Here we are at the end of another month already! Goodness, where did the time go?! It’s hard to believe that tomorrow will be May 1st, but here we are!

We hit a milestone here on this blog in the last few days – *50* followers here on WordPress!! Thank you to all of you who follow my blog here and sometimes on other areas of social media as well!

In life outside of my blog and reading, I’m working on getting my water garden up and running for the season. Mostly that means cleaning out all the dead leaves and algae that have built up in the winter, putting the fountain in so the water aerates, fix the rocks that birds and animals knocked over in the winter, and fertilize the plants. My only drawback right now is there’s a mother robin nesting right above the electrical outlet where I plug my fountain in. I hate to disturb her, but I need to get the fountain in the pool so it aerates the water for the plants. I cleaned out a bunch of debris last week on my day off. This week I’m hoping to at the very least get the fountain in the water. If I can get the rocks reset and the plants fertilized as well, excellent. If I can’t, I’ll do it another day.

Spring also tends to be a time when my depression and anxiety are higher so it makes it harder to keep up with things. This year hasn’t been as bad as last year, thankfully, but sometimes it’s still hard to get myself to read instead of playing mindless, stupid computer games like Mahjongg.

However, I still managed to read 15 books this month – 7 cozy mysteries (1 of which was a novella), 7 romance books (1 of which was actually a novella & 1 was a short story), and 1 picture book.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been quite as good at keeping up with the reviews of what I’ve read. I only wrote 9 reviews in the month of April. I have 3 reviews that are still in draft format and a fourth that I plan to start at some point! I also participated in 1 blog tour and had 2 other posts. One on a few housekeeping things and the other a post about recommendations for Reluctant Readers in the Middle Grades (ages 8-12).

As far as Reading Challenges go, I made progress on 5 of my challenges:

• Goodreads 2017 Challenge – up to 64 total out of my goal of 175
• Craving for Cozies Challenge – up to 38 total out of my goal of 80
• Cruising Thru the Cozies Challenge – I have completed two categories and am still working on the other eight.
• Pages Read Challenge – up to 17,540 pages out of my goal of 48,001-60,000 pages
• eBook Challenge – up to 37 total out of my goal of 50 (which I may raise to 75)

Looking Ahead to May

In May, I will be participating in 5 blog tours, one spotlight post, the others with books to review. In fact a couple of stops have multiple books to review. On top of that I’ll be reading one other book for review for another review crew I’m apart of. The books included in these blog tours and reviews are:

As you can see, I’ll be busy reading this month!  On top of the blog tours and Daryl Wood Gerber’s newest, I’m finishing up reading some flash fiction for our teen writing contest, “It’s All Write!” at my library. Flash fiction are super short stories, usually less than about 200-250 words. They’re very interesting to read and I’m enjoying it immensely. 🙂

On top of all the books above, I still need to finish reviews for the following books:

Since I have so many books to read for review this month, I doubt that I’ll get much of my backlog read, but maybe. I suppose it depends on how rainy and cold it is and whether or not I can be outside!

Thanks for joining me along my journey!