Mid-week ramblings

Hello, friends.  I feel as though I’ve been nonexistent around here this past week or so.  I had visitors all last week – my mom, her boyfriend, and my grandma were here for the entire week and my aunt came for just the weekend, so we had a full house and my week was packed with visiting and activities.  I also worked most of the week so I was trying to maintain my regular life while spending as much time with them as possible… so I definitely neglected this blog a bit. 😦  But the good news is that I’m back, for now anyway (I’m going on a trip mid-May, so I’ll be absent then too) and I definitely plan to get some reviews up this weekend.

I realized the other day that I’m way behind on my review commitments.  For a couple of months I had stopped accepting review copies, which allowed me to catch up almost all the way, but once I started accepting them again it seems that I was unable to control myself!  I finally had to come up with an organized way to make sure I finish all these books in a reasonable time frame.  Now I’ve got which review copies I’ll be reading in which month all mapped out in a google doc, so when the next book that I’m dying to read comes along I can tell the publisher that I am booked all the way through August (true story – YIKES!).  This way I feel less pressure and I can be honest about when I might review a book.  The thing with me is that I only want about 30% of my reading to consist of review copies, which means I can do only 4-6 review books per month.  I am very happy with that balance, as long as I don’t fall too far behind – then I get super stressed and it stops being fun.  So this new organization I have put together is going to make a huge difference for me. 🙂

Speaking of review copies, I recently attempted to read one that didn’t quite agree with me – Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.  I’m not sure what it is about this novel, but after more than 50 pages it just wasn’t clicking with me so I had to give it up.  The good news is that I’d like to give it to one of you.  The only thing is that you must live in the U.S. (sorry about that, I simply can’t afford the international shipping costs, they are more expensive than the book itself!), and you must either have a blog or review the book here on my blog.  Just leave a comment with your name and email and I’ll pick a winner by Sunday evening.

That’s about all I have for tonight.  I’m really going to try to catch up on reviews this weekend (shouldn’t be too hard – I haven’t read much this week), so keep an eye out for posts in a few days.

As always, thank you for being here for me, and for paying attention to my little blog.  It means everything.

How is your week so far?