Year of the Asian Sign-Up Post & TBR

Hi everyone! Today I’m sharing with you my sign up post for the Year of Reading Asian Reading Challenge, as well as some of the books I’m planning to read!

The goal of the challenge is to read as many books written by Asian authors as you can in 2019 and is co-hosted by CW @ The Quiet Pond, Lily @ Sprinkles of Dreams, Shealea @ Shut Up, Shealea, and Vicky @ Vicky Who Reads.

 

I’m aiming to reach the Malayan tapir level, which means I need to read 21 to 30 books. I already read a book this year that counts towards the challenge and it’s The Astonishing Color of After by X.R. Pan (full review).

MY TBR

I decided to focus on books that are already out and that I own already, as a way to reduce my tbr pile. I’m hoping to read most of these books plus some of the 2019 releases with Asian main character and by Asian authors.

Let’s start with the Fantasy and Sci-Fi books I want to read:

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang | The Library of Fates by Aditi Khorana | Want by Cindy Pon | The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty| Shadow of the Fox by Julie Kagawa| Forest of a Thousand Lanterns by Julie C. Dao | The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi | Ignite the Stars by Maura Milan 

Now, these are the Contemporary books I’m hoping to get to:

From Twinkle, With Love by Sandhya Menon | Love, Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed | Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao | Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram | I Believe in a Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo | My So-Called Bollywood Life by Nisha Sharma | P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han

And lastly, an assortment of books from different genres that I want to read:

Beginners’s Guide: Love and Other Chemical Reactions by Six de los Reyes | The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo | Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng | China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan | The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar

Are you participating in #yarc2019? if so, which level are you aiming for? What books are you excited to read? have you read any of the books I mentioned?

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2019 Reading and Blogging Challenges

Hi everyone! In 2018, I only participated in the Goodreads reading challenge, because I sign up for a bunch of challenges in 2017 and I abandoned all of them. But this year, I decided last minute that I wanted to participate not only in the Goodreads challenge (I have a goal of 52 books), but also in a few other reading and blogging challenges. And today I want to tell you about them!

Reading challenges

Reading Woman Challenge

This is a challenge is hosted by Reading Women podcast.  The idea is to:

“Complete as many challenges as you can from the list. If you have one book that covers two categories, feel free to count it for both. It’s not a contest. Our goals is to encourage you to read widely (and fight the patriarchy, but that was probably a given), so just have fun with it!”

I tent to read mostly female authors, so that part won’t be hard, but this has some interesting prompts that I think will help me expand my reading even more.

Dancing with Fantasy and Sci-Fi

This reading challenge is hosted by A Dance with Books and it consists of 3 sections. Fantasy, Sci-Fi and General for a total of 52 prompts which comes down to about 1 book a week. You can do 1, 2 or all 3 sections.

Since one of my goals this year is to read more Fantasy and Sci-Fi, I thought this would be the perfect way to encourage me to do it. Also, it has so many cool prompts!

Blogging challenges

2019 Book Blog Discussion Challenge 

This challenges is hosted by Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction and Shannon @ It Starts at Midnight. Here’s what they have to say about it:

“So often, we book bloggers mean to post more discussions on our blogs, but we just don’t quite get around to it. Well, we wanted to give everyone a little motivation to keep the discussions going, plus give us a place to link up our discussions so that more people will see our precious words of wisdom (or … you know … our GIF-filled rants)”

One of my goals for 2019 is to write more discussion posts and I thought this was a great way to get me to actually do it. I’m setting my goal to 12 discussions in 2019.

2019 Review Writing Challenge

The idea with this challenges is to set a goal of how many reviews you want to write in 2019 and then you write them and share them through the link up. The host is Shari from Delighted Reader.

I’m actually not setting a especific number of reviews I want to write, instead I want to write reviews for at least half the books I read in 2019.

Are you participating in any reading or blogging challenges this year? In which ones?

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My Reading so Far in 2018: I Completed my Goodreads Challenge of Reading 52 books!

I have never read 52 books in 4 months before in my life and I’m so excited! I honestly can’t believe that I completed my Goodreads challenge so early in the year. Since I still have so much of the year left to read, I thought it was a good idea to check my reading statistics in terms of genres, authors, diversity and some other things, and see if there was anything I wanted to change in terms of my reading for the rest of 2018. Here’s what I found:

GENRES

This are the genres I have read, the number of books for each genre and the percentage that the number of books represents in terms of my reading:

1. Romance= 17 book (33% of my reading )
2. YA Contemporary = 9 books  (17% of my reading)
3. Poetry Collections= 7 books (13% of my reading)
4. Fantasy = 6 books (12% of my reading)
5. Sci-fi= 6 books (12% of my reading)
6. Non Fiction (memoir) = 4 books (8% of my reading)
7. Fiction (chick lit) = 2 (4% of my reading)
8. Historical Fiction =1 (2% of my reading)

In other years, my two main genres were YA Contemporary and fantasy, but with time romance has climbed to the top of my list. One of the main reasons is that I’m in a fantasy slump, but also it has to do with the fact that when my mental health is not great, reading romance  really helps me. I want to try to read more fantasy again.

