Weekly Wrap-up | May 17, 2020

Happy Sunday everyone! This will be a short update—I’ve been feeling under the weather this week, mainly because it’s that time of the month and the cramps and anxiety are hitting hard. It isn’t usually this bad, but my body thought to remind me again why it sucks being a girl—I’m emotional and hangry all the time, I have this intense craving for carrot cake in the middle of the night, and my concentration is shot. It SUCKS, especially on top of COVID and exam preps.

Bleh. Oh well, it will pass.

Anyway, on to my bookish updates!

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Weekly Wrap-up | May 10, 2020

Happy Mother’s Day to all moms out there! This week was a little more ‘eventful’ than my normal quarantine week—we celebrated my brother’s birthday last May 7 by ordering some of his favourite food, and then we celebrated Mother’s Day also by ordering out. My brother and I (half-)joke that our interactions with the people who deliver our food are the only things we look forward to now, lol. Still, the food was pretty great, and we spent a lot of time reminiscing, which was nice.

I’m not sure if our overall situation is improving, though. Just this week, one of our country’s major media and broadcasting companies, ABS-CBN, ceased operations because of the failure of the Congress to renew its franchise permit. Many (me included) suspect this is intentional, because ABS-CBN has been vocal in its criticism of President Duterte (whose populist appeal is very similar to that of Trump’s). Aside from the implications of this on democracy and free speech, a more practical concern is that 11,000+ employees have just lost their jobs, which extremely concerning given the COVID situation. Please keep us in your thoughts—there’s a lot of collective fear and outrage again here.

In other news, things are also slowly beginning to pick up with school. We now have a revised calendar for the next academic year, and I’m just waiting for the final dates for our Comprehensive Exams (we have those on the MA level, for some reason). I’m not looking forward to studying for those but having some certainty and getting back to making plans will definitely be a relief.

Weekly Wrap-up + Very Tentative Reading Plans for May and Beyond

Happy Sunday, everyone! I hope you’ve all had a great week. I know I just said in my April Wrap-up that I don’t do well with a TBR, but… here I am, making one anyway. This is all very tentative—I don’t do well with a strict TBR, but I find I’m more motivated to read if I have a set of options and a VERY loose time frame (much like my Women’s Prize reading), so I’ll try to do something similar for May and for the rest of the year.

A minor life update—my reviewing mojo is back!!! I was able to write and schedule a few posts again over the past few days. Thank you all for your encouragement last week; it really helped to know that a reviewing slump is normal. ☺️

On to the wrap-up!

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.

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.

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)