Skip to main content

Month in Review: July 2011

It's really hard to believe that the month of July has passed. It wasn't a very good month for my family so we're all looking forward to a much more enjoyable August. We have a weekend trip to Myrtle Beach planned, followed by a road trip to Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware later in the month. It should be a lot of fun!

Here's what happened in July in terms of reading and reviewing.

Books Read in July: 6
I read six books in July. They were all adult fiction books:
Flesh and Bones by Paul Levine
Simply Genius! by Ervin Laszlo
Predators of Darkness: The Aftermath by Leonard D. Hilley II
A New Prospect by Wayne Zurl
Murder in the 11th House by Mitchell Scott Lewis
Listen by Rene Gutteridge

Reviews Written: 5
This month, I wrote five reviews. First, I wrote reviews for one book I read in June:
Counting from Zero by Alan B. Johnston

I also wrote reviews of four of the books I read in July. You can click on the links above to read them.

Author Interviews: 1
Leonard D. Hilley II

Guest Posts: 1
The Road to New Prospect by Wayne Zurl

NetGalley Month
July was NetGalley Month at Red House Books and I participated by reading 2 1/2 books from NetGalley. That's it. I didn't do nearly as well as the NetGalley Month in April when I read 5 NetGalley books. She's doing it again in October, so I may try again. The two books I finished were Simply Genius! and Murder in the 11th House. I'm halfway through The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen.

I didn't read any more books for this challenge in June, so I still need to read three to six more by the end of the year. I really need to focus on this challenge soon!!

This month, I read books that took place in four states. I also read a book that took place in multiple states and countries, and another that had an unknown location. Here's where the books I read in July took place:
Florida
Pennsylvania
New York
Tennessee
Multiple (Simply Genius!)
Unknown (Listen)
That brings me to 17 out of 50 states covered, plus 6 additional countries. Here's my updated map:

View My Book Retreat in a larger map
Labels:

Comments

  1. fredamansAugust 3, 2011 at 5:08 PM

    Good month! Happy August reading!

    http://fredasvoice.blogspot.com/2011/07/july-monthly-news.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sue JacksonAugust 5, 2011 at 5:15 PM

    Sorry you've been through some tough times recently, but at least you had a productive reading month!

    You're ahead of me on the Where Are You Reading Challenge - 17 states is pretty good!

    I hope you have some nice getaways and enjoy your books in August!

    Sue

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks for stopping by! I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Popular posts from this blog

Getting back to blogging

It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Overall, life is good. Work is …
Post a Comment
Read more

April Reading Review

Where exactly did April go? I swear it was just the middle of March and now it's May. Once again, I'm going to provide a quick review of each of the books I read last month. For the last two weeks of the month, I participated in the Spring Into Horror Readathon hosted by Michelle at Seasons of Reading. The only rule was that you had to read at least one book that was horror, thriller, etc. I read one book that qualified. With the exception of the first book in my list, the books I mention below were read during the readathon


My book club's May selection was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had started reading this nonfiction book about the author's work representing men, women and children who were on death row in March but finished the book in April. This is an eye-opening story that everyone at my book club discussion agreed should be required reading for law schools and police officers and even legislators who are making the laws related to judgements. I learned to…
3 comments
Read more

Banned Books Week: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

This is the end of Banned Books Week and unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to write about banned books this year. But I did want to include at least one post about it, so today I wanted to share one of the book series that it seems most people are surprised to find on the list: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park.

According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar. This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…
10 comments
Read more