After reading a few books, doing a book swap and buying 3 more books today, my physical tbr is at 81 books 😀 Many of these I bought years ago and still haven’t come around to reading but I think i’m going to give HRCYED 3.0 a shot this year and hope we can get that number down! What’s your physical tbr looking like?

Has this ever happened to anyone?

I mean, Pride Month is coming to an end, and this month I decided that I wanted to read a lot more books with lesbian or bisexual women as the main characters. And I kind of succeeded. I read around seven or eight new books, but my goal was 12. What I realized—and I don't know why I'm surprised—is that if I give myself a list of books to read, if I make a plan, my brain immediately wants to rebel. It just goes into this reading slump where it's like, "Okay, now I don't want to read any of them."

Because tell me why I picked up some of the most beautiful books, and it felt like such a chore to get through them. There was nothing wrong with the books. My brain was just like, "No. You made a plan. You forced me. Now I'm not going to read them." In my head, I thought it would take me maybe two or three days to finish each book. Instead, it was taking me weeks to get through a single one, even though I was enjoying it.

I think my brain just likes randomly picking books from my reading list instead of following a plan of what I should read. I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but it definitely happens to me. The moment I make a reading plan, my brain just goes, "Nope."

But yeah, I still achieved some of my goals, so that was nice. I think I'm just going to keep the rest of the books from this month's plan on my main reading list and pick them up whenever I feel like it instead of forcing myself. I also think this weird rebellion from my brain probably affected some of my reviews. I might have rated a few books lower than they deserved, just because I wasn't in the right headspace while reading them.

But I really enjoyed the whole process. So yeah, tell me if this happens to anyone else?

Is anyone looking to start the Hardest Reading Challenge You’ll Ever Do 3.0 starting in July? I’m getting very excited about it and would love to talk to people about it! I’m in the discord but it’s a bit intimidating.

Looking to get people's thoughts on something regarding adding books to Pagebound. The directions are: "We only accept book entries. We do not accept box sets, fanfiction, bonus chapters, webtoons, scripts, single short stories/essays, magazines, etc. These entries will be deleted by the Librarians."

Regarding magazines - I'm interpreting this to mean magazines like Vogue, Time, Real Simple, etc. However, I subscribe to a lot of fiction magazines like Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Deadlands, Elastic, etc. In my view, these should be okay to add because they are essentially short story collections, but am curious to know what other people think?