So Many Challenges!

Now that I've made my own reading challenge I seem to be finding them everywhere! It's not a bad thing, though. I made my own because I wanted one that was customized to my own goals, and strengths, and motivations. and even though I'm coming across lots of other challenges none of them are quite what I need from a reading challenge. Mostly because they involve other people. Maybe I should change the name of mine to the Extreme Introvert Reading Challenge.

See, I've found that making a thread on a message board and knowing that other people may or may not be following my progress does nothing to motivate me. In fact it's more the opposite. If I feel pressured to do/finish a challenge I'm more likely to quit. It's like if you tell me I have to do something, even if it's something I was going to do anyway, even if it's something I want to do, the second I feel like I have to do it I'm going to quit. I don't take being told what to do very well.

So, doing it on my own, with no pressure, no one watching, no one but me caring if I fail or not, works best for me.

I did create a thread in a group on LibraryThing. Just in case I find I'm needing some motivation, I have a place I can go get it. The groups is called Reading Our Own Tomes (ROOTs) and its all people who are basically trying to do what I'm doing; read the books I already own. I don't know if I'll ever go back and update my thread or not but within an hour of posting it I had several very encouraging/welcoming replies.

I'm in a few GoodReads groups also and one of them has challenges for just about everything. It's called Coffee & Books. They have a challenge for how many group reads you do, how many books in general, they even have a section where you can make up your own challenge. I thought about doing a thread there but there are literally thousands of people in that group. The LibraryThing group only has 70. I'll stick with the smaller group.

There are also all kinds of 'Reading Challenge' posts popping up on my Pinterest. Those ones are interesting, and I can see using one if I really can't decide what to read at some point, but they kind of go along with the 'once I feel like I have to do it...' thing, at least for me anyway. I start reading one of them and my brain goes 'read a book I should have read in high school? I hated high school. This list sucks.' And then I'm back with having nothing to read.

I'd like to say that one day I'll feel comfortable enough to do a challenge with other people. I even started to type out that 'one day I'll have my shit together enough to do one of those other challenges' but you know what? It's not about having my shit together or not. It's about knowing myself well enough to know I will probably never do one of those. I'll never be posting on message boards about my successes and struggles, I'll never be checking off little boxes on a nifty printable from some popular reading blog. That's just not me. And that's okay.

What I'm Reading Right Now

I'm once again reading four books at once! I'm crazy. But it's working for me. I've decided to do a post every week as a kind of round up of what I'm reading and how it's going. This is ('obviously'-in Snape's voice of course) the first one.

This week has had some challenges. I've had to do a bit of sleep training with The Toddler because of previously mentioned sleep problems. She had a doctor appointment today, just a well child check up, but my anxiety always goes nuts about doctors appointments. We're getting ready to put our house up for sale, which has meant lots of cleaning, decluttering, and anxiety. The realtor is coming tomorrow morning to take pictures for the listing so some of that anxiety will be lifted after that. Naturally, it will all come crashing back down on Monday when the house is actually listed and I have to worry about people calling for showings at the last minute. On top of all that The Husband has been working overtime and will be for the next month, which means no breaks for Mommy, and no help with cleaning the house either. In spite of all that, I'm getting in some good reading time, mainly at nap time and after everyone else is in bed at night. It's actually helping me with my anxiety quite a bit, so things haven't been too bad on that front.

So here are the books I'm reading, in no particular order;

1. Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson; This is the first book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. It's been on my TBR list since my days working at the bookstore nearly nine years ago. I'm really loving so far, its very dark, but in a good way, I'm only 150 pages in but I bought the next two books in the series already.

2. Happily Ever All-Star by Sosie Frost; A secret baby/football romance. I love these kinds of romances. I'm a sucker for a guy in football pads, I guess.

3. Friends with Full Benefits by Luke Young; This is the second book in the Friends with Benefits series and I love this series so far. I don't usually read serial romances but this is nothing like the serials we sold at the bookstore, all with the same cover except the picture of the heroine and hero in a little circle on the front, and titled something like 'A Bride for the Duke' or 'The Greeks Pregnant Mistress'. I was originally intrigued because it's a romance novel by a male author and I gotta say I totally love it.

4. Hard Man by S.J. Bishop; This one's an ARC so no details, but I've loved all her previous books and this one has not disappointed.

I think that's it for the weekly update. I'll post another one next week. I'm finding that writing the blog is really helping me stay motivated. I don't even need any readers, lol, I just need to be able to write it all down.

ARC's; Part 2 Taking the Plunge...Again

I talked about my first experience with an ARC a few days ago. My anxiety is just getting back to normal after that. It was bad. The book was bad. Everything was bad. Well, I got an email from another author's mailing list that I'm on this morning, asking for ARC readers, and since I've read her books before and loved them I signed up. And I got an ARC copy of her newest book! I'm pretty excited about this one. I've already started the book and it's amazing! I might even post my review here as well as Amazon or wherever she wants reviews posted.

However, this puts me back up to reading four books at a time again. I guess it's starting to become my normal. At least I'm enjoying all the books right now. I'm only going to do ARC's for authors I've read before from now on, things seem to be better that way.

Reading Habits: A Mug of Something Warm

We are having some weird weather here. It snowed Monday night, about four inches, and it was beautiful. Then Tuesday the temperature went up to just above 32 degrees, it rained all day Tuesday and by Tuesday evening most of the snow was gone. But now the temperature has dipped back down again and all the water that had no where to go has frozen over everything. 

So all in all it's a cold, crappy, winter here. Which is perfect reading weather! When it's cold out there's nothing better that a blanket, a book, and a cup of something warm. I usually save my coffee/tea for The Toddler's nap time, when I'm actually alone and can sit down and enjoy it. I used to be a two-cups-a-day, don't-talk-to-me-till-I've-had-my-coffee, type of person, but in the last year that's changed. I don't know if it's just that I'm getting older or has to do with my anxiety or what, but I can't handle sugar first thing in the morning. I get all shaky and jittery, which is not an enjoyable thing, and I can't drink coffee without cream and sugar. So, when the house is quiet I boil some water and make some coffee or tea.

 I use a french press for my coffee because I recently discovered mold growing in my little 4 cup coffee machine and had to toss it. I already had the french press so I decided to use it instead of buying another coffee machine. I like that it's a more mindful process but it does require a higher quality coffee than a drip machine. I can't wait till my three pound can of coffee grounds from Costco is used up so I can buy a small bag of fresh ground coffee. The Costco coffee, though okay for a drip machine, kind of turns into mud in the french press, tasteless and bitter. I discovered the other day though that I can put hot chocolate mix into my coffee and it tastes almost like my favorite Starbucks drink! YAY! So now I do that most afternoons. I get to have a faux mocha latte and read a book. 

I also love tea! For a long time I loved the idea of tea but didn't really like tea itself. Of course I was only buying black tea bags from the grocery store and didn't know anything about proper brew times or anything like that. Now I buy loose leaf tea from a small, local, tea shop and it is infinitely better. My favorite tea for the morning is called Scottish Morn by Harney and Sons. It's a black tea and it's stronger than English Breakfast tea, but not as strong as coffee, and I drink it black in the morning. I like tea in the evening too. I love a blend called Heavenly Hazelnut. It's so cozy and has little bits of chocolate in it. I drink that one with a little milk and sugar in it but not much, the flavor is too good to cover up with a bunch of sugar. 

Honestly, I usually only get though half a mug of whatever I happen to be drinking. I usually get too involved in whatever I'm doing and forget about it, especially if I'm reading. But the mindfulness of brewing a cup of tea, of selecting my favorite mug and choosing a tea and preparing the teapot/infuser. I find it so calming after a day of constantly being needed and doing everything for other people, even though I love the people, that's why I do it all, but I need those few minutes for myself at the end of the day. 

ARC's

I've a few ARC's (ARC means Advanced Reader Copy, I was so confused till some one at the bookstore told me that) over the years. When I was working at Border's we got a them quite often, mostly just so we could recommend them. Recently, I signed up for a spot on an author's ARC team. The first 25 people to respond got a spot. I probably shouldn't have signed up since it was an author I'd never read, but I've signed up for a lot of ARC teams and never gotten a spot so I expected this one to be the same. A couple of days later I got an email that the first ARC book was being released to the ARC team, which apparently included me. I was surprised and so happy that I got to read a book and review it before it was released! I downloaded the book and sat down to read it right away since The Toddler was napping.

