Tag: reading

I Achieved My 2025 Reading Speed Goal!

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After yesterday’s depressing post, I decided to try to write today’s post about more optimistic: I achieved my 2025 reading speed goal!

Yes, I am happy to say I have officially achieved my 2025 reading goal. I didn’t want to set a number of books to read by the end of the year like many online do. Instead, I wanted to increase the speed of my reading. I used to be a fast reader in high school and college, but I’ve slowed down a lot since then. Since the popularity of reading began in 2020, I began to buy books, both new and old, to read. The problem was I was buying them with the mindset that I can read as fast as I used to.

Sadly, that isn’t true. So, now I have way too many books to read and no way to decide if I would like to keep them or not… unless I read them first. This is why I decided to focus my reading goal not on how many books I read in a year, but to work on getting my speed of reading faster.

This year, I can read much faster than I used to. Sometimes, if I have the time, I can read a 300 page book in less than 24 hours. This speed is similar to my reading speed in high school and college. I still notice I need to slow down more that I used to, but I’m not going to complain too much about it.

I have also noticed the work I did on my reading speed has also helped me in other areas of my life. Seeing this has made me feel more confident in my own abilities and gave me hope to start making a dent in my to be read pile of books.

Next year I have some reading goals, but my main goal is just to maintain my reading speed.

 

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!

Featured Image is from Pexels.com

Book Review: A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft

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A few years ago, a YouTube I was following at that time recommended books to read during the fall months. One of those books was A Far Wilder Magic by Allison Saft.

At that time I wanted to read more books that were popular. In addition to the YouTuber recommending it, A Far Wilder Magic was one of the books that was pretty popular at that time. The plot interested me, so after a lot of thought and debate, I decided to buy the book and read it.

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Book Review: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

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Booktok and online book reviewers in general has really let me down. After years of reading really bad books that are highly praised, I finally gave up on trusting them. I really don’t like the books they review nor do I like the books they praise.

Even though I really don’t like the popular books, there are sometimes books that slip through the cracks and I end up liking it. Sometimes, I can see why they are popular, but I also don’t know how to feel about them. One of the books that have slipped between the cracks is Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Fairies.

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My Great Book Burn Out and Why I’m Sick of Reading New(er) Books

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Many things can be hidden by the facade of social media, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing. If you were in my house right now, you would see piles and piles of books I have read, not read, or tried to read/have read but hated.

These piles have been fluctuating in size due to the major clean out and organizing I have been doing for many months. While trying to decide what to keep and what to get rid of, I have slowly realized books is one of the things I want to get rid of, but have a hard time doing so. I like reading and invested a lot of time and money to create my library. This is why I struggle letting go of my books.

Yet, I’m in a major burn out of books. I have been trying to find books I want to keep but so far I’m struggling to find some I want to keep. For the most part, all the books I want to get rid of the most were published within the past ten years.

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Book Review: Fame, Fate, and The First Kiss by Kasie West

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It’s now officially fall! Fall means many things for many people, but on many of the book social media sites I used to follow, it means they will post content relating to books in the horror genre. (Probably because they want to talk, and even promote, books that are good for the Halloween season of fall.)

I, on the other hand, never really liked horror movies, books, or anything relating to it. Gothic novels? Yes, I’ll read those. Suspense novels? Sure! Thrillers? I’ll read them. But horror? Nope. No way. And the same thing goes for anything macabre and contains a lot of gore. It doesn’t matter if the books are in the horror genre. I won’t read them.

This is why I tend to favor books that tell stores with horror elements in them in a different way. Or it isn’t the most important part of the story. This is the case for the young adult romance Fame, Fate, and The First Kiss by Kasie West.

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Book Review: The Apple Creek Announcement by Wanda E. Brunstetter

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For many years, I’ve had a pile of books I want to review here on this blog, but don’t. Sometimes I forget about them until I stubble on a save post that I never finished. Other times it’s because of other reasons. These reasons can include not liking the book and not knowing what to say about it.

In the case of The Apple Creek Announcement by Wanda E. Brunstetter, I read this book three years ago. Although I finished this book years ago, I ended up struggling to describe in a review post.

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Book Review: The Boys of Benjamin Boulevard by Samantha Robinson

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It’s been a few weeks since I published a book review post. To be honest, I’ve been watching so many YouTube videos reviewing books. This caused me to suffer from book review burn out… and made me question if I really felt ready to review any of my read books in a post.

In order to get back into writing book review posts, I decided to review The Boys of Benjamin Boulevard by Samantha Robinson. This book, and it’s sequel, are published on Amazon’s print on demand service. Right now The Boys of Benjamin Boulevard is no longer in print and is no longer available to read including on Kindle. The sequel is still available to purchase and read, but in print version only. There aren’t a lot of reviews on The Boys of Benjamin Boulevard or it’s sequel, so I don’t know how my review may impact either book.

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5 Magazines I Still Purchase (And Reread After I Buy Them)

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I love books, but I don’t always like to buy them. They can be quite expensive and I don’t normally like the story. Because of this, I sometimes feel like buying books all the time is a waste of money for me. Although this rings true for books, I have a major weakness for magazines. Especially sewing, knitting, and cooking magazines. I believe if books contained the information the magazines I usually read, I would buy them more often and not feel so guilty about them. Yet, they don’t.

While going through my old magazines to see if there are any issues I don’t want to keep anymore, I began to see all the magazines I kept and why I picked them. I narrowed my favorites down to five magazines brands and types of magazines, that I bought the most and keep rereading. Although all my favorite magazines are not for everyone, nor is reading magazines, I think many will find it interesting which ones I still buy and enjoy reading.

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Reading Books, Reading Books Via Audio Books, and My Desire for More Transparency for Online Reviews

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For a few years, I struggled with comparing my reading habits to people I see online. Comparing my reading habits goes back to when I was in elementary school when others read less than I did, but I did have problems reading and writing caused me to test poorly in reading speed tests. Today, I enjoy reading and I can speed read pretty well, but I’m still pretty sensitive about it and I can’t speed read as fast as someone that doesn’t have my problems. Because of this, I don’t like to call myself a bookworm and I like to read a book at least once before I review it online.

This sensitivity began to rear it’s head when I started to watch videos reviewing books I was interested in. Although I didn’t have an issue with people who read faster than me, (Obviously they don’t struggle with reading like I do) I began have problems with people with reading disabilities reading more than I do. One person in particular began to review multiple books, some of them over 400 pages long, every month. I couldn’t fathom how this was possible. I can read a 400 page long book in a small amount of time, but I can’t read many of them over the course of the month.

Many theories began to form in my head, including they may have way more time on their hands than I do. (They are full time social media influencers after all.) Late last year, while watching one of this person’s videos, I found out my answer: They listen to audio books.

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Book Review: The Summer of Broken Rules by K. L. Walther

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For many years, Booktok has been a major influence on which books become popular. A few years ago, I heard about a popular Booktok novel called The Summer of Broken Rules. It was written by K. L. Walther, who became extremely popular because of this book.

Back then, it was highly recommended by a YouTuber that I used to follow. I didn’t know at that time that the YouTuber was also a huge Taylor Swift fan and loved the book because of it’s ties to her. Today I don’t follow the YouTuber because of many reasons. One of the minor reasons is her incorporation of Swiftie references throughout her videos.

After reading the book, I felt very conflicted about how to talk about it online. This is why it’s taken me years to figure out what to say or if I should recommend reading it. Although I still feel very conflicted about how to talk about the book in a review post, I’m tired to stumbling across my book review post in my saved drafts files. So, I’m going to review it, no matter if I am sure about what to say or not.

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