My Reading Life for the Next Few Weeks

Hey everyone!

I wanted to pop on here and give you an update on my reading life for the next few weeks. Of course I’ll be doing my mid-month checkins, but I’m reading as much as I can for my first Summer Reading List.

Yes, it’ll be my first time creating a summer reading list for my blog and I’m excited and nervous. It was almost last minute and it actually stems from a bigger project I’ve been working on with my TBR. Here’s how this all came about:

I was looking at my April TBR and just wanting to finally catch up with my growing TBR. Every month, I feel like I receive so many books and as much as I want to read all of them, I can’t. I’m always playing catch up and I always seem to leave a few books behind. I want to fix this problem and really only read new books as they come out (and a few older books mixed in each month).

My first challenge is reading all the new books currently releasing. In order to catch up, I need to ignore my backlist and only focus on the new releases. I figured since I’m reading all these new books then I’m going to put together the summer reading list. So what I decided to do was work on putting this list together and spending my summer reading only backlisted books.

My second challenge is then dedicating my summer to solely reading backlisted novels. This means only the books I’ve accumulated on my bookshelves over the years. No new reads. No library holds. I’ll read a new release every once in a while (especially since my review job is reading ONLY new releases), but I want to finally catch up on my fantasy series, start some new fantasy, and read older books written by some of my new favorite authors.

I always feel like I don’t have enough time to read my backlist while new reads continue to publish every single week. While there’s no stopping the train over the summer, I want to read pretty much only new books for now. When June/July starts, then I’ll be switching over to an 80/20 split; eight backlisted novels and two new reads or something like that. I would love to read at that ratio until the end of September where I’ll switch back to only reading new books until the winter.

I’m not sure if this method will work, but my biggest issue is the backlisted TBR. I want to dedicate an entire season to reading them and catching up with my TBR. Even if I make a small dent, I’ll feel proud that I dedicated time to reading these books and finally feeling the accomplishment of reading them.

I apologize to everyone who don’t want me to read only new releases, but it’ll be for a little while. My review numbers will be going up as well, but I’ve decided I like having reviews on here. It’s a part of my reading life and something I don’t want to ignore anymore.