June Wrap Up

So June.... I felt extremely restless throughout the whole month, on a personal level I returned to my usual day job after 3 months working night shifts elsewhere in the hospital (I’m usually a theatre nurse) and everything else going on in the world, I was worried that I would struggle to settle enough to read. What actually happened was that I buried myself in my books and fictional worlds and read a grand total of 22 books! (and DNF’d 2 others)

I started the month with The Series of Unfortunate Events: The Austere Academy which is the fifth book in the series. I decided in April to start reading the whole series from the beginning as I’ve always been curious about how the story progresses, when I was younger and the books were first coming out I only read the first 3 in the series and never continued, I must say that this was my least favourite of the series so far and I’m making notes on my various issues with the series (mainly WHERE ARE THE POLICE?)

I also read the whole Charlie Travesty serial by KJ Sutton and Jessi Elliot, which is 4 volumes each about 100 pages which is a new favourite series and gutted I have to wait another year for the next volume to be released. I read 3 books written in verse and have discovered that I love this form of writing, Clap When You Land and The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo and The Black Flamingo were are fantastic.

My first experience reading manga was a great success, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas had beautiful art and the story was so moving. Fortuna Sworn and the follow up Restless Slumber also by KJ Sutton are making it to my all time favourites list along with The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. There were some average reads, Ninth House, Howls Moving Castle, The Court of Miracles, that were fun reads but won't stay with me for long. And finally my 2 DNFs The Binding which I got 40% into and just didn’t care about what was happening so decided to leave it there. City of Brass I got 34% into and felt a bit lost, I was listening the the audiobook and just wasn’t in the mood for it, I may pick it up again in a few months as I've never seen a bad review for it. It’s so hard to not make this post ridiculously long and there’s so much I would love to say about each and every book and I haven’t even mentioned some of them.

Statistics wise I read 6080 pages, 8 were 5 star reads, 8 were 4 stars and 5 were 3 stars.