“Building the Book Fort” is a weekly post where I track my bookish life.

Currently Reading:

• The DOSE Effect by T.J. Power
• Threadneedle by Cari Thomas
• The Darkness Surrounds Us by Gail Lukasik
• The Graveyard Shift by D.M. Guay

Finished:

• Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno Garcia
• Daindreth’s Assassin by Elisabeth Wheatley
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• The Russian Cage by Charlaine Harris
• The Cinnamon Bun Book Store by Laurie Gilmore
• Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey

Total pages read: 3,393

Total books read: 15 of 75

TBR (goal is -36): ?

#ShelfLove Challenge: 8 of 51

It’s good to be back. This has been the slowest reading year since I started tracking well over a decade ago. A lot has happened and life got crazy enough that I got pulled away from reading, blogging, and even getting on bookish social media. I won’t be meeting any of my goals this year, and I’m okay with that all things considered. A lot of the events in my life over the past several months have been extremely stressful, even though some of them were good changes. I BOUGHT A HOUSE, Y’ALL! And I finally have all of my books and bookish decor unpacked and all together in one place, organized just the way I want. Who needs a dining room when you can have a library?!

I’ve decided to keep the dining room table and chairs for now since that’s where I put together puzzles and occasionally use it as an actual dining room table. However, I’ve considered getting a large coffee table for my living room, moving my puzzle board there, and then replacing the dining room table and chairs with a chaise lounge or a couple of arm chairs and a side table for cups of tea and TBR stacks.

During my time away, I ended up coping with a lot of the stress by buying books. My retail therapy was bad enough that I simply stopped trying to track how many and what books I brought home. So the next phase is going to be scanning my books and getting Goodreads and StoryGraph updated. However, that’s not going to happen until sometime after this weekend’s Dewey’s 24-Hour #Readathon!

The Readathon is why I’m posting this long overdue update today instead of waiting until Saturday. I’ll be trying to get a Readathon post up Saturday morning by the time the Readathon starts with my TBR and snack options. Until then, I actually have to put together that TBR and get said snacks. In all of this, I’m also attempting to be on Litsy more often, so most of my Readathon updates will likely be there.

After I get Goodreads updated, my plan is to get back into posting “Down the TBR Hole” again. I’m on a sort of book buying ban for the remainder of the year, and by “sort of” I mean no Fiction books in any format unless I’m using up one of my remaining Libro.FM credits. Why? A few different reasons. The first one being that I left my job back in April due to the toxic work environment, being at a dead end in my career, and my health was declining the longer I stayed. The second reason being that I now live less than two miles from a public library. The third reason for my sort of book buying ban? Y’ALL, I’M STARTING MY OWN BUSINESS! The only books I’m allowing myself to buy are ones related to that business, and I’m putting those under the category of “Professional Development.”

What are you reading? Let me know in the comments!