February 2021 Monthly Wrap Up!

March 1, 2021January 2, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads33 Comments

Two months down and we can already start counting down the months left in 2021 on two hands! 🤯
Also, does anyone else love the fact that March starts on a Monday? Is it just me that finds that oddly satisfying? 😂

I know February is the shortest month of the year but wow, it really passed by in a blink! Other than work, reading and blogging I’m not even quite sure what I can tell you about what I got up to this month? Like January, half the time I didn’t even know what day it actually was! The only days I was certain of were Wednesdays because as a part-timer that’s my Friday. My parents left to Bali to sort out our house there earlier this month, so the responsibilities here have fallen to me, but other than doing all this adulting stuff it’s been a pretty quiet month!

I’ve been spending a fair chunk of time especially in the last week playing Animal Crossing and honestly, life on my in-game island is ~~probably~~ more exciting than IRL. 🤣 I’ve been doing a lot of terraforming and redecorating and it’s all coming together quite nicely and I was more than happy to kiss the snow good-bye, too! I’m excited to see what the updates this month bring. I saw the Mario x ACNH update has already appeared and the items are so cool! 😍 I don’t know how I’m going to incorporate them on my island but I want to try as much as I can.

Despite the short month, I think I managed to get in quite a few reads in February and I ended up reading 20 books. All save one of my reads were 3-stars and up but I did have one DNF this month and that’s also my first for the year! February was unsurprisingly heavy on romance and I ended up reading a lot of NA sports romances on a whim 🤣 I haven’t read many sports romances and although the jock vulgarity at the beginning of each book is always slightly off-putting, I think I definitely want to try more sports romances. They’re very white though, aren’t they? 🤔 I also had my first re-read(s) of the year this month and deciding to re-read with the audiobooks for The Illuminae Files and Aurora Rising was a really good decision! These audios are fantastic and I would highly recommend if you want a fun and full-cast listening/reading experience!

All my re-reads were 5-stars but my only 5-star first-time-read this month was Take A Hint, Dani Brown but I also have to mention The Death of Vivek Oji, which ended up being 4.5-stars for me but I’m in no doubt that this book will stick with me for quite a while! 🥲

January 2021 Monthly Wrap Up!

February 2, 2021January 2, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads33 Comments

Please someone tell me how the first month of this new year has already come to an end. How did that happen so quickly?

2021 kicked off pretty quietly (on this side of the world) although globally, it seemed that chaos still reigned in many places causing tensions to remain high and people to feel pretty low, not to mention the pandemic. I took a one-week holiday at the start of the month to “decompress” between work contracts, although not much of that happened before it was time to start work again but this time on a part-time contract! I have to admit that since I started working three days a week, my days have begun to blur into one giant blob of working, reading, blogging and not much else. 😂

Half the time I feel like I don’t even know what day it is anymore and that definitely didn’t help by the brain fog that came creeping in around mid-month. Although I still struggle with my mental health and this month got a bit rough towards the end, the three day work week has really helped to keep extra pressure at bay and that’s exactly why I agreed to it in the first place!

In bookish mail news, I was surprised to actually receive the Cemetery Boys pre-order goodies from Aiden Thomas (even if it’s quite late)! I never usually receive these goodies and I blame that entirely on the mail system in my country so colour me very shook when I saw the beautiful character cards (and sign plate) arrive the other week. My photos don’t do the cards justice but trust, they’re gorgeous and I love to see them! 😍 If I’m not mistaken, the art is by: @mmarsloud.

January ended up being a pretty great reading month thanks to having more time in general. I ended up reading 22 books (that I’m counting with three books that I read and won’t be counting towards my GR goal). This month was unsurprisingly heavy on fantasy and romance with a sprinkle of middle-grade and literary fiction. A couple books took me a few steps out of my comfort zone but I ended up really loving them and they were strong contenders for favourites this month! The majority of the books I read were also by new-to-me-authors with some potential favourite new ones on the list!

