The TBR Tag

TBR's... They're hard things to keep track of sometimes. Books keep piling up while you're trying your hardest to work through them, somehow you just can't keep up. Welcome to my life. 

The Diviners - Libba Bray: Creepy, Haunting Crime Investigation

Title: The Diviners

Author: Libba Bray

Publisher: Little Brown Books for Young Readers 

Puhlication date: September 18th 2012

Series: The Diviners (#1)

Purchase: Kobo, Amazon

Rating: 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟

                       

                    

Evie O’Neill has been exiled from her boring old hometown and shipped off to the bustling streets of New York City—and she is pos-i-tute-ly ecstatic. It’s 1926, and New York is filled with speakeasies, Ziegfeld girls, and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that she has to live with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult.

Evie worries he’ll discover her darkest secret: a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far. But when the police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol and Will is called to the scene, Evie realizes her gift could help catch a serial killer.

As Evie jumps headlong into a dance with a murderer, other stories unfold in the city that never sleeps. A young man named Memphis is caught between two worlds. A chorus girl named Theta is running from her past. A student named Jericho hides a shocking secret. And unknown to all, something dark and evil has awakened. 

How To Get Back Into Blogging After Taking a Break

It's very hard to get back into blogging after being gone for a while. I've been thinking on what to post and how to make my comeback to this blog. I could hardly pretend I hadn't been gone at all, so that's not what I'm going to do. Here I am and this is what I've been up to. 

Quitting blogging

The real question is: Why did I quit blogging? The simple reason is that I didn't feel like doing it anymore. I thought it was too much work while being in my senior year of high school. Then my freshman year of college came around and I never got back into it. I have no good excuse and I don't need to have one. I was busy. This doesn't mean I haven't been reading. Since 2016 started, I have been reading more than ever. My reading average is 15 books a month. This is crazy for me. My total reading amount comes down to 80 books and we're only halfway through the year.

What have I been up to?

I have been doing something else book-related since last October. I created my own booktube channel. I have uploaded more than 100 videos on my channel. That comes down to uploading 3 to 4 videos a week. I have been using the same name as the name of this blog, since I wasn't sure if I'd ever come back to blogging. Making bookish videos had been my pride and joy for the last 9 months. My motivation has been through the roof and I've been very good at creating an uploading schedule. This gets me to believe I must be just as good at keeping a blog going.

What is in the future for Charlie Book Fanatic?

The booktube channel is definitely continuing on, because I absolutely love creating videos and sharing my love of books with fellow booktubers and readers. My plan is to expand my platform onto this blog and keep a separate blog going next to my booktube channel. I don't have any ideas for posts yet, but I do have a list of video ideas which I might transform into blog posts. I can also insert my videos and make a blog post around it, but I'm not the biggest fan of this idea. What I don't want, is to push people into watching my videos. I've been an avid reader of blog posts and I loved writing my own ones for the short amount of time I did it last year. The difference between my booktube channel and this blog is going to be that my blog will be fully book-related. On my channel I upload mostly bookish videos, but I also upload story times.

Where do we go from here?

I will choose some ideas and type those up. I don't have an upload schedule or any real ideas yet, but it will happen. I promise you that. I might make posts I don't have any videos of. Examples are discussion posts and challenge updates. I don't do those often enough on my channel, but I did do one recently on New Adult books and why I like them. I think I can create something great with this blog and I hope you'll be here, along for the ride. It's going to be a crazy one.

Tips

I can't leave you hanging without giving you some tips if you're wanting to get back into blogging after a long time. That's what the whole title is about and what I've been asking myself, after all.

1. Think long and hard about the content you want to create. Do you want to go on with what you did before you quit or took a break? Or do you want to do something completely different?

2. Talk to your readers! If you don't know what to do, do what I'm doing right now. I'm talking to the people who read or want to read my blog. They'll understand and maybe even help you out a fair bit.

3. Create an upload schedule and stick to it. I know how hard this is. I started blogging once and quit. I started booktubing once and quit. I picked both up again. Having an upload schedule helped me so much. I was determined to stick to it and it worked. 

4. Brainstorm. It's so important to have actual ideas for the content you want to create. I know I'm being contradictory here. I have no clue about what I want to upload here, but I do have ideas. I can pick whichever idea I want to work on anytime I want. For my booktube channel, I have the whole year planned out already. I'm never stressed out.

