WEEKLY UPDATES: CLOSING A DOOR…

Good morning! Today’s post will link up to The Sunday Salon, The Sunday Post and Stacking the Shelves, for weekly updates.

Mailbox Monday is hosted at the home site: Mailbox Monday.

And let’s join Kathryn, our leader in It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?, at Book Date.

Soon we will finally close the door on 2020, but the after effects will last much longer. Hopefully a vaccine for the virus will soon be available to many…and while our lives won’t return to the “old normal” any time soon, we might carve out a new one.

This week I actually read and reviewed three books, an improvement for me lately. I wrote six blog posts.

After discovering that HBO Max is now available as a part of my Amazon Prime HBO subscription, I had fun exploring shows and movies. I started watching The Flight Attendant, based on Chris Bohjalian’s book that I read a few years ago; and I enjoyed a movie starring Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, and Diane Wiest, called Let Them All Talk.

Today I am enjoying some coffee and a small breakfast while I write this. Join me in virtual coffee while we take a closer look.

LAST WEEK ON THE BLOGS:

Tuesday Excerpts:  “Goodnight Beautiful”

Tuesday Potpourri:  Bookish Treasures…

Bookish Wednesday…

Rescuing a Backlog Book!

Coffee Chat:  Goodbye, Doldrums…

Bookish Friday:  “The Cousins”

Review:  Christmas Shopaholic, by Sophie KinsellaReview:  The Girl in the Mirror, by Rose CarlyleReview:  Goodnight Beautiful, by Aimee Molloy

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INCOMING BOOKS:

Empty mailbox!  I did download five e-books.

Layla, by Colleen Hoover

The Push, by Claire McGowan

The Cousins, by Karen M. McManus

The Arrangement, by Robyn Harding

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CURRENTLY READING:

Clear My Name, by Paula Daly

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That was my week.  What did yours look like?  This Time Magazine Person of the Year award made me happy!

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WEEKLY UPDATES: MONTH & TIME CHANGES…

Good morning! Today’s post will link up to The Sunday Salon, The Sunday Post and Stacking the Shelves, for weekly updates.

Mailbox Monday is hosted at the home site: Mailbox Monday.

And let’s join Kathryn, our leader in It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?, at Book Date.

Where did October go?  In fact, where has the whole year gone?  I can’t say that I will miss 2020, and remnants of the bad parts will continue into the New Year, I am sure.  Also…did you remember to set back your clocks? 

I am focusing on reading and blogging…and movies.  I only finished two books this week, but I enjoyed them both.  As I started another one yesterday, I quickly set it aside, and tried a couple of others before finally landing on the one I’ll be reading now.  Some new books arrived in my Kindle, so I am looking forward to those. 

Let’s grab some coffee and take a closer look at the week.

LAST WEEK ON THE BLOGS:

Tuesday Excerpts:  “The Undoing”

Tuesday Potpourri:  The Gifts of New Books…

Hump Day Potpourri…A Great Start to the Day

Wednesday Reading…

A Rediscovered Book…

Coffee Chat:  Creating a New Normal…

Bookish Friday:  “Sisters”

Saturday Potpourri:  Autumn Tidbits

Review:  Invisible Girl, by Lisa JewellReview:  You Should Have Known (The Undoing), by Jean Hanff Korelitz

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INCOMING BOOKS:

Empty physical mailbox!  I did download three e-books…

House of Correction, by Nicci French

I’ll Be Seeing You, by Elizabeth Berg

And an Amazon Prime Freebie:

Girls of Brackenhill, by Kate Moretti

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CURRENTLY READING:

The Silent Wife, by Karin Slaughter

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That was my week…what did yours look like?  This past week, I had birthday Champagne cake in the dining room.

And on Halloween, we had a lovely salmon dinner and Red Velvet Cake for dessert.

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A JOURNEY THROUGH MY SHELVES…

Good morning!  Grab some coffee, and let’s talk about books…again.

While visiting blogs, I see others talking about their TBR…and their physical bookshelves.  So while I mostly read e-books, stashed away out of sight on Pippa, I do have some physical books in stacks.

Some are in my office, like these.  One is a review book, but the others are ones I have purchased:

 

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In the living room, I have a stack of purchased and review books:

 

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Once they are read, they go on one of these shelves:

 

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There is also space on my office bookshelf, at the top of this post. 

I used to have a lot more shelves…thankfully, the great purges of 2015 and 2016 left them more manageable.

It would be lovely if they were all in one vast library, though, don’t you think?

What do your shelves look like?  How do you keep the unread books separate?

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INTERIOR THOUGHTS: A PRECARIOUS BALANCE…

It is time to assess my progress towards BALANCE!

One aspect of balancing my interior world is all about the books I buy, as well as those I manage to read.

Let’s look at my Compulsive Book Buying Disorder:

 

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Here’s what happened so far this year:

Books Purchased in January 2016:  SEVEN!  (Not bad)

How about February?  – SIX!

March:  Uh-oh….TWELVE!

April:  TEN…So far.

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Now let’s check my progress on the Read the Books You Buy Challenge:

Twenty-eight books read so far in 2016.  These are books that were purchased between June 2015 to the Present.

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Now…this is all great, but what does it have to do with balance?   Let’s look at books that I’ve read from my Old TBRs…before June 2015.

Those numbers were harder to access, but I found them by going back through my written logs from the beginning of the year, and here they are:

TWENTY-TWO books read that were purchased before June 2015.  So…a little progress.

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Balancing books read, books purchased, etc., is all good.  But I still have a ways to go to balance out the rest of my life.

My A Day in the Life post showed a somewhat balanced day.  I’m thinking I should do a similar post once a month.  What do you think?

Do you easily balance your days, your weeks, and your months?  How do you do it?

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