Hey all, Dani here.
Okay, before I can really focus on the new month/new year of reading, I first have to wrap up all of last month’s reading and content. While I didn’t generate as many posts as I would have liked, I can blame a lot of that on how work made me feel physically. But I’m happy to say that for the first few months of 2020 I’ll basically be sitting at a desk, which means plenty of time for reading, writing, and blogging. It should be a pretty productive time.
Oh, and the change in work schedule–bleh to having to go to second shift for three months–meant that I actually had to go out and finally get a new car. Mine stopped running in Jan 2018 and I never got a replacement because Damian and I were on the same schedule again, so carpooling was how we operated. My temporary week or two on a different schedule made for some weird times of sharing the car, but we couldn’t sustain that sort of life for three months. And I ended up getting a car much newer and nicer than I’ve ever had in my life: a 2012 Honda CR-V. That’s pretty nice.
So now it’s time to jump into the wrap-up of everything I read in December, which was 22 books. Now, don’t get too excited about that number: 8 of those are Christmas presents I bought for my 2 year old niece, and as always I have at least a couple volumes of manga on the list as well. Yes, I still read quite a bit, but I was really hoping that I would get so much more accomplished in the last 10 days of the year.
I did create a 12-hour readathon event, called #JolabokaflodReadathon, and I read 5 books in that time, so that was a lot of fun, and I’m hoping to make the event even better in 2020, since in 2019 I thought of it a day before I did the readathon.
Anyway, let’s jump into the wrap-up. As always, if I have a review already written then I will include a link back to that post.
Slay by Brittney Morris — 4.5 stars
Tell Me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi — 3.5 stars
Tweet Cute by Emma Lord — 4.5 stars (review coming Jan 21)
The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams — 5 stars
Crier’s War by Nina Varela — 5 stars
Little Golden Books: Frozen 2 by Nancy Cote — 4 stars
Little Golden Books: I’m a Unicorn by Mallory Loehr and Joey Chou — 4 stars
Little Golden Books: Beauty and the Beast by Teddy Slater, Ron Dias, and Ric Gonzales — 5 stars
Little Golden Books: My Little Pony: Rainbow Dash Reading Rainboom! by Tallulah May and Zoe Persico — 4 stars
Little Golden Books: Trolls: Branch’s Bunker Birthday by David Lewman – 4 stars
Little Golden Books: The Little Mermaid by Michael Teitelbaum and Sue DiCicco — 4 stars
Reindeers are Better than People by Walt Disney Company — 4 stars
Frozen 5-Minute Stories by Walt Disney Company — 5 stars
The Epic Crush of Genie Lo by F.C. Yee — 4 stars (review coming Jan 3)
My Hero Academia Volume 22 by Kohei Horikoshi — 4.5 stars
Critical Role: Vox Machina Origins Series II #4 by Matthew Mercer, Ariana Maher, Jody Houser, Msassyk, and Olivia Samson — 5 stars
The Magicians by Lev Grossman — 4 stars
Forbidden Scrollery Volume 1 by Zun and Moe Harukawa — 3 stars
Strange Planet by Nathan W Pyle — 5 stars
We Met in December by Rose Curtis — 4 stars
Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw — 4 stars
Wicked Saints by Emily A Duncan — 5 stars
Okay, now with the wrap-up finished, it is time to talk Book Haul, which also means talking Book Unhaul, and OwlCrate Unboxing. So there’s a lot to go over.
Let’s just go ahead and start with the Unhaul portion. In an effort to tidy up the library area, I had to do a lot of shelving books and reorganizing my shelf arrangements. While I was in the middle of that, it only seemed natural to week out those books that I just don’t see myself reading or that I don’t see myself picking up to read again.
Turning in those books to Half-Price Books was actually a nice money help around the holidays. I technically got enough money to buy myself another 3 or 4 books, and I told Damian that I would roll that into books to buy in January since December was a low book-buying month. Though I did pick up a couple books at HPB while we were there as well. But when it comes to non-gift book purchases, I only bought four books for myself (technically five, but B&N was running a Buy 2 get 1 free sale on manga). So I bought both volumes of Fairy Tail 100 Year Quest and got My Hero Academia, and then I picked up Reverie and Children of Virtue and Vengeance. The rest of the manga were either purchased by Damian or they were Christmas presents, and then The Blade Itself, and both The Secret Loves of Geeks books were from that trip to HPB. So since I didn’t technically reach my 5 book purchases in December, again, I rolled the single non-purchase over for January, because I have a feeling I’ll need it.
All right, well now it’s time for the OwlCrate Unboxing portion of today’s post. This ended up being a book that I had already owned for over a month and had already read. I do really like the OwlCrate Exclusive Cover, though. I think I’m most excited about the hand warmer, but it’ll also be nice to relax with the coloring book and colored pencils.
Finally, I guess I need to talk about my TBR for January, and half of my TBR is currently in digital form because I’m really trying to keep up with my NetGalley early copies this year. I might even start trying to work on including some older NetGalley reads so that I can get my review ratio up.
All right, well that is all from me for today. How was your reading in December? What books do you hope to read in January? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to talk books and other plans/goals for 2020. I hope you are having a wonderful start to 2020, and I’ll be back soon with more bookish content.
Free State of Geek 