Hey all, Dani here.
Happy May Day everyone! I hope you all are having a fantastic day.
Before I jump into the breakdown of everything I’ve read and watched, I’m going to start with the overall 2019 wrap-up, as I have every month thus far. I think it’s helpful to look at my overall month-to-month progress on my goals for the year.
- Reading: I read 19 books this month. I’m still doing really well with my Goodreads reading challenge for the year, but I’ve started to slack on my Year of Big Books personal challenge. I’ve read a couple 500+ page books, but they weren’t ones on my list. I guess they still count, though. And I have big plans for big books as we move into summer, so there’s still plenty of time to feel successful with these reading goals. For the record, my Goodreads goal was 75 books and I’m currently at 69 books read. So I can definitely say that I’m going to be increasing that goal, but probably not for a little while. I’d like to still try and get myself to focus a smidge more on writing.
- Blogging: This has been my most successful year of blogging so far, and that’s fantastic, and this month I definitely saw an improvement over last month. Mostly this is because I ended up bringing back my weekend posts in order to keep from falling even farther behind on my review backlist.
- Writing: Chalk this one up to a pretty big failure. I think I only wrote maybe 1,000 words this month, which I’m a bit upset about, but spending the first third of the month without internet definitely took its toll on my ability to focus and write.
- Conventions: GenCon is close to releasing the event and panel calendar, which means we’ll start figuring out our tickets for the stuff we’d like to do. The past couple GenCons we went to, most of our time was spent wandering the show floor. I’m hoping to go to some writing panels. Oh, and they keep adding guests for Cincinnati Comic Expo, and it is making me even more excited to go–even though Damian and I will spend most of the event working with Colorworld Books.
Let’s start off with the books I’ve read over the month of April. As always, if there is a review posted for that read, I will include a link to it as well.
Geekerella by Ashley Poston — 5 stars
The Princess and the Fangirl by Ashley Poston — 5 stars
The Devouring Gray by Christine Lynn Herman — 4 stars
We Rule the Night by Claire Eliza Bartlett — 4 stars
My Hero Academia, Vol 18 by Kohei Horikoshi — 4 stars
The Girl from the Other Side: Siuil a Run, Vol 6 by Nagabe — 5 stars
How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, Vol 2 by Yukiya Murasaki and Naoto Fukuda — 4.5 stars
How Not to Summon a Demon Lord, Vol 3 by Yukiya Murasaki and Naoto Fukuda — 4.5 stars
The Wicked + the Divine, Vol 8 by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson, and Clayton Cowles — 5 stars
Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy — 5 stars
Sky Without Stars by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell — 5 stars
The Philosopher’s Flight by Tom Miller — 5 stars
No Country for Old Gnomes by Delilah S Dawson and Kevin Hearne — 4 stars
Serious Moonlight by Jenn Bennett — 4.5 stars
Dragon Goes House Hunting, Vol 1 by Kawo Tanuki and Choco Aya — 3.5 stars
Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture edited by Stephen H Segal — 4 stars
King of Fools by Amanda Foody — 5 stars
Colorworld (audiobook) by Rachel E Kelly and narrated by Cherami Leigh Kuehn and Todd Haberkorn — 5 stars
Geek Girls Don’t Cry: Real-Life Lessons from Fictional Female Characters by Andrea Towers — 4 stars
Okay, so that means it’s time to move onto what I’ve watched over the month. Beauty & the Beast (5 stars), Shazam! (5 stars), Game of Thrones season 1 (5 stars), Assassin’s Creed (3.5 stars), Brave (5 stars), The Secret World of Arietty (4.5 stars), Knights of Baddassdom (4 stars), Game of Thrones season 2 (5 stars), Game of Thrones season 3 (5 stars), Avengers: Endgame (5 stars), Accepted (4 stars), Stick It (4.5 stars), Avengers (5 stars) The Big Bang Theory season 1 (4.5 stars).
As for our in-progress watches, we are halfway through the fourth season of Game of Thrones, and we are continuing our watch of Critical Role’s second campaign.
Next up is the book haul portion. Okay, now technically three of these books were March buys, but they didn’t arrive in the mail until April, so I’m including them now. Also, yeah, I totally made up for the small hauls the last couple months. Yikes.
Oh, and I had to get OwlCrate again in April, because it was featuring one of my absolute favorite books and I needed the alternate cover in my life. So now I have two awesome signed copies of this book and they look so great together, and I am super happy with it. And I think we’ve figured out where our bills stand with the house, so I can probably say that my OwlCrate subscription is reinstated…but I’m going to play it month by month for right now.
Finally, I guess now I need to talk about my May TBR…which is a pretty darn ambitious stack of books, honestly. I guess I’m just in the mood for some big ole fantasy reads. Of course, May is beginning with the next round of the Manga Madness Readathon, so obviously expect some manga to pop up at the beginning of the month too. But we’re also planning to once again go and visit Damian’s grandparents for a holiday weekend at the end of the month–and they live somewhere with basically zero cell phone reception. What that means for me is basically four days unplugged from the rest of the world, and since I’ve learned that I wake up 3 or 4 hours before everyone else, I have so much awesome reading time. Seriously, I think I read something like five books on the trip last year, so I should definitely be okay to read a couple of big books. It’s exciting.
Yeah, it is a pretty thick stack. I don’t know what I’m thinking. It should be fun though. Obviously I don’t always stick to my TBRs either, but I want to read each of these books for different reasons, so it’s shaping up to be a great month of reading.
How was your April? Any big plans for May? Let me know in the comments, and I will be back soon with more bookish content.
Free State of Geek 