OTHERS 

I used to read mainly YA, but I feel like this year that hasn’t been the case, so I wanted to check how much YA I have read this year. I tried to see how much new adult and adult I have been reading but since I read so much romance and I’m not sure how to separate which one are NA and which one are adult, I decided to stick to just YA:

Young Adult=  19 books out of 52 are young adult (36%)- I like that this % has drop because it means I have more of a balance in terms of how much YA/NA/Adult I read.  

This year I’m trying to read more new releases and I have been writing posts with my anticipated releases for each month, so I wanted to check how I was doing with that goal.

2018  releases= 11 books ( 21%) – this is not that good since I want new releases to be at least 40% of what I read, that’s the goal for this year and I need to start reading more new releases.

AUTHORS

I have read a total of 46 authors this year:

5 male authors (10%)  VS. 41 female authors (90%)

I checked and found no information about any of the authors being non-binary or gender non-conforming.

I honestly love the fact that the majority of the authors I read are female and I want to keep it like that.

POC Authors = 14 authors out of 46 (26%)

I need to do better, the percentage of POC authors I read needs to increase! Also, I’m latinx, so I checked how many of the POC authors were latinx and I’m ashamed, only 4 authors are latinx. 

Authors that are part of the LBGTQIAP community= 8 authors out of 46 (15%)

Again, I need to do better and read more authors that are part of the LGBTQIAP community. Also, I may have missed some authors because I only counted the ones that have publicly talked about their sexual orientation.

DIVERSITY 

20 books out of 52 (38%) had LGBTQIAP main characters or, in a few cases, love interests (that had significant roles in the story): 

1 book had a tran character

1 book had a non-binary character

3 books had asexual characters

6 books had lesbian characters

6 books had bisexual characters

8 books had gay characters

In terms of romance, out of the 37 books I read that had romance in the them: 8 books had a m/m romance, 8 had a f/f romance and 21 had a m/f romance. I just want to note that not all the m/f romances are straight couples, since a few have bisexual characters.

15 out of 52 books (28%) had POC main characters. 6 of these 15 characters are latinx. 

Honestly, I need to do so much better in terms of reading more diversely.  I haven’t been paying that much attention to what I read and I haven’t been choosing the books I read as consciously as I should have been.

Did you set a Goodreads goal? Did you accomplish it already, are you behind or are you right on schedule?  What genre have you read the most in 2018? Are you making the conscious of reading more diversely ? 

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Reading Challenges Update- March 2017

Every month, I post an update of how I’m doing in the challenges that I’m participatin in. If you want to know my brief thoughts about any of the books in this post, you can check out my March 2017 Wrap Up.

DIVERSITY BINGO 2017

This month I read 2 book that fit into squares  of  the diversity bingo 2017 that are still empty and I read 3 books that fit into squares that I already filled. I’m only putting the 2 books that fit into empty squares. I have read 16 book for this challenge and the goal is to fill the 36 squares. (14/36)

BEAT THE BACKLIST

My goal for this challenge is to read 30 backlist books this year and to count towards the challenge the book has to have been realese before 2017. I read 4 books in March that count towards this challenge, which means that in 2017 I ahve read a total of 19 books that count towards this challenge. (19/30) 

FLIGHTS OF FANTASY

My goal for this challenge is to read 20 fantasy books in 2017 and I’m falling. I didn’t read any fantasy book in March. (4/20) 

GOODREADS

I want to read a total of 80 books in 2017. I read 6 books  in March and that means I have read 23 so far in 2017 and I’m 4  books ahead of schedule.

Are you participating in any challenge? How are you doing? Have you read any of the books on this post? Did you like them? If you posted an update for your challenges, leave me a link! 

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Reading Challenges Update- February 2017

Every month, I post an update of how I’m doing in the challenges that I’m participatin in. If you want to know my brief thoughts about any of the books in this post, you can check out my February 2017 Wrap Up.

DIVERSITY BINGO 2017

This month I read 8 book that fit into squares for the diversity bingo 2017 and they are all #ownvoices. I have read 14 book for this challenge and the goal is to fill the 36 squares. (14/36)

BEAT THE BACKLIST

My goal for this challenge is to read 30 backlist books this year and to count towards the challenge the book has to have been realese before 2017. I read 8 books in february that count towards this challenge, which means that in 2017 I ahve read a total of 15 books that count towards this challenge. (15/30) 

FLIGHTS OF FANTASY

My goal for this challenge is to read 20 fantasy books in 2017. I read 2 fantasy book in february, which takes my total count to 4. (4/20) 

GOODREADS

I want to read a total of 80 books in 2017. I read 10 books  in february and that means I have read 17 so far in 2017 and I’m 4  books ahead of schedule.

