It's not Chatty Saturday time, but I thought it would be appropriate to celebrate the end of summer with a little look-back over the last few months worth of bookish memories. Technically, summer ended on September 21st, but with tomorrow being October, I figured today's the perfect time.

I don't get summer breaks anymore, as I no longer go to school (boohoo), but there were a handful of small breaks here and there, not to mention last week's vacation. I felt like this summer was a pretty [bookishly] magical experience worth chatting about because I rolled over and out of my reading slump at the beginning of summer and now, I'm even done with this year's Goodread's challenge! I finished it early yesterday (1am in fact) and oh...watching the confetti fall down was simply joyous, especially considering the fact that not too long ago, Goodreads was constantly on me about being 3 or 4 books behind!

I didn't go anywhere for my week long break, but I did visit my grandma a little more often and the whole family (meaning my parents, brother and I, not a party of us) would stay with her for the rest of the day. There's nothing much to do there (there isn't a television) but I do bring books to read. Heck, once I even brought my laptop so I could write my review for a book. Both are perfectly quiet activities for when she's napping.

Something clicked in the middle of July. I'm not entirely sure what. Maybe it's because around then, I started to get back into bullet journaling again (only for books)? That couldn't be the case as I did try to set up reading plans back from April through June, to much failure and further reading slumps.

Perhaps, it was Dave's invitation to the Lies Like Wildfire blog tour that stirred my reading soul and making me realizing that YA isn't such a bad genre after all and that I've sorely missed it. I shouldn't have let a handful of bad eggs put me off an entire genre so I'm very glad to have given it a second try again.

Maybe it was the discovery of audiobooks and realizing I could read and game at the same time.

Or maybe, just maybe, I had set aside a single goal one fateful day where I said to myself All you have to do is read 50 pages today and I won't bother you anymore for the week...and I blew the goal away by plowing through, realizing I could read more than a couple words, if only I set aside a little time for myself...

Whatever the case, somewhere in mid-June and early July, I started to eat through books like the word starved person I was for half of 2021. I went from maybe a book or two a month to a book a week because if I could read 50 pages a night, during a designated hour set up just to read, that would be 300 pages a week (not including the self-imposed Monday "deadlines" to throw up the review). I thought to myself, 300 pages is a lot of books out there. I could do 300 a week!

And now I'm done with my reading challenge.

And soon, I'll be done with my 100 days of posting (a challenge that literally just came about because I sure didn't set it up for myself). I'm thinking about easing back on reading my TBR and posting daily in October, so that I could get started with the BBNYA books, but now that I know I'm fully capable of reading at least 50 pages a day, so long as I set some time aside to do it, I know I can hop back on the train at anytime.

It's been a lovely reading summer. I can't wait for another month to begin and look forward to more good books.

How was your summer? Did you go anywhere fun? Even if you stayed home, like I did, did you read anything good?

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