2018 Beat The Backlist – Reading Challenge

Loads of people were sharing on twitter and writing blog posts about this challenge, and it peaked my interest. The challenge is being hosted by Novel Knight and you can find all you need to know about the challenge in Austine’s blog.

The main focus of the challenge it’s to get you to read those books that you end up putting aside for new releases. I thought this would be a great challenge to do, to help get my physical TBR down.

I’ve decided to pledge 20 books for this challenge. However, that doesn’t mean these will be the only books not from 2018 that I would read, but will be the ones prioritised! If I do get to knock my TBR down a bit I will be very happy.

What I decided to do was to ‘randomly’ (not as randomly as I like to advertise) grab 20 books out of my TBR pile. The ones selected will be the ones I will make sure to read in 2018. No more judgey looks from them.

So here is the list of the 20 tributes! (If you click it will take you to Amazon where you can find out more about the book. Full disclosure that they are affiliated links).

 

1. The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon – 2014
2. Matched by Ally Condie – 2010
3. Charisma by Jeanne Ryan – 2015
4. Heir of Fire by Sarah J Maas – 2014
5. Queen of Shadows by Sarah J Maas – 2015
6. The Assassin’s Blade by Sarah J Maas – 2014
7. What’s a Girl Gotta Do? by Holly Bourne – 2016
8. A Quiet Kind of Thunder by Sarah Barnard – 2017
9. Three Dark Crowns by Kendare Blake – 2016
10. Margot & Me by Juno Dawson – 2017
11. The State of Grace by Rachael Lucas – 2017
12. Satellite by Nick Lake – 2017
13. Wunderkids by Jacqueline Silvester – 2017
14. The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer – 2016
15. The Summer of Impossible Things by Rowan Coleman – 2017
16. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas – 2017
17. Talking As Fast As I Can by Lauren Graham – 2017
18. The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman – 2015
19. A Gorda (The Fat Woman) by Isabela Figueiredo – 2016
20. O Fim da Inocência (The End of Innocence) by Francisco Salgueiro – 2010

 

Have you joined the challenge? If you have, what books have you pledged and who’s your team? I’m with the Book Bards!

Have you read any of the books on my list? If so, let me know what you think of them in the comments, but please no spoilers or as Liam Neeson’s puts it best “What I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. (…) I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill you.”

Let’s go Book Bards!

*FangirlSince1988 xxx

Top 5 Wednesday – 2018 Reading Resolutions

I’ve been wanting to start doing these meme posts for quite some time, but keep forgetting about it. I’m the kind of person who likes to start from the beginning and every time a new month came around I kept forgetting to do the first week’s topic. I kept telling myself to start with the new month coming, and again once that month came I forgot again.

Now you ask me ‘But Ana today is Monday and you are posting this 5 days late. How come?’ Well my beautiful followers, it’s a very simple answer…I just decided to not give a f*ck and do it anyway! It’s a New Year and I love the topics that came up for January, so here we are!

The Top 5 Wednesday for this week is about 2018 Reading Resolutions , and here are some that I hope to achieve this year.

Goodreads Reading Challenge

For some years I have been in a big reading slump, I have mostly used my time watching films, documentaries and TV because whenever I tried I just couldn’t shake this slump. In 2017 I decided to give myself a small number of 20 books for the Goodreads Reading Challenge but it was about November and I had only read about 5 books. However, that was when I also I decided to re-start my blog, I connected with lovely bookish people (e.g. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Bookworms) and with that I slowly started to get out of my reading slump and was able to reach my 20 books goal.

So for 2018 I gave myself the goal of 52 books. That means one per week. I can read more than one book per week for sure, but I also can get quite busy with work. I find that this is a very achievable goal without adding a lot of pressure.

Beat The Backlist Challenge

This year I decided it would be a good year to tackle a second reading challenge and after seeing a lot of bloggers posting about this one I decided that would be a good one to join in. Most people seem to do it with the purpose to make sure they either read more classics, or their previous years ARCs, but I’m just doing it because I cant take them books looking judgey at me from my TBR pile. So I selected 20 random books from the pile and pledged to read them in 2018. I will do a post later this week about what books have been selected for this challenge (May the odds be every in their favour!) and how to join in.

Read more Own Voices

I do read quite a variety of books. Being Portuguese living in the UK I tend to read in both languages. Every time I go back to Portugal I always grab a few books by Portuguese and  Lusophone African authors. However, I realise that even though I have a lot of variety I still lack a lot of own voices. Yes, even my Lusophone Africa Literature is mostly written by descendants of white Portuguese.  So this year I will make sure that I will be picking up more own voices books, I want to be closer to everyone else in the world with my reading!

Netgalley 60% feedback

I’m the worst when it comes to Netgalley, because I can’t stop clicking the request button but then I hate e-books so takes me ages to actually read it. Defeats the purpose of requesting ARCs doesn’t it? So this year I want to make sure that my feedback gets to 60% as that means that I would have to actually come around to read all the books I request!

Books Read Money Jar

I saw this idea floating around twitter where people put one pound into a jar every time they finish reading a book. I think it’s a brilliant idea to get you to save some money throughout the year, but also to give you the motivation to keep reading. This will be the resolution that would motivate me to complete my other four, especially because I’m going to up the game and I would add a further pound to the jar for every book review written. That would make sure I get my Netgalley feedback up and this blog consistently relevant.

Alright, I hope you enjoyed my 2018 Reading Resolutions for my Top 5 Wednesday. If you want to join in every Wednesday make sure to do it here.

Do you have any reading resolutions for 2018? If so let me know in the comments.

Happy Reading!

*FangirlSince1988 xxx