Weekly Wrap-up | April 26, 2020

Happy Sunday, everyone! I hope you’ve all had a great week. I was planning on posting a couple of reviews this week, but I was distracted by the Women’s Prize shortlist announcement, and after that I seemed to have momentarily lost the ability to string words together for a review. Like, I would stare at a blank document for half an hour, or else spend it writing one paragraph, which sounds so bad that I’d end up scrapping it. It’s beyond frustrating. Has anyone ever experienced this when writing reviews? I know writers often experience this, but I didn’t think it was possible to be blocked when writing a review. (Then again, I’m a very slow writer.)

I’m not sure how this happened, but I suspect that the fatigue of churning out all those reviews for the Women’s Prize finally got to me. Being new to blogging, I’ve never realized how much effort it takes to write reviews on a regular basis. This stuff is hard work for a non-income-generating hobby (for most people—I know some have been able to monetize it), so now I have so much more respect for the veteran book bloggers out there—it really takes some dedication to keep doing this. If you have any tips or experiences to share about blogging, please let me know! I’d really be interested to hear them.

In any case, I don’t think I’ll force it for next week. I have one more post queued, a monthly wrap-up to do, and maybe one or two tags, but maybe taking a little time off from writing reviews will be a good idea. I’m a little disappointed because I never feel like I’ve caught up with all my reviews, but I’m hoping it’s better to take a break than forcing it.

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Weekly Wrap-up | April 19, 2020

Happy Sunday everyone! Only two more days til the Women’s Prize shortlist is announced, and I’m very excited for it. At this point, I’ve finished 9 of the 16 longlisted books, which doesn’t exactly qualify me to make predictions… but I’ll still try to guess anyway! I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing Girl, Woman, Other and The Mirror & the Light there, but I’m having more difficulty guessing which books will take the other spots. I’ll be posting my best guesses tomorrow.

On to the wrap-up!

Weekly Wrap-up | April 12, 2020

Happy Easter, everyone! Man, I can’t believe that it’s already Easter—I think I’ve steadily lost the ability to tell time since the quarantine started. The days are just blurring together now. It’s hard to believe that had it not been for the pandemic, my family and I would’ve been in Croatia this week, taking a lot of tourist-y pics of the Game of Thrones locations. We’ve been excited about it since last year, especially since it’ll be our first tripe to Europe, but apparently 2020 had other plans. So we’re all a little glum this week, but at least we’re all together and we’re all safe.

Weekly Wrap-up | April 4, 2020

Three weeks into the quarantine and I feel like I’m starting to kind of get used to it. I mean, I still wish it never happened, but I’m a lot less anxious compared to the first week and I’m better at not checking the news as much, so I guess those are small wins.

In other news, a paper I’ve co-authored got accepted for publication!!! 🥳 I’m still in shock over it since that paper was a shot in the dark—we only had two months to put it together—and we weren’t expecting to hear from the editors until May or June. I’m really happy, but then we still have to make major revisions and my body just isn’t ready for that kind of productivity right now 😂 I’m a little miffed that the editors have the capacity to be productive at this time. Sometimes I forget that just because I’ve been transformed into a slug that subsists on chips and Netflix doesn’t mean that everyone else is the same. It makes me feel annoyed and guilty. Maybe that’s why they’re editors of a journal and I’m still a poor grad student…

Anyway, I digress. Welcome to my weekly wrap-up! I’ll start with some bookish updates first before the non-bookish updates, as usual.

March 2020 Wrap-up

I thought the world was off to a rough start back in January, but March really takes the cake this year. At the start of the month, I took some time off reading and blogging to be with my family for my grandmother’s wake, and just one week after we buried her, Metro Manila was placed under community quarantine (in effect, a lockdown). It’s already Day 17 of quarantine but every time I wake up I still feel that everything’s so surreal, this can’t be happening, our lives will never be the same, etc., etc.—and it’s all I can do to keep myself from panicking.

Thankfully, reading and blogging has kept me sane these past two weeks. I really wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t have this blog (and you guys to talk about books with!). This month, I’m really happy I was able to read 12 books, five of them from the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlist. Here’s a rundown of everything.

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Note: Titles link to my reviews.

Weekly Wrap-up | March 22, 2020

Hey everyone! It’s Day 11 of community quarantine here, and I’m still sane… so far. Mainly I miss walking around campus, seeing trees, and running, but I’m doing fairly well in terms of the social distancing aspect (perks of being an introvert, I guess). It’s also nice to finally be able catch up with my reading and reviewing, although I feel incapable of concentrating on anything else.

Weekly Wrap-up | March 15, 2020

Hey everyone! Hope you’re all cozying up indoors to stay safe from the virus. 😷 The situation’s getting worse here, but I’m trying to make the most of the time (and take the edge off my anxiety) by catching up on reading and blogging. Here’s a round-up of my bookish updates this week:

Posts This Week

• February 2020 Wrap-up (Wednesday)
• My TBR from the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlist (Thursday)
• Book Review: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Friday)

My TBR from the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlist

The Women’s Prize for Fiction is an annual literary prize awarded to an excellent work of fiction written in English by a woman. I’ve always followed the announcements for Women’s Prize, but this is the first time I’ll be attempting to read a couple of books from the longlist. I owe this sudden desire to seeing the enthusiasm of Emily, Callum, and recently Hannah about the prize, and about going through everything in the longlist. Thanks, guys!

February 2020 Wrap-up

I’m back!!! Gah, I feel like I’ve been away for a looooong time! Between adjusting to the start of the semester, starting my 21K preps, taking time off to be with my family for my grandmother’s passing, and the hullabaloo over the outbreak, I feel like I haven’t had much time to sit down to write and think!

Top 5 Books that Caused a Major Hangover

It’s Tuesday, so it’s time for another Top 5 post! Thanks again to Shanah @ Bionic Book Worm for the topics.

We all know what a book hangover is. It’s the emotional devastation that sets in after you’ve read a particularly good book, when you realize it’s all over and you can never experience it again for the first time. It’s the inability to function the next day after you’ve spent the whole night devouring the book. It’s the physical pain of having to choose another book to read because you’re afraid nothing will compare to what you’ve just read.

It’s both the worst and best feeling in the world, if you’re one of those readers that look for complete emotional devastation and mild functional impairment in their reading experience.

Recently, though, I realized that I don’t get to experience this as much anymore, but that I’m likely to get hangovers from series. So, in this post, I included both series and individual books (also because I can’t choose just any one book in the series – that’s not cheating, is it?). Anywaaay, let’s get right to it.