Starting 2025 With a Clean Slate

 

I opened my Goodreads in December, looked at my TBR, took a deep breath.... and removed everything.

The last time I updated that list was in 2016, and to say I'm a different person now would be an understatement. While there were a number of books there that I do still want to read, many were on there for specific challenges from groups that are currently not active. 

So I decided to start 2025 with a clean slate.

Just looking at the list was making me feel overwhelmed. I'm going to use it as a place to keep the books I'll be soon reading, rather than a list of hopefuls, sometime in the future.

My plan for this year are to review all the books I read (excepting the many repeats of kid's books... one review per book is my limit). I'm pretty sure most of the grown up books I read will be through NetGalley as that is just the easiest way to access books for me right now. I'm finding I'm having difficulty with getting the books I want to read in the time I want to read them through the library. Many books I search either aren't in the catalogue or have months long waiting lists. That's not very conducive to buddy or challenge reads.

My goals this year are:

1. Read 12 grown up books this year. I think planning on 1 per month is reasonable, and I may even get more!

2. Read 1 new book to the kids each week. Considering their books take less than 10 minutes to go through normally, this is totally achievable. I'm mainly doing this so we don't get stuck in a rut of re-reading the same 5 favourite books over and over.

3. As stated above, review all books that I read, and as a subsection to that, start cross posting to social media. Any NetGalley books will obviously be reviewed there, however I want to get my reviews on here, as well as Goodreads. I have Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky, and it would be nice to get them going with reviews. I'm not looking to become a Bookfluencer or anything, just to honestly review stuff for the authors and people looking. Especially the kids books because there isn't as much out there as for those written for adults.

4. Be more active on my Goodreads groups. I'm part of Challenge Corner, NetGalley Readers, and NetGalley Buddy Reads and I just want to be more active and part of the community.

5. Continue to be active on Librivox. I host the podcast, proof listen, and book coordinate over there and I want to continue what I've started. The only issue with being a proof listener rather than listening to the finished story is that I quite often listen out of order, so I'm not sure I can count those books. I may include a Librivox post each month just to keep track of my activity and give it a little promo.

6. Play around with the NetGalley Reading Journal. I don't expect this to be something I actively update throughout the year, at least not on a book by book basis. I'd like to at least do the Month Summary pages though.

I think these are all reasonable goals for the year. The biggest challenge will be time, but I'm planning on taking that time after the kids are in bed now, even if it means hopping out to a coffee shop to get it done.

What goals or plans are you looking at for the year?

Dusting Off and Gearing Up

 My goodness, it's been a while!

Looking at my last post, apparently the post vacation hangover took me out for longer than expected. Followed by me expanding my family by 2.

In the ensuing years of motherhood, my brain did not have the energy to read anything, much less review what I did have a few braincells to read. So this poor blog ended up vacant and dormant.

Now, however, my children are sleeping through the night, and old enough for me to foster a love of reading in them. So I am back to log what I'm reading and review so others can find the good, the bad, and the ugly.

While I am still an eclectic reader, and enjoy a lot of different genres, I will be including children's books as my kids and I dive into them. 

My kids at this stage are Munchie, my daughter who just turned 5 and has been reading independently for about 8 months, and Biggie, my son who just turned 2 and is just learning his letters and numbers, but is figuring out how to sit long enough to get through a board book.

Munchie's nickname comes from her having a penchant for biting while nursing when she was a baby, my Hubby thought it was hilarious, I suffered.

Biggie's nickname is due to the fact that he is a giant. He is off the growth charts that the doctors use, and is currently in 3T clothes.

I still get most of my books from my local library's online catalogue, but I've also just joined NetGalley and have been thoroughly enjoying reading and reviewing the eARC's on there. Having another place to link a review is one of the main reasons I'm getting this blog started up again.

I will be following the same reviewing pattern that I previously used, though on kid's books I'll include whatever comments I get from the kiddos because a kid's book isn't fully reviewed until a kid weighs in.

I have some catching up to do with the books that I've read this year, so expect to see a flurry of posts in the next few weeks while I get those reviews out.

Thank you for joining me on this journey, and please feel free to comment with requests or suggestions on what we should read next!

Jessie Facts: Where do I get my books

So along with reviews, I want to post some info on how I get my books, how I review, what I like to read, where I tend to read, etc. I'm going to call these posts "Jessie Facts" and just have little blurbs about me and my reading.

A good place to start is where I get my books.

I am an avid reader, but I'm also at a stage in my life where I don't have a lot of dispensable income. Mortgages suck! So most of my books come from my local library.

I am horrible at remembering due dates, so I didn't take as much advantage of this prior to last year when I got my Kobo. That was when I discovered that my local library had connected with Overdrive and has a lovely selection of e-books to choose from. I now have it connected to both my Kobo and my iPod so I can download and read books on the go. The two best things about this is that A) it's free, and B) it automatically returns all books so I don't have late fees!

My next main spot for getting books right now is through author promotions on various online stores. Lots of authors will put the first book in a series up for free when they drop their second book, or just to get more reviews, or whatever. I recently found an app/website that makes my life a lot easier when it comes to promotions like this. It's called Bookbub, and it's a site that collects all the promotions it can find that connects with Amazon, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo, and puts them all in one place so you can pick and choose what you'd like to get. You get to select the type of books you like to read and it will send you an email daily with those types of books listed, or you can just hop on the app or site and scroll through the categories. I love the fact that it has "free books" in their own category as well.

Lastly, I have my home library. My husband is also an avid reader and when we moved in together, our combined library overfilled our apartment. Luckily we moved to a bigger house and now have an area that is specifically the 'library' though we still have smatterings of books in every room of the house. Since we both read and collect different styles of books (he's more into adult fantasy, and I read a lot of YA), there are plenty of books on the shelves that I have to work my way through.

It's nice that there are so many options available right now for people who have limited budgets.