Summer Biannual Bibliothon – Wrap Up

The Summer Biannual Bibliothon 2018 is officially over which means it’s time for me to recap my experience and tell you guys more about the books I read from July 14th to July 20th! If you’re curious about the challenges and books I planned to read to complete them, check out my TBR that I posted last week.

But now, let’s hop into my experience with this readathon, shall we?

This readathon actually started off quite differently for me already because Caro and I were actively discussing our TBRs as we set up them and having Caro choose part of my TBR was also super fun and I can’t wait to hopefully do something similar more often. 🙂

I started this readathon by actually reading the group book which was The Wicked Deep by Shea Earnshaw! It had gotten quite a bit of buzz around the release date and I hadn’t heard anything negative about it so I was obviously really excited to get started and that remained how I felt about this book until the very end!

For my fellow audiobook loving bookworms, give this audiobook a chance! I wasn’t sure how I wanted to consume this story but I saw that Audible had this book and after listening to the 5-minute sampler I was sold on the audiobook and I’m really glad that I did. But because I’m who I am, I ended up listening at a much higher speed than the sampler so I lost some of that atmospheric feeling (which I’m the only one to blame for) I originally experienced but that’s okay. It’s a readathon after all, so I wanted to finish my books as quickly as possible.

Something I do have to critique about this book is the fact that it’s rather predictable. If you’ve read the synopsis or have heard it somewhere before, you kind of know exactly what’s going to happen which takes away from the reading experience for me. There were only so many ways you could’ve taken this story (it’s like when a movie is set on a boat – you know something is going to happen to that boat. That’s just how storytelling goes.) and the author kind of went the more obvious one.

But then again, if you check my rating, this was still a really good book and I thoroughly enjoyed my time listening to it and I would absolutely recommend it to you guