Happy February everyone! This year, I’ve decided to do something a bit different. At the end of each month, or the beginning of the next, I will post a month in review post to check in with my reading challenges for the year and see how things are generally going. I’ve seen other blogs do this and I think it will be a good thing to keep me on track. So let’s get started!

First up, my GoodReads challenge, which is to read 50 books in 2021. In January, I finished seven books so far, which is pretty good for me! Those books are:

1. The Rules for Disappearing by Ashley Elston (review here)
2. Stolen by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston (review here)
3. Golden by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston (review coming soon)
4. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (review here from 2017)
5. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (review coming soon)
6. The Rules for Breaking by Ashley Elston (review coming soon)
7. Looking for Alaska by John Green (review here from 2017)

I haven’t done anything for the Beat the Backlist challenge yet, which was to read 24 books from my owned TBR. This is mostly because I was trying to finish up some leftover stuff from last year. I am currently reading a book for the challenge though, so that’s a start.

My goal was to complete four series on my Complete the Series list for this year, plus finish any new series started in 2021. So far I’ve completed one series from the list (The Rules of Disappearing duology by Ashley Elston) and completed one series that I started this year (The Heart of Dread trilogy by Melissa de la Cruz and Michael Johnston. Sure, it was only a two book series from the list, but still, progress is progress! I still plan on trying to tackle as many of the smaller series (duologies and trilogies) before I try to do larger series to get some of those off the list quickly. 

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Challenges are heading in a good direction. The only one I haven’t really made progress on is Beat the Backlist, but that will change now that I’m more caught up on other things. While we’re talking about progress, let’s take a look and see how the blog did for January. I’m comparing this to how I was doing towards the end of 2020 because I fell into a big blogging slump starting in October, when I only posted twice. November and December were a bit better, posting 8 and 11 posts in those two months. For January 2021, I was back up to 25 posts. Huzzah! That makes me feel quite a bit better. What’s more, 12 of those posts were book reviews, which is a really big number for me! That will probably slow down a bit as the year goes on, since I was trying really hard to push reviews out for everything I read at the end of 2020. But still! Overall, January was a pretty good reading and blogging month.

Here’s to hoping that February is just as productive!

Categories: Challenges