Are you participating in any challenge? How are you doing? Have you read any of the books on this post? Did you like them? If you posted an update for yur challenges, leave me a link! 

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Reading Challenges Update – January 2017

Every month, I will be posting an update about how I’m doing in the challenges that I’m participatin in. If you want to know my brief thoughts about any of the books in this post, you can check out my January 2017  Wrap Up .

Diversity Bigno 2017

This is the challenge I’m most excited about and I’m glad that of the 8 books I have read so far this year, 7 of them fit in squares for the diversity bingo and they are all #ownvoices. I really want to fill all the squares by the end of 2017 and I think I’m doing really well so far.

Beat the Backlist

My goal for this challenge is to read 30 backlist books this year and to count towards the challenge the book has to have been realese before 2017. I’m very glad to say that 7 of the 8 books I have read this year count for this challenge.

 

Flights of Fantasy

My goal for this challenge is to read 20 fantasy books in 2017. In January I read 2 books that work for this challenge and if I keep that pace I think I will achieve my goal.

Goodreads

 

I want to read a total of 80 books in 2017. So far, I have read 8 books; 7 in January and 1 the first day of February. I’m 1 book ahead of schedule.

 

 

 

Are you participating in any challenge? How are you doing? Have you read any of the books on this post? Did you like them? If you posted an update for yur challenges, leave me a link! 

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2017 Reading Challenges

It’s that time of the year when we have to choose the challenges in which we are gonna participate in. After thinking about for a few days, I chose to participate in 4 challenges hosted by other people and one challenge that I will be hosting that’s part reading challenge and part blogging challenge. I have participated in one of these challenges before, the rest are new to me and I’m excited to see how I do. 

This year I want to try and be more involved in the part of the challenges that’s more community oriented. Last yeat I read the books and kept track of how I was doing in each challenge and I shared that in  my wrap up, but I rarely linked my wrap ups or reviews in host’s blog, I rarely commented in others people posts that were related to the challenges, I never participated in a twitter chat. It’s like I participated, but not really. I want to change that this year. 

Here are the challenges I’m paticipating in: 

1.  Diversity Bingo 2017

I have been saying for a while that I want to read more diversely, but it’s only in the last couple of weeks that I feel like I have been making a consious effort to accomplish that goal. I want to keep working in 2017 to read more diverse books and specially more #ownvoices books, that’s why I decided to participate in the Diverse Bingo 2017. The idea is to cover all the squares within the course of a year. It was created by a bunch of wonderful people of twitter (you can find out who, if you click in the image).

At the end of 2017, I will have read 36 diverse books and that’s really exciting.

2. Beat the Backlist 

As weird as it may sound, I usually read more backlist books than new releases in a year. Because of that I joined a challenge to read backlist books in 2016 and this year I also wanted to participate in a similar challenge and that’s why I joined this challenge hosted @ Novel Knight. My goal is to read 30 backlist books in 2017, even if I think I will read more based on the amount of backlist books I read in 2016.

Also, I will participate in the Hogwarts House Cup Mini challenge that’s tied to the Beat the Backlist challenge. My house is ravenclaw. You get points for your house based on the backlist books you read and every month a house wins the house cup.

3. Flights of Fantasy 

This challenge is hosted by Alexa @ Alexa Loves Books and Rachel @ Hello, Chelly. The idea is to choose a certain number of fantasy books and see if you can read them in a year. Last year, I participated in this one and I even participated for a while in the Flights of Fantasy Book Club. My goal for 2016 was 30 books and I didn’t complete that goal, but I did read 27 fantasy books. I was so close! Lately I haven’t been reading as much fnatasy as I used to and that’s why I didn’t complete the goal.

For 2017, I’m lowering the number of fantasy books I want to read and that’s why my goal is to 20 fantasy books in 2017.

4. Goodreads challenge 

The last two years I set a goal of 52 books in my Goodreads challenge, which means 1 book per week. In 2015, I read 55 books and in 2016 I read 100 books. I have been thinking about this for a while and I decided that I will try to read 80 books in 2017. I think that I will read more, but I want to push myself a little without putting to much pressure in myself.

5.The Pride and Prejudice Project

This is a sort of challenge that I will be hosting, the idea is to post once a month a review of a book that is based on or is a sort retelling of Pride and Prejudice or maybe a review for a movie adaptation or a TV show or a web series based on Pride and prejudice.

                                                                   

To know more, here’s the original post  

Do you participate in challenges? What  2017 challenges are you participating in? Are you participating in any of the challenges I mentioned above?