The Blog Squad: A Blogger Collaboration Part X
We are a group of three book bloggers situated on different continents but brought together by our love for books and a penchant for talking about them. We’ve joined our forces to create a collaborative series of posts about book blogging and we hope you’ll enjoy the discussions.
A MAGICAL WORLD OF WORDS - AmyNikita
BOOKS.BAGS.BURGERS - Uma K
BOOK REVIEWS BY DI - Di Hewlett
What is your reading schedule like?
Right now my reading schedule is pretty much unpredictable as my semester exams are going on! I’m working through a couple of books this month but keeping it light. Hopefully I’ll have more free time next month and I can catch up on my Goodreads Challenge (I’m currently 15 books behind!!)
There are some series I’m really excited about starting finishing (hopefully) in the summer holidays! Namely, The Mortal Instruments (I’m FREAKING EXCITED about this one!), and Six of Crows (I’M EVEN MORE EXCITED ABOUT THIS ONE)
My reading schedule typically consists of review copies and reading them in the order I receive them - and if it’s an ARC that has to be read and reviewed within a time frame, that’ll obviously come first.
Occasionally, I’ll fit in a library book, but only if it’s one I really want to read. Books I’ve bought myself come last, but sometimes - if it’s one I’m DESPERATE to read - I’ll squeeze it in among review copies.
How much pressure do you put on yourself to meet your bookish goals?
So I used to put A LOT of pressure on my reading goals! I’d even make pretty impossible goals and push myself to go get them! Of late I’ve learned to let go of that...or more like forced to let go of that due to exams and more academic stuff. Whatever the reason maybe, I’m glad to have slowed down. When I put too much pressure, reading starts to feel like work and there’s no fun in that is there?
But I still do care about my Goodreads Challenge on which I’m currently A LOT behind. But hopefully I’ll catch up to that! I think it’s absolutely okay to have bookish goals as long as they don’t drag you out of your comfort zone. Books = Comfort , so trying to read books just for the sake of numbers at the cost of comfort is no fun.
Hmmm...
I don’t really have many bookish goals (except from my Goodreads challenge, obviously, and that’s the whole year. SCORE!), and so I don’t really pressurise myself too much with that.
The only bookish goal I can think of right now is making sure I finish a book within a month. In the next question I explain more about that, but basically I don’t like a book or its review to “overlap” into another month. That’s the only bookish pressure I put on myself.
But if the book I’m reading is a review copy - or an ARC - then I won’t allow myself to put it down until I’ve read a decent number of pages per day. I’ll read the book regularly until it’s finished, and definitely within a month.
How has blogging changed your reading habits?
Blogging has definitely changed the way I read. Back before I started blogging, I read purely for entertainment value. Now I’ve started looking at books with a more critical eye and started seeing things I’d ignored before. Before I started blogging, I didn’t even know how important diversity in books are, how sexist some books were and such. After starting to blog and exploring the bookish community on the internet I’ve learnt so much!
Also since I started blogging I’ve started prioritizing my TBR pile a lot differently than I used to. Earlier it was about books I wanted to read the most but now i have to take into consideration ARCs, review copies and make sure I’m posting reviews close to the publishing date. This has of course caused my TBR pile to explode but oh well, no one said blogging was easy :P
Blogging about books has definitely made me analyse what I’m reading more thoroughly, and look at it with a critical eye. I also don’t read just any book I want to, because ARCs and review copies come first and I have to find time to review them all.
I’ve also cut back drastically on getting library books.
Because I like to have things “neat and tidy”, I always make sure I never read a book over two months. I like to wrap the month up cleanly by being able to say, for example, “I read Six of Crows in April. I read it and reviewed it then.” So that means I won’t start a new book on like the third last day of the month, because it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be able to read and review it by the time the next month’s rolled in! I don’t like overlapping, so to speak. It’s kinda like a pet peeve for me, but it’s what I’m comfortable with.
To see my answers make sure to visit the other collab posts!
We hope you’ve enjoyed our discussion post! Please talk to us and let us know YOUR answers below. What do you think of our responses? If you have any specific questions you’d like us to address in the future, please let us know in the comments section below. Stay tuned for next week’s questions!
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