A bit late again this month, but I wanted to make sure to get June’s status up since we are officially at the halfway point of the year. Let’s see how things went, shall we?

June Reads

• Of Shadow Born by Dianne Sylvan
• Shadowbound by Dianne Sylvan
• Shadowstorm by Dianne Sylvan
• Shadow Rising by Dianne Sylvan
• Citadel by C.M. Alongi
• Zone One by Colson Whitehead
• The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud
• The Golem’s Eye by Jonathan Stroud

Eight books for the month of June is pretty good. I was originally trying to read nine, but time got away from me. Oh well.

Here’s the chapter graph for the month. The only difference is that I listed Zone One as pages read instead of chapters, since it doesn’t really have chapters per se. I did miss three days of reading which is why I couldn’t finish that last book.

Challenge Updates

GoodReads Challenge: My goal for this year was to read 100 books in 2023. I was hoping to get to 50 books by the end of June (which would have been a stretch), but I managed to get to 47. Still pretty good!

Complete the Series: My goal was to finish six series on my list (you can see the list here). I did finish the Shadow World series by Dianne Sylvan, at least until the final book comes out in November (CAN’T WAIT!!!). I also started on the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, which I can’t count towards a June goal, but I can say that as of this post, I did finish the last book. It was the first thing I read in July.

Beat the Backlist: My goal was to read 25 books off of my owned TBR lists (i.e., the books that I own but haven’t read yet – there’s a lot). This month, I read two books off that list: Zone One and The Golem’s Eye. This brings me to 16 books out of 25 going towards this goal, which I think is really good progress. That only leaves nine left, and I think I’m planning on reading five of them in July alone.

A-to-Z Challenge: In June, I only added one book to my alphabet challenge, but it was a big one: Z! This was a big reason why I read Zone One, to be honest. Plus, it was on my Backlist, so it helped that goal too! This leaves me with six letters to complete by the end of the year: J, K, M, V, X and Y. I’ve been looking around GoodReads and some of these might be tricky. I may need y’all’s help with suggestions.

Blog Updates

Blogging has been a struggle lately and I’m not sure why. I only managed seven posts this month, but two of them were reviews, so I’m happy with that. Here’s the breakdown:

• Challenge/Updates/Random: 1
• Teaser/Top Ten Tuesday Combo: 2
• WWW Wednesday: 2
• Reviews: 2

I will try to get more reviews up in July. That is the main thing I want to do. I’m also going on vacation this month, so that may throw a wrench into things. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Overall, it was a fairly decent month. I’ve had better, but I’ve also had a lot worse. I’m getting started back up a little late for July, but we’ll see what this month brings.

Categories: Month in Review