Valentines Day Fun

 Some old, sone new

Discussion Challenge: 20 Books for January

 

This may not surprise most of you who already read by blog regularly. Yes, I get a lot each month, so I was not surprised myself 🙂 Sorry, not trying to brag here 🙂

This was how my year in reading began for 2024.

I often try to listen to short audiobooks and read short e-books each month, and do so on the first days of each month, if possible. The shorter they are, the shorter time it takes to complete them and less extra time staring at screens. Exactly why I prefer physical books.

I don't want to have to name each book for each month, but I'd like to say that there are a few new authors I've read in the last month and year, something I may talk about more in another post.

February Bookish Bingo

 Here is the new card.

My Books:

1. This Wound is a World--Billy-Ray Belcourt (1 square): Audiobook
2. The Art of Costuming--Ruth E. Carter (4 squares): E-Book, Short Book, Puzzles/Games, Free Book
3. Behold the Dreamers--Imbolo Mbue (4 squares): Physical Book, Not in a Series, Book Club Read, Free Space
4. Watership Down--Richard Adams (4 squares): Shelf Love, Animals as Characters, In a Series, Multiple Realms/Dimensions
5. Sunny Song Will Never Be Famous--Suzanne Park (1 square): Book Boyfriend
6. Never Cry Werewolf--Heather Davis (4 squares): Library Book, Retelling, Demon/Monster, Curse
7. Red Queen--Victoria Aveyard (4 squares): Color in the Title, Royalty, Reluctant Heroine, Witch/Wizard

Groundhog Day Humor

Some new ones and some from last year.

2024 Book Blog Discussion Challenge

I'm going to do something new this year. I'd known about this blogging challenge for years, but never considered joining until now. I've have reading others' posts to get some ideas on how to do it.  Since I'm new to this, I will aim for the first level, going over if possible. The graphic below will be displayed on my posts. See the details below.

Welcome to the 2024 Book Blog Discussion Challenge hosted by Nicole @ Feed Your Fiction Addiction and Shannon @ It Starts at Midnight! This challenge has been going on for nine years now, and we’re excited to keep discussing books with you!

So often, we book bloggers mean to post more discussions on our blogs, but we just don’t quite get around to it. Well, we wanted to give everyone a little motivation to keep the discussions going, plus give us a place to link up our discussions so that more people will see our precious words of wisdom (or … you know … our GIF-filled rants).

We hope you’ll join us for this challenge and pledge yourself to posting more discussions in this upcoming year. I promise we’ll have lots of fun talking together! We’ve found that the Discussion Challenge is its own little community

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Here’s All You Have to Do:

• Create a sign-up post announcing your intention to participate and link up below. There’s no need to say what your discussion posts will be about–just tell us you’re joining and let us know your goal. (Can be in an update post or a post with other challenges–you’re not required to make a completely separate sign-up post.)
• Please link back to both challenge hosts and include the challenge button in your sign-up posts. Feel free to also link back in your actual discussions (we appreciate it, so more people can find us!), but that’s not required.
• The challenge runs from January 1st until December 31st, 2023. Sign-ups will remain open through December 28th, 2023.So, you can basically sign up all year long. Come join us!
• Share it! The more people we get to participate in this, the more awesome discussions we can all be a part of and the more fun it will be! So, invite your friends to join us!
• On the 1st of every month, a link-up will go up on both Feed Your Fiction Addiction and It Starts at Midnight where you’ll leave your links for that month’s discussions. Every month, I’ll update the Discussion Challenge widget in the sidebar with the new post–so you’ll always know where to find the latest link-up!
• There will also be a big yearly giveaway–multiple winners for multiple things!–so do keep entering and checking back!
• Use the hashtag #LetsDiscuss2023 to share your progress and connect with other participants on Twitter.
• Have questions? Feel free to ask in the comments!

What Kinds of Discussions Can You Link Up?

Discussions can be about whatever you want as long as it’s relevant to books or book blogging! We’re pretty lax about what can be called a “discussion,” but here are some guidelines:

• We reserve the right to remove posts from the link-up at our discretion. Posts that we feel promote hate or denigrate others will be removed.
• Please don’t link up discussions about things that are completely off-topic, like travel or fashion, etc.
• Please don’t link up month-end wrap-ups (We have the Monthly Wrap-Up Round-Up for that, and we’d love to have you join in!)—unless you have a very specific book-related discussion topic that you include in your wrap-up!
• Please don’t link up book reviews unless it’s more of a general discussion about a topic and you’re using a specific book as an example.
• Please don’t link up giveaways unless the post is mostly a discussion that just happens to have a giveaway attached (like if you were talking about the reasons you love audiobooks and you decide to do a giveaway of an audiobook at the end).
• Linking up Top Ten Tuesday posts or other meme posts are fine as long as there’s some actual discussion involved (not just a list of books). Same with tags—they’re fine, but we’d prefer if there’s some discussion involved of why you chose the books, not just a list of books that go with the tag topic.
• A post can be about you personally if it’s a get-to-know-you type post. (We love getting to know our fellow bloggers!)

Hopefully this doesn’t make us seem like the Discussion Police—we just want to try to keep the link-ups discussion-focused since there are already a lot of places to link up those other types of posts. (And remember that we always err on the side of being flexible.)  

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The Levels:

1-10 – Discussion Dabbler  ⬅️ My Goal
11-20 – Creative Conversationalist
21-30 – Chatty Kathy
31-40 – Terrifically Talkative
41+ – Gift of the Gab

Picture Prompt Book Bingo Challenge 2024

I was sure I was done signing up for challenges, but got tempted by this one. I had known about it since last month when I posted it to a Facebook group for collecting reading challenges (for which I am a moderator). But after seeing two other bloggers sign up for this one, I decided to give it a go. It seems really fun and easy. 

HOW DOES IT WORK?

If you’re new to the Picture Prompt Bingo – it’s a loosey goosey reading challenge in which you match books that you’ve read to one of the pictures on the bingo card. The key thing being that you can be as creative in your interpretation of the picture as you like.

For example, take the majestic snail in the top right corner: this could suggest to you a book that was a slow read, or a story about a character with no fixed abode; you may read something that has a snail on the cover, or the word ‘snail’ in the title; perhaps you’ll read a book about a small, overlooked lifeform or one with which communication doesn’t appear to be possible. As long as you’re happy with the connection you make between the book and the image, it’s all good.

1. A heeled shoe decorated with a bow: Bluebeard--Kurt Vonnegut
2. A microscope:
3. A partially unrolled scroll and a pen: Persian Letters--Montesquieu
4. A land snail:
5. An old Roman coin:
6. A fern plant:
7. A simple crown: Red Queen--Victoria Aveyard
8. An armillary sphere:
9. A seashell:
10. A cannon on a gun carriage:
11. A harp (one of the big ones): XOXO--Axie Oh
12. Two hands making a shadow puppet dog: Never Cry Werewolf--Heather Davis
13. An old camera and tripod:
14. A dog (a very good doggo):
15. A beehive (with four bees flying around it):
16. Fluffy cumulonimbus clouds:

Diversify Your Reading 2024

It looked as if this one wasn't going to happen this year, as it ddi not appear on the website where it had been hosted. However, I just now found it on Instagram. A little late finding it, but I wanted to do it.

JAN: Summer Secrets--Jane Green

FEB:

MARCH:

APRIL:

MAY:

JUNE:

JULY:

AUG:

SEPT:

OCT:

NOV:

DEC: