March 2022 Reading Wrap Up

Welcome to March’s Wrap Up! March passed by in a bit of a blur, but in that blur I managed to read quite a bit! Despite midterms, starting to run an experiment, and deep diving into the job search, I manage to complete 6 books! Some were great and some were not, so read on to hear all of my thoughts on the books I picked up!

Books Read:

Normally I give a little synopsis of my reading month, but in March I really was all over the place. My ratings range from 5 stars to 2 stars and everything in between! So I’m going to spare you the overview, and get into the details of what I did or didn’t like about each individual book!

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Rating: 5 out of 5.

I read Hook, Line, and Sinker towards the beginning of the month, and boy was that a great decision. I really enjoyed It Happened One Summer, but I absolutely ADORED Hook, Line, and Sinker. It has some of my favorite tropes, a great emotional journey, and lots of hijinks to laugh at. After loving this book so much, I’m definitely going to be trying out more by Tessa Bailey in the future, despite my initial rocky start with the author. Her backlist might not be for me, but her current works sure are!

Then we have Dating Dr. Dil, which I gave 4.5 star to and have a full review where you can read about all my thoughts on this book! As a summary, it was funny, it was cute, it had depth, and I really enjoyed reading it!

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⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Life of Melody was more of a 3.5, but I rounded up because it was a fun read. It follows a fairy and a beast raising a human child together and possibly falling in love while doing so. I needed something quick and light when I picked it up, and this definitely delivered!

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⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

The Accidental Pinup was one of my anticipated releases of this year, so upon getting an ARC, I read it almost immediately. I have a full review going up in July, closer to this book’s release date, but essentially, as sad as I am to admit it, this book did not work for me. I didn’t mesh with the writing or the romance, so ultimately this book got 3 stars.

Sweethand was a book I had on my TBR for about a year now, so I finally picked it up, annnnnd, I didn’t love it. It got a 2.5 star rating from me because not only did I not enjoy the romance, I downright found it unhealthy at many points, and definitely don’t ship the two. But hey, at least it’s off my TBR now!

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⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

This is another disappointment from this month, but thankfully I have a full review already posted, so I don’t need to go into detail once again! Essentially, I didn’t love the romance and I didn’t get any sort of body positivity that I was promised.

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Books Acquired:

NetGalley:

I got approved for two graphic novels on NetGalley this month! Scout Is Not a Band Kid comes out in April, so I’ll have to have a review up for it soon, which means it won’t be on the TBR very long! Plus, it sounds really good, so I’m excited to get to it!

Batter Royale also looks really cute, but there’s an issue with the NetGalley file, so I might have to wait until it releases in June to pick up a physical copy and review it, which is a bit annoying. Hopefully the story makes up for the inconvenience!

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Purchased:

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The books I bought this month each came from a separate book buying adventure! I purchased A Brush With Love early in the month after seeing an Instagram live with the author and deciding I needed her book! This is one I plan on reading over spring break in a few weeks! Then I purchased a used copy of The Roughest Draft, since I want to read this one, but for some reason keep feeling like I may not love it, so I didn’t want to get a brand new copy. I also pre-ordered the 7th Spy x Family volume months back. Have I read past volume 2 yet? No. Do I keep buying these manga as they release regardless? For some reason, yes! Someone make sure I don’t buy volume 8 without having at least picked up another volume or two! And lastly, on a trip to Barnes & Noble with my friend, I picked up How to Survive a Scandal! I’m really hoping that by the end of April or May you’ll see my thoughts on at least 2 or 3 of these books in a wrap up!

Giveaway:

Back in 2021 I won a giveaway as part of Denise Williams’ author interview Instagram live series, and my prize was a pre-order of Libby Hubscher’s March 2022 release, If You Ask Me. So it was a lot of fun to finally get this book in the mail a few weeks back!

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Quarterly Goals Update:

When I set my 2022 goals, I mentioned that I would be checking in during my wrap ups every quarter, so here we are with that first check in!

Discussion Challenge:

While I haven’t been as active as I would like on the blog, I still have posted a few discussions, three to be precise, over these past 3 months. I didn’t set a number for myself, and I’m glad I didn’t because that means I can consider an average of one discussion a month to be a win! I am on track for this goal!

Only Buying 60 Books in 2022:

From the months of January to March, I have only purchased 13 books, which means I’m on track! As I mentioned in my original goals post, 60 books a year averages to about 5 books a month, which means that in 3 months I should have accumulated a maximum of 15 books, and I definitely stayed within that limit! I’m so proud of myself!

Me half of the time when I saw a book I wanted to buy

Continue Unhauling:

I have continued to do this! I’m still using PangoBooks to help with this goal, and it’s been working well! So far I’d say I’m achieving this goal!

Reaching 950 Followers:

This is the goal I have the least amount of control over, and therefore I’m concerned with it the least. Can I achieve almost 65 more followers in 9 more months? If I’m active enough, perhaps. But time will tell for this one. I guess a mini goal I can set for myself, is that it would be nice to have 900 followers by the time I check in again in June. But I’ll be okay if I haven’t gotten there yet by July.

Reading Experiments:

1. New Genres

Sooooooo, have I picked up anything that isn’t a romance in these past 3 months? Technically, yes. I picked up one graphic novel. But did I branch out, like I wanted to? Not in the slightest. I’m okay with that though, because this is more a goal for the second half of the year, once I’ve graduated and have the brain power to read things that aren’t romances. I might also make an attempt to read one or two non-romance books over spring break in April, but if it doesn’t happen, I’m okay with that.

2. Writing Reviews for a Month

I haven’t done this yet, but there are 9 more months in the year! Or, since I’ve already reviewed 2/3 books I read in February, I may just write a mini review for that one remaining book, and call this challenge complete!

Achieving the 100% NetGalley Feedback Ratio:

Back when I set this goal, I only had 7 books to read and 83 books approved in total. Somehow, despite my goal of wanting to reduce the number of NetGalley books on my TBR until there were no more left, I managed to increase that number! I currently have 9 books that I need to read and review with 93 books approved in total. So I managed to add 10 more books to my NetGalley TBR in the past 3 months!

To be fair though, some of those approvals I had no control over since my requests were already pending. (Of course, I had control over the 3-5 that I actively requested or used the “Read Now” button to acquire, but we’ll just ignore those).

I do have a plan though! I hope to achieve this goal by the end of June! Right now, since NetGalley now lets you remove pending requests, I only have 1 pending request, that I can easily read at any point, since I’m very excited for it. But assuming I don’t get approved for that book, I plan on splitting up the titles so that I read an average of 3 a month. If I do that over the next 3 months, then I will have read through my entire NetGalley TBR by the end of June! I’m hopping to read 2 books I’m excited for and one I’m less excited for each month so that I don’t get burnt out, but I guess we’ll see what ends up happening! Hopefully when I report back in June, this goal will have been completed!

Do A Quarterly Check In:

I’d say that so far I’m doing great with this goal! I remembered to do my first check up! I gave detailed progress updates on each of my goals, as you’ve just read! So as long as I do another update like this one in June and September, I’ll have easily completed this goal!

Things I Did:

I feel like March was one of those months where I did so much but remember so little of it. All I know is that I was busy with school, with my experiment, with midterms, with homework, with other things. None of it is really noteworthy, so I’ll keep this section short this month!

Did you do anything exciting in March? What was the best book you read this month? Have you done a goals check in recently?

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