The prologue was terrible. The story was okay but the writing was awful. There were parts that contradicted each other, odd word choices, sayings that didn't make any sense. I thought for sure the rest of the book couldn't be like that so I kept reading. How could a book have made it all the way past editors and beta readers with such horrible writing all the way through? I was wrong. I read up until a horribly written but very detailed rape scene in chapter five and at that point I just threw my kindle down. This book was bad. So very very bad. But I was an ARC Team member. The author was waiting for my feedback. She wanted a link to an Amazon review. How could I give this a review? In the first ARC team email the author had asked that we email her first if we felt we had to give a bad review so I did. I tried to not sound like a horrible bitch, and say a few good things with the amazingly huge heap of bad but I'm afraid I came off a bit condescending. I really didn't mean too but it seemed like there was no way this book had been on the desk of a competent editor at some point and I may have suggested she look into a line editor. It's been bothering me a lot though. I know it's just my anxiety, but I can't stand the thought of someone being mad at me, or hating me, even a stranger on the interwebs. I feel like I have an obligation to post a review though. For some reason there are people giving this book 4 and 5 star reviews and I feel like readers need some warning of what they are buying, but I don't want to go on a smear campaign against this author either, not that anyone is paying attention to my opinion, but still. I've decided to just leave it at emailing the author. I'm sure she'll remove me from her ARC team but that's probably for the best. I feel bad for having to tell her how bad it was but I couldn't lie.

In other news; I've read two books for the RMSC! I'm working on three and four. If I can keep up this pace I'm going to blow the goals out of the water, we'll see how it goes though. I also have decided to put a link to the blog on my Goodreads profile. I only have like 11 friends on Goodreads so I don't think it will get much attention if any but still its a step towards sharing the blog, which my anxiety doesn't want me to do. Anxiety says 'Your blog sucks! Delete that shit!' and maybe if does suck but I'm enjoying writing so suck it anxiety.

Other People's Reading Goals and Life With a Toddler

I follow some large book blogs and authors on Facebook. In the last week quite a few of them have posted about the Goodreads Reading Challenge. I started looking at other peoples goals on a few of those posts. My overall goal for the year is 35 books and I thought that was pretty good by holy crap! Some of those people have set their goals at 2-300 books!

When I first saw that I was like 'Wow. I suck. My goals are nothing compared to some of these folks.' And I let myself feel bad for a while because it will be a long time before I can even think about having enough time to read that many books. With a small child, and hopefully more babies in the near future, it's just not going to happen for a while. I thought about it for a little bit and realized I can't compare my toddler-filled life with the life of anyone else as far a goals go. Our lives are different, our priorities are different, Our reading abilities are different. And that's okay. Reading isn't a competition. At least it's not for me. Well, it is, but not with other people. It's about being better than I was last year, It's about doing something I enjoy, that adds to my life, not turning it into a chore because I'm trying to be better than everyone. And seriously, anyone who has small children, reads 2-300 books a year, and still gets enough sleep is on a totally different level than me anyway.

Speaking of toddlers and getting enough sleep, here's an update on my progress on the RMSC. I've made no progress, because my toddler won't sleep! She really did not sleep at all Monday night. It was miserable and as a result I spent Tuesday keeping myself busy with cleaning and things so we couldn't fall asleep so she'd sleep Tuesday night, which didn't really happen. She was up until midnight and I still didn't get any reading in. So today, I'm exhausted, trying to wear out a toddlers inexhaustible energy, and I still haven't read anything. So that's where I'm st right now.

The First Book of 2017!

It wasn't the book I expected it to be. And it doesn't count for the Read My Shelves Challenge. But I read the first book of 2017! How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind By Dana White. She's one of my favorite bloggers, my favorite podcasts, but I'd never bought any of her e-books until this one went on sale for $1.99. On January 2nd. So I loved it but it doesn't count for the RMSC. I actually read the whole thing in one sitting, I did skip over a few bits about decluttering because she covers that pretty well in the podcast but after I do the "28 Days to Hope for Your Home" part from the appendix I might go back and read those parts.

Also, I'm reading four books at a time right now! That's crazy! I don't usually do more than two, but they are all so different and in such varying formats that I'm able to do it right now. Only three of them will count for the RMSC, I bought The Nesting Place; It Doesn't Have to be Perfect to be Beautiful by Myquillyn Smith this afternoon because the e-book was on sale for $1.99. I kind of have a thing for homemaking books at certain points in the year, and New Year's is one of those times. I'm trying to make progress on all the books everyday, the e-books and the Walking Dead graphic novel should be finished by tomorrow. I pretty bad at updating my page count (or percentage) on GoodReads unless I'm having a hard time finishing a book for whatever reason, then I need the motivation of seeing the updated percentage to keep me going. Sometimes I have a hard time concentrating on one thing at a time so I find it easier to read multiple books and switch between them frequently than try and force myself to read one, because I know I will get bored and set the books down and not pick up another one for a year. That's how I got into my reading slump a few years ago.

So, recap;

RMSC: 0/20
Reading goal for the year: 1/35