this book, but it is definitely a must-read for any American out here, and anyone who ever read the sentence “Well if they’re really poor, why don’t they quit smoking ? They’ll save money !” somewhere on the internet, and actually stopped to think about it and try to understand.

Sadly, I did not finish The light between worlds, by Laura Weymouth – I’ve been desperately trying to finish it for two weeks now, and I can’t seem to be able to read more than two pages at a time, so I’ll put this one on my nonexistent March TBR and see if I can finally get to the end of it !

I’m not actually planning a TBR this month, for a couple of reasons – I’m in between two full-time jobs, and just moved into a new apartment, so I’ll need some time to settle into my summer rhythm before I can plan things properly again. For now, I’ll just try to read whenever I can, and stick to my post schedule for some time !