Hello friends! I said I was back to blogging and then didn’t post for weeks – classic. Haha well you know, life just gets busy sometimes! But since it is now December – dang!! – I thought I’d get back to it and share a wrap-up of my reads and etc from the past month.

Do you ever set monthly TBRs? I used to, but I kinda feel like that puts too much pressure on me to read certain things, so I don’t do it anymore. I’ve been working on reading all of my owned books, so really what I’ve been doing is trying to read books I have and not buy too many new ones. This proves difficult since I’m fortunate enough to have easy library access 😂so I cheat on my “owned books” goal with library books.

This month, I read 4 books that I owned and 3 books from the library! Over all of those, I read 2986 pages, and had an average rating of 4.1. I also have now read 101 books this year! I wasn’t expecting to hit that so early, since the past few years I’ve reached around 100ish right at the end of the year. So let’s get to the good stuff – the books themselves!

I wanted to share with you some of my favorite first lines from various novels. By definition, the first line of a book is the first thing we read. From them we can get a hint about the story and the feeling of the book. They’re the kind of thing that can be SUPER impactful if done well, but never hurts the story if they’re not a “blow-you-away” kind of line.

Some of them I like because they are funny, others because they are jarring, and others because they’re just damn beautiful.

Yes you are reading this correctly – an actual blog post after 2.5ish months. Seeing as this is a hobby for both me and Shari, I don’t feel guilty about taking some time away but I do miss blogging! It’s fun 🙂

So it’s time to come back! For me at least haha. Shari, as you may or may not know, is a BOSS who is following her dreams at animation school!! How cool is that?!? But that also means she’s quite busy with projects and art and all that incredible stuff. I have no such excuse – I just got out of the habit of blogging lol.

What have I been up to these past 2.5ish months? Well, I’m glad you asked. If you didn’t, too bad. I’m gonna tell you anyway.

Somehow we’ve made it halfway through the year. How?? is that?? possible? I have no idea. Naturally, this means I’m looking forward to the second half of the year to see what exciting books are coming up. Let’s not think about the books I acquired in the first half of the year that I still haven’t read LOL. Here are some upcoming books that I’m the most excited for!

Thank you to Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl for hosting/organizing Top Ten Tuesday!

Okay guys. THESE COVERS. I just. Cannot. They’re all so beautiful and I love them so much!!! Also it’s funny how the two covers with the black snake line up with one another 😂.

I have to say, of these I’m MOST excited for Angel Mage. Garth Nix is one of my favorite authors ever, and I’m super excited for him to be writing a new fantasy novel!!!! It sounds incredible.

Here are the summaries of the books from Goodreads! For some of them, they’re later books in a series so I’ve put the summary of the first book instead since I don’t want to spoil the series.

Have you ever been to an author signing event? I know that unfortunately authors can’t make it to every city, and can’t make it to every country. One of my wishes if I had infinite money would be to send authors to places they don’t usually get to go! Anyway, I live about halfway between Philadelphia and New York City, so I’m lucky enough to have access to many author events.

This past Tuesday (January 29th) I was able to attend the Leigh Bardugo’s launch event for King of Scars! This is the first book of her duology about Nikolai, a character originally from her Grisha trilogy. Since a lot of people can’t go to these author events, I thought I’d talk a bit about about what it was like, share what she talked about, and just talk about the whole day in general!