This book started off very slow, and it was hard to get into. I liked the idea of it, but found it too easy for my thoughts to drift away during the audiobook. British narrator. It’s being made into a Netflix show later this year I believe.
3/5 stars
It’s that time of the month where I go over how I did in my reading stats! That’s right, a new feature because I’ve never actually done a reading wrap-up before. Why not start now?!
The graphics are from TheStoryGraph which is my book tracking site of choice these days. If you’re into statistics, this is where you want to be. They even include a calendar of all your reading updates. Looking at February, I see it was another big month for books and I really hope that carries over into March, but if it doesn’t that’s alright too. I read a total of 7 books (29% of those were audio books, the rest were physical & ebooks) and my average rating was 3.57 – I only had one 5 star read, and that was ‘What I ate in One Year’ by Stanley Tucci.
I’ve decided moving forward I’d like to devote an entire spread to any 5 star books I read, mostly because I don’t often have a lot of 5 star reads, and I think it would be a neat little bit of creativity I could toss into my reading journal. I’m not 100% pleased with how the journal went this year, but I am determined to keep with it (as best I can) and then next year I can implement changes like moving to a square journal and organizing some things better. Right now the journal is a lot of statistics, and while I do love stats, I’d like a little more creativity to flow.
In January I read 6 books (I may actually backdate a post to represent this) which I also thought was a lot for me, but hey maybe this is the year for massive reading (so I can protect my mental health with all of the crazy that is going on in the world these days). I certainly have no complaints – and I really hope that March involves just as many (if not more) amazing reads.
Despite the fact that I rarely ever make it to actually posting on this damn book blog of mine – I have been reading this year. A LOT in fact. I’ve even been keeping up with my reading journal for once (gasp). Which is what the picture above is from. It’s two spreads that I’ve included, one that shows new releases for 2025 that I’m looking forward to, and the other spread (well, now it’s outdated, but I’ll get to that in a moment) talks about all of the books that I’ve purchased.
BookOutlet.ca also just happened to have a $7.99 sale and it coincided with the removal of taxes (temporarily) on some items. Some items being books. So I purchased 7 brand new books for $50 total, including free shipping. I was incredibly happy when they showed up. Which books? I’ll have to talk about that in a future post.
In the meantime, enjoy the pictures of my reading journal spreads.
With one day left in the tax break for Canadians this year, I decided why not spoil myself for Valentines day, and I ordered a bunch of books for $7.99 each from Bookoutlet.ca. Excited?! Yes! I am. There was free shipping, and I can’t wait to get them and start reading. You can be sure I’ll post reviews as time goes on.
There are a LOT of different ideas on reading journal spreads out there. When I want to relax, sometimes I just watch videos on YouTube that talk all about them. I wasn’t really happy with a few of the spreads I had put in my reading journal, but I also didn’t want to just start over in a new journal so I took a big piece of sticker paper, and started fresh. That’s where both of these spreads come into play.
On the left hand side is my reading Matrix. At the end of the year I’ll take the top 10 books (with the highest ratings) and then pit them against one another to figure out my #1 book of the year. So far I’ve only read a single book with a 5 star rating, we’ll see if that changes. I didn’t want to do monthly ‘favourites’ because what I read varies so much depending on my moods. It didn’t really seem fair, and wouldn’t be an accurate representation of my favourites.
On the right hand page is my alphabet reading challenge. That one is pretty self explanatory, I write down the titles of the books I read for each letter of the alphabet. I do have a few simple rules, like “they, all, them” do not count as words for this challenge. It’s just a silly little game, but I think it’s a lot of fun. While I don’t think I’ll actively go out and look for books that begin with those letters to try to complete it or anything, I do think it will be fun to see where it naturally leads.
One of the book challenges I’m doing this year is “A Year of Goober” from the book club that I belong to. The challenge is pretty simple, there’s two prompts for each month, and each one coincides with a flower. You can do either of the prompts, and at the end of the year you have a bootiful (beautiful, but Goober is a ghost, see?) bookuete (bouquete) of flowers. So far I’ve got January and February planned out, January is a Carnation “your favourite author” and I went with Holly Black, and then February is a violet, “continue a series” and I went with Iron Flame (I can’t wait to read the next book). On the left hand side I’m pasting the prompt along with the flower (I printed them out onto sticker paper) and on the right hand side I’m writing down the book and the author, but I think instead I might print out the covers and stick them there. This is my 2nd attempt at this layout, I had an earlier version that I just wasn’t loving at all. I can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s completed at the end of the year!
The next spread in my reading journal includes my BBBC (bulletjournal buddies book club) books which are selected monthly, and my series tracker. I didn’t like how I initially set my tracker up, and eventually realized I NEED the titles in there, so I re-did it and I added a tip-in, since I ran out of room! Of course I had to add my favourite stickers, chickens!
I love making lists and tracking all of the things. For the past few years I’ve done this in a bulletjournal, combining all of my ‘stuff’ into a single book – however – for 2025 I’ve decided to go ahead and make a dedicated reading journal, just for books (well, sort of, it’s for books, tv shows, movies, and tracking things that I enjoy like knitting).
I figured I’d post a few pages here on the book blog to showcase how I’ve got it set up this year. I’m taking a lot of inspiration from other reading journals out there, and just customizing it a bit to suit my own needs / designs. In the picture above, is my TBR pile (to be read) for the year, along with my rating system. Whether or not I actually make it through all of these books will be another story. I plan on crossing them off as I read them (if I read them), and then of course further on in the book I’ll have the actual reviews written.
Since I’ve joined a book club, it will also give me space to track challenges and events with that. I’m excited! It’s nice to have it all in one place, physically, besides just keeping it around on GoodReads (which I have been trying to move away from a bit).
Do you keep a reading journal? Let me know in comments!
This was my second book by T. Kingfisher – and I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t absolutely blown away by it like I have with some of her works. It tells the story of fourteen-year-old Mona, who has a magical gift of – bread. She can make gingerbread men rise, and her familiar is a sourdough starter which I found hilarious. I think in the case of this book, I was simply not the target. The book was written for a younger audience, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I didn’t particularly like how Mona went and solved her issues, either. Things start off as a murder mystery but quickly develops into a coming-of-age story – and again, nothing wrong with that, it just wasn’t what I was looking for.
There are some young adult books I can read and forget that it was ever written with an audience in mind, and unfortunately this was not one of those books, for me. Still, it was a fun magic system and brought some unique features, so if you’re looking for something easy to read and quite cozy despite the murder happening, this might be a read you’ll want to look into.
3/5 stars
A very interesting book that had a lot of informational facts that I didn’t know. Alex Trebek led a fascinating life, and I loved the ‘just an ordinary man’ perspective that the book came from, but, while reading I personally found a lack of flow. It read like a book of disjointed facts that were about the same person but didn’t really fit together. Each chapter was a ‘fact’ and some were explained in great detail and others left me wondering. The first half of the book read much different than the later half when he started talking about his career. It was probably on purpose, it almost felt like he was uncomfortable talking about himself (he states numerous times that the game should never be about the host) and he spends a lot of time paying homage to the wonderful contestants he had over the years.
I feel like that could have probably been an entire book all in itself, and not in his autobiography where I was there to read about him. Still, the book was an enjoyable quick read and my first Canadian autobiography.
3/5 Stars
The Nomadic Reader 