I’m still a bit behind on my reviews and part of me just wants to start writing mini-reviews for all of them but is that a cop out? 😂 I loved most of my reads this month but I also had quite a few ratings below three-stars and I don’t tend to give those out a lot, so that was pretty surprising! With only one five-star read this month Ever After Always was the winning favourite and I’ve linked my review below if you want to check it out. 😊

December 2020 Monthly Wrap Up!

January 4, 2021January 2, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads19 Comments

We’ve now started the first full week of January and I was debating whether to even make a December monthly wrap-up post because I’m lazy but I already did the End of Year Survey: Parts I, II & III, but I thought let’s just get it done with so… Here we are 🤪

December was both so slow and too fast and it was honestly a bit of a “surreal” month. I found myself struggling even more to stay motivated at work especially since everyone was going off on holidays and I was one of the few that stayed on until the very last day of the year. I did have a lot of wrapping up to do as I was also ending my full-time work contract and with no one around to really hand things off to, it was a bit more hectic than anticipated.

For the most part, I played a lot of Animal Crossing, read a few books and generally tried to not give in to my desire to retreat into ultimate cave-reading mode too often (especially since I still had work to do)! LOL 😂 I did get my Owlcrate mid-December and the merch and book were gorgeous–I absolutely loved it! My favourite items are the planner+stickers, the monthly pin and of course, the book itself!

In December, I read 18 books! They were a pretty good mix of fantasy and romance, although I did manage to sneak in a non-fiction and some literary/contemporary fiction as well. Despite being excited to read more holiday romances, I only ended up reading two, but I might read one or two more in January but that’s also a big might. As you’ll see in my wrap up although I’ve been reading, what I haven’t been doing is writing reviews immediately. I’m so behind and really need to catch up 😂

I loved many of my December reads and despite a few exceptions, most of them were 4-5 stars, so I would defo say it was a successful month for reading! I had two five star reads in December and they were (obviously) my faves: Bad Blood and Amari and the Night Brothers. They’re two very different books but both are equally amazing and I would highly recommend them!

November 2020 Monthly Wrap Up!

December 4, 2020January 2, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads15 Comments

Can you believe it’s already December? I’m a little shook at how quickly November seemed to zoom right by me and that I can’t recall reading much of anything at all last month!

Work in November was been overwhelmingly busy with projects ending, people leaving, and new things to start sorting for next year as my organisation goes through a merger. Having to prepare communications for the region and projects, as well as representing Southeast Asia in our global works council (similar to a union), on top of finding time to blog and read, really stretched me quite thin! To say that everything seemed to be overflowing might be a bit of an understatement and part of me is even glad to see that we’re in the last month of 2020 now because I’m truly running low on steam 😂

But it hasn’t been all bad! It has been an incredible month for book mail and I’ve received many of the special editions that I ordered earlier in the year. I haven’t spent much on regular book buying in 2020, but I’m 100% positive I made up for all that with the many special editions that I purchased. I really kissed that money goodbye, friends 😂

1) Stack of random new books; 2) SE A Deadly Education; 3) SE The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

Illumicrate Archives: The Poppy War, naked cover art + mind-blowing jacket art!

Now… ON TO THE “FUN” STUFF!

In November, I read 15 books! **Okay, I just totally surprised myself with that count because I expected to see that I only managed to read five books or something because that’s really what this month has felt like 😂 LOL I didn’t have any five star reads or DNFs and the majority this month were 4 stars. If you can’t tell I went on a bit of a historical romance binge and the light reads were exactly what I needed! The books were a good mix of blog tour reads, ARCs and new books on my TBR.

Being the only book I rated 4.5 stars this month, The Cousins was my favourite read but I think the Moose Springs series are close contenders because they really brought me a lot of joy and I can’t wait to continue on with the series in December as I was lucky enough to get the ARC!