Hi booklovers
In spite of having a lot more time to read and write blogposts, I hardly felt like blogging much during my summer break. I don't know why, but I didn't really have much inspiration to write stuff.
The new school year started two weeks ago and although I'm very busy preparing lessons and marking the first tests of the new year, now I feel like blogging again. Go figure...
Anyway, I wanted to talk about my summer reading. Last year I had a great reading summer, I was able to read 23 books and I was really proud of myself. So, this year, I wanted to read at least as many, if not more books.
We're now midway through September and I'm not ashamed to say I didn't end up reading the same amount of books. I 'only' read 15 books. At first I felt bad, because I thought I hadn't read nearly enough, but then I was like: who cares how many books I've read, as long as I liked them.
I blame BookTube for thinking I hadn't read enough. I love watching wrap-up videos, but they usually make me feel a bit bad about 'only' reading 3 books per month. But recently I decided to no longer let myself be influenced by the number of books other people read. I don't want to feel bad about being a 'slower' reader. I am a non-native English reader, so I think it's normal that I don't read as quickly as a native English person. Over the last year I somehow got it into my head that I needed to (only) read fast-paced books and that I needed to get through them as quickly as possible. I used to love reading 'The Wheel of Time' books by Robert Jordan. But these books are humongous and they took me a long time to read, so I ended up putting them down and not finishing the series. And then I started reading as many books as possible, because I thought that was a good thing. I don't want to be rude to people who do manage to read a lot of books in a month, but it's not my thing (anymore). I started to notice I couldn't remember what I just read right after finishing a book. And that's not good. I first realised this while reading 'Heir of Fire' by Sarah J. Maas. It had been a couple of months since I'd read 'Crown of Midnight' and I could hardly remember what had happened in that book. I started wondering why that was and I think one of the reasons was that I just didn't take enough time to digest the story, thus forgetting a lot of it rather quickly. I used to be able to remember what happened in a book for a very long time, so I felt sad when noticing this.
I also noticed that I ended up reading much shorter books, so I could finish them faster. But lately I've started watching a few BookTubers who read humongous fantasy books and I've been wanting to pick up 'The Wheel of time' series again. That of course also means taking more time to finish a book. I've started reading Malice by John Gwynne on August 27th and I'm still reading it and even though I still have to get used to my new reading pace, I'm okay with it.
I will continue to read multiple (usually two) books at the same time, because I usually read a book on my e-reader while commuting and a physical book when I'm at home. I've only recently started doing that, because I used to have a problem keeping the stories seperated, but I've gotten better at that.
I've also tried to cut back on my bookbuying because I was hugely influenced by BookTube to get all the books. I know it's too easy to blame everything on BookTube, because in the end I'm the one who watches the videos and lets myself be influenced by them, but it's something I've heard other people talk about as well. When you first start watching BookTube you want all the books everyone is talking about, but at one point you realise you can only read that many books in a year.
At the moment I have a huge TBRpile and even though I don't really mind that, I don't want it to grow much bigger. I'm not saying I won't be buying any more books, just not as frequently. (Although I still have a huge wishlist and I regularly look at it, I try to restrain myself. I'm curious to see how long that's going to last :-) )
Sorry this is a bit of a rant, but I just wanted to put this out there!
Bye for now
Annelies