5. Don't push yourself. Don't create an insane upload schedule you can't stick to. Only do what you can do. If you know you're busy, don't go and upload six to seven times a week. You can do whatever you want, but I feel like quality is more important than quantity anyway. Spend more time on one post you can be proud of and you will feel way better. 

If you do want to check out my booktube channel, you can find it here: www.youtube.com/charliebookfanatic

Do you have any more tips to get back into blogging? Leave them down below! I'd love to hear from you.

Stacking the Shelves #2

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted over at Tynga's Reviews. This meme is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in a physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks.

Reading More Diversely #1: Indie Authors

Reading More Diversely is an original monthly feature on Charlie Book Fanatic. (That's me!) 

This feature is supposed to be a monthly reading challenge for myself. In this series of posts I will list 5 books/authors that have to do with diversity relating to the subject I chose for that month. In the month following the post I will try to read all of these books/authors. In the next post I will do some mini reviews of the books I read.

The ultimate goal is to look back at the end of the year and to see I have read more diversely. The definition of diversity is different for everyone. For me it is all kinds of things: Books with characters that have mental health issues, that are LGBTQ, that are of colour, switching it up with male/female perspective. The same goes for the authors. 

I do realise lots of people have already touched on this subject, but I never took it seriously. Now, I do and I want to actively expand my horizons and meanwhile maybe motivate other people to do the same with me. 

To go back to the subject of this month; Indie authors. Another term people fill in differently. What I mean by indie authors, are authors who publish their books outside of 'mainstream' publishing. To specify: Outside of the Big Five and other major publishing houses. 

This month I decided to pick 5 books that look interesting to me. So let us dive straight in.

Wishlist Wednesday #1

Wishlist Wednesday is hosted by Pen to Paper. Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it's entirely up to you), that we can't wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

Review: Bomb - Sarah Mussi

Title: Bomb
Author: Sarah Mussi
Series: Standalone
Publisher: Hodder Children's Books
First Publication: May 7th 2015
Genre: Young adult thriller
Source: Netgalley
Synopsis: When Genesis goes on a blind internet date, she just wants to get over her ex-boyfriend Naz. But when Genesis wakes up the morning after the date, she can't remember a thing. To her horror Genesis has become an agent of mass destruction, a walking weapon in the hands of a terrorist cell.
Goodreads | Amazon
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I received Bomb from Hodder Children's Books in exchange for an honest review.
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Bomb drowned me in tears. My heart ached for these characters. Extremely captivating read. It kept me up all night wanting to finish it.

After waking up in a cellar, Genesis doesn't quite remember what happened to her. But it all comes back to her, mostly in the beginning of the book. Imagine being in Gen's position, though. Strapped to a bomb, waking up alone in a dark unlit room. I would be scared out of my mind and actually, so is Gen herself. The way Gen handles everything throughout this book is so well developed and realistic. I adored Gen's personality. Her emotions felt so real to me. She undergoes some serious character development and I loved her for every single moment of it. Even after she had developed a lot, she still bounced back into her old thought patterns which I thought of as lifelike. Nobody you hold dear can be forgotten within an hour. The characters in this book definitely did not get over their grief in an hour, luckily. They hurt, they bled and they cried. 

Stacking the Shelves #1

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted over at Tynga's Reviews. This meme is all about sharing the books you are adding to your shelves, may it be physical or virtual. This means you can include books you buy in a physical store or online, books you borrow from friends or the library, review books, gifts and of course ebooks.

Review: Those Girls - Lauren Saft

Those Girls by Lauren Saft will be out in your local bookstore on June 9th 2015. I received this book as an eArc from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in exchange for an honest review.

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This book got me. Right in the feels. Perfectly relatable as a teenager. I couldn’t put this book down and stayed up until three AM to finish it.

Veronica, Alex and Mollie are best friends and have been since a very long time. Alex is in love with her best friend Drew, but he doesn’t know about it and now she joined a band - without telling anyone. Mollie struggles to keep her estranged boyfriend with her, while she’s getting meaner. And Veronica longs for love, in all senses. This book is about their junior year.