Blogging Confessions

Back in July one of The Broke & The Bookish's Top Ten Tuesday's topic was Top Ten Blogging Confessions. It's a post that Jamie has done a couple of times and I wanted to give it a go. So these are my Top 10 Blogging Confessions.

Make sure you check out Jamie's original post on The Broke & Bookish. 

Also, while you've got your search engine open check out Jamie's other blog The Perpetual Page-Turner. It's one of my favourite book blogs!

1. I NEVER feel that I'm reading enough.

I've got my weekly average up to around 3 books a week now however, I still feel that I'm slacking! I'm always comparing what I read to other bloggers and they all seem to be reading so much more than me it makes me feel like the slowest reader ever. 

2. Until two weeks ago I was totally winging it and didn't schedule a single post. 

So I'm not the most organised person. The people who have had rescheduling emails from me will back this up. In all honesty I didn't even know you could schedule posts until a couple of weeks ago and now I have posts all lined up into next month. I'm slowly, but surly, organising myself but I'm still new at this and I feel like I'm totally winging it. 

3. I have serious blogging envy

I don't mean too. I love the other bloggers and I have some great chats with them and I adore reading their posts. However, when someone gets a book I'd like to read or they've come up with some amazing idea of a post I get really jealous. Envy is probably the worst part of my character and I'm working really hard to be better. Promise! 

4. My NetGalley's feedback % is 30.

Ah! I guess I have a problem where I just need MORE books. They're free and lovely and there. I forget that I have to actually read them. I'm working through my list though and I've stop requesting books on NetGalley unless I REALLY want them. So in theory this should go up soon enough. 

5.  I buy more books now than I did before I was blogging. 

You'd think when you're being sent books for review that you'd buy less. But being part of the book blogging community you find out about SO many more books than you did before and you can't get arc's of all of them. Which in the end equals an empty bank account a fuller shelves. 

6. I sometimes feel that I let my blog take over my real life.

Maybe sometimes is an understatement. I manage to spend a good couple of hours a day on social media sites and writing posts that my whole life feels like it's in this blog. I'm not complaining I love writing these posts. I started blogging because I was struggling to write the ending to the book I was working on and I didn't want to stop writing because I knew if I did I would never go back to it. I'd like to think that my writing skills have improved some since I started, I know I'm the typo queen but I feel that the posts themselves are becoming more interesting. 

But you might disagree. 

7. I hate writing negative reviews.

Why would anyone send their book to a reviewer that writes negative reviews? I know we're meant to be honest and I am, but it does make me a little nervous when I post a negative review. I had one last month that I was really worried about, I keep thinking what if the author reads it? I don't want to hurt anyones feelings but at the same time I can't lie. I mean if I wrote 5 star reviews about every book I read you'll stop trusting my judgements... that's if you do anyway, I'm just making assumptions now. 

8. I have a TBR list so long I'll never read them all and yet it just keeps getting longer.

I have this feeling of impending doom every time I look at my TBR list. There are so many worlds I want to explore and stories I want to loose myself in and there just aren't enough hours in the day! 

Real life keeps getting in the way! 

It feels like every time I tick one book of my TBR 5 more have been added! It's never ending and actually a little daunting.

9. I sometimes feel that when other blogger's are commenting about the state of the blogging community now-a-days, they're talking about me.

Okay they're not really complaining, it's more like they're commenting on how the blogging community isn't what it was. I think it's because I'm new I can't help buy feel like they're talking about me. I don't know what blogging was like 'before' but I haven't got any complains. Everyone is lovely and I love it. But I would be lying if I said when people post that they feel like the blogging community is a shadow of what it once was that they're talking about me, because of course, I'm part of this 'new' community. 

Although I will point out that I have paranoid narcissistic tendencies so there is a very good chance I've made this all up in my head. 

10. I don't always read the blurb of a book before I get it.

Yeah this is a bad one! I'd say about a third of the books I own I have no idea what they are about. If I see a book that has a really great cover or I've been told it's a good book I've been known to just buy it without actually reading the blurb and finding out what it's about. It some times makes reading them a lot more fun, you have no idea what going to happen and no expectations. It's like a little adventure. I'd say 7/10 times this works for me... although sometimes I'll be cursing myself for not finding out what the book was about first. 

So those are MY blogging confessions, what are yours? Do you feel the same as me on some of these point? Let me know! 

Summer Blogger Promo Tour: The YA Club

Today we have LS from The YA Club. Today's post is a little later than usual as I was away this weekend but don't worry it's still the same as usual.

The YA Club is a blog run by 8 different lovely bloggers! Here's how they explain their blog on their site:

More than thirty years ago, Brian Johnson wrote an epic letter to Mr. Vernon in John Hughes’s now-classic film The Breakfast Club telling him who he and his classmates thought they were. Five students, all from different school cliques, served detention one Saturday in March, initially seeing one another—as Shermer High School’s dean did—as their labels, and not as their identities.The Breakfast Club resonated with so many teens in the 1980s and over the years since then because of the way it ripped apart those classifications. But decades later, those labels still exist, even though the lines are a little more blurred. Contemporary YA books reflect that (or should). As Brian wrote in his letter that afternoon, “each one of us is a brain and an athlete and a basketcase, a princess, and a criminal.”That’s who we are.We are the YA Club.

For this post I had the pleasure of finding out L.S's top 10 books of all time! To find out more about L.S check out some of her sites:

TWITTER || FACEBOOK || WEBSITE

LS's Top 10 Books EVER

1. Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas

For Steve York, life was good. He had a 4.0 GPA, friends he could trust, and a girl he loved. Now he spends his days smoked out, not so much living as simply existing.

But his herbal endeavors -- and personal demons -- have lead to a severe lack of motivation. Steve's flunking out, but if he writes a one-hundred-page paper, he can graduate.

Steve realizes he must write what he knows. And through telling the story of how he got to where he is, he discovers exactly where he wants to be....

2. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
Don't let the ease of reading fool you - Vonnegut's isn't a conventional, or simple, novel. He writes, "There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters."
Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rock-hard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy - and humor.

3. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

His problem is Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions that he's committed to flying, he's trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he's sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

4. The Alienist by Caleb Carr

The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels.
The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in criminology-- amassing a psychological profile of the man they're looking for based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who has killed before, and will kill again before the hunt is over.
Fast-paced and gripping, infused with a historian's exactitude, The Alienist conjures up the Gilded Age and its untarnished underside: verminous tenements and opulent mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. Here is a New York during an age when questioning society's belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and mortal consequences.

5. The Song of the Lioness Quartet by Tamora Pierce

Fans of Tamora Pierce's stellar saga about Alanna of Trebond can now get all four books one boxed set!

Packaged together for the first time, the Song of the Lioness quartet is the adventurous story of one girl's journey to overcome the obstacles facing her, become a valiant knight, and save Tortall from conquest. Alanna douses her female identity to begin her training in Alanna: The First Adventure,and when she gains squire status in In the Hand of the Goddess, her growing abilities make her a few friends -- and many enemies. Books 3 and 4 complete Alanna's adventure and secure her legend, with the new knight errant taking on desert tribesmen in The Woman Who Rides like a Manand seeking out the powerful Dominion Jewel in Lioness Rampant.

A must-read for Pierce's loyal followers and a perfect starting point for readers not yet familiar with her work, this boxed set is fantasy writing at its best. Pierce's gifted writing -- and her knack for creating heroines unafraid to challenge the status quo -- shines brightly in this Lioness set, taking it to the highest ranks, just like Alanna herself. Shana Taylor

6. The Curse Workers trilogy by Holly Black

Cassel comes from a shady, magical family of con artists and grifters. He doesn't fit in at home or at school, so he's used to feeling like an outsider. He's also used to feeling guilty; he killed his best friend, Lila, years ago.
But when Cassel begins to have strange dreams about a white cat, and people around him are losing their memories, he starts to wonder what really happened to Lila. In his search for answers, he discovers a wicked plot for power that seems certain to succeed. But Cassel has other ideas and a plan to con the conmen.

7. 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

Inside little blue envelope 1 are $1,000 and instructions to buy a plane ticket.
In envelope 2 are directions to a specific London flat.
The note in envelope 3 tells Ginny: Find a starving artist.
Because of envelope 4, Ginny and a playwright/thief/ bloke–about–town called Keith go to Scotland together, with somewhat disastrous–though utterly romantic–results. But will she ever see him again?
Everything about Ginny will change this summer, and it's all because of the 13 little blue envelopes.

8. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth. This extraordinary first novel has captured the imaginations of teenagers and adults across the country.

9. Elanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Two misfits.
One extraordinary love.
Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.
Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park.
Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

10. Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys

It’s 1950, and as the French Quarter of New Orleans simmers with secrets, seventeen-year-old Josie Moraine is silently stirring a pot of her own. Known among locals as the daughter of a brothel prostitute, Josie wants more out of life than the Big Easy has to offer. 
She devises a plan get out, but a mysterious death in the Quarter leaves Josie tangled in an investigation that will challenge her allegiance to her mother, her conscience, and Willie Woodley, the brusque madam on Conti Street. Josie is caught between the dream of an elite college and a clandestine underworld. New Orleans lures her in her quest for truth, dangling temptation at every turn, and escalating to the ultimate test.
With characters as captivating as those in her internationally bestselling novel Between Shades of Gray, Ruta Sepetys skillfully creates a rich story of secrets, lies, and the haunting reminder that decisions can shape our destiny.