Okay, I have to admit, I discovered and read some great new books earlier this year thanks to my monthly reading challenges, but I’m now feeling burnt out by them. There’s definitely a benefit in being intentional about what books you read, but it also removes the spontaneity of choosing a book based on your emotional needs at that exact moment. My monthly TBR’s were getting onerous by trying to accommodate my challenge, book club, and ARCs each month and it didn’t leave much (or sometimes any) room for spontaneity.

Book club is pretty much the highlight of my month and I’m really enjoying starting to work with publishers, so I think I will probably part ways for with my monthly challenge in the new year, but I’m going to try my best to see it through the rest of this year. As a side note, it’s coming up on my 1-year anniversary of starting this blog and I just want to say a huge thanks to all my followers and everyone who reads my reviews! I just surpassed 100 subscribers a few weeks ago and while that doesn’t sound like a lot, I really appreciate everyone who has given my voice power by reading and subscribing. I started a travel blog in 2010, but I didn’t really post in it that much the last few years, so I wasn’t sure how this experiment was going to go, but it has been a tremendous amount of fun for me. I’ve really enjoyed having a platform for my bookish thoughts and I’ve started actually building some relationships with publishers, which has been a really interesting learning opportunity for me and I’m really excited to see where it will go in the future.

But back to my monthly challenge. This challenge feels like a bit of a cop out, because I was totally going to do this anyways, but hey, you have to go with what inspires you. November is pretty much my favourite month as a reader because of the Goodreads Choice Awards. I LOVE reading new releases because it makes me feel hip and ahead of the curve, and I love celebrating those new releases by having the opportunity to vote for them. Since I’ve been more involved in the book world over the last year or so, I’ve gotten pretty good at guessing what books might be nominated for certain categories and once the nominees are announced, I always try and read as many as I can before the end of the voting period. This year I have already read 25 books that were nominated in the first round (more will be added in the second round), so I had a pretty sweet head start and have already voted in several categories.

So my challenge for November is to read as many of the Goodreads Choice Award nominees as possible.

I tend to read a lot of books in the fiction, mystery, historical fiction, young adult, and YA Fantasy categories and then focus on some of the other categories in November. Since the nominees were announced I’ve read All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover (romance) and For Every One by Jason Reynolds (poetry). I just started Everything’s Trash, But That’s Okay by Phoebe Robinson (humour) as an audiobook and I’m about halfway through Vicious by V.E. Schwab, with the intention of reading Vengeful, the sequel which was nominated in Sci-fi.

Once the winners are announced, I’ll follow up with a list of all the books I decide to vote for! In the meantime, I love hearing from you, so let me know if you’ve read any of the nominees? If so, what books did you love? Are there any nominees you’re planning to read this month?