If you need an indication of how August was, then just know I wrote September Wrap Up here and stared at the screen for like five minutes. August was a lot. What made it so much was definitely my mental and outside of blogging life, but it just made August go by in a complete blur.
Books Read
Even though I barely remember August, what is time even, I had a fabulous reading month. I had a few disappointing reads, but I also had some fabulous, top tier of 2020 reads! Of all the 28 books I read, I had about 46% of them be 5 star reads. For me, five star reads are tricky. It can come down to having a unique world that I can’t get enough of, or exploring a theme that just resonates so deeply with me. It can also be an emotional book that made me cry or just meant so much to me. I think August hit books for all of those criteria.
Of the 28 books I read, 54% of them were by authors of color and 39% of them were queer. While I’m always trying to increase both of these statistics, my bare minimum is always 50% authors of color and 30% queer authors/characters. In general, I am so happy with August, but it just felt like it completely passed by me.
Personal Updates
From the end of July I was dealing with bed bugs. Not a huge amount, but just enough that I was recently bitten quite badly (although we all have NO clue where they came from), and so that meant a ton of things in my apartment had to change. It was also about 50 days of visits with the bug people and then treatments.
It didn’t help that these were some of the HOTTEST months. Normally in summer I suffer from heat rashes when I get too hot, as well as some general mysterious skin conditions. All of these just compounded into August being probably the worst month of the year. And like….we’re living in the midst of a pandemic.
Thankfully now things are a lot better. I’ve been able to get a new bed and the situation has been cleared. But it just means if you think my reviews were a bit scatter brained, or I’ve just been absent all over the place, that’s why. I didn’t want to talk too much about it while it was happening, but now that it’s over, I feel like I can talk more about it.
And now?
Knowing I was dealing with all of this, behind the scenes, it made the pressure to stay on top of my schedule even worse. I am pretty behind for September ARCs. But it’s also made me re-think, even more so, my future in ARC reviews and in book blogging. We have this tendency to want to read ARCs. But I’ve loved reading the backlist books so that we all can talk about why we love them. For ARCs there are just not as many people who have read them already.
I can’t promise changes soon, but just know that in 2021 there will be some changes, in terms of how many ARCs are read and maybe even the schedule. I’m playing around with a few things, but if you have any ideas of what you’d like to see more of, please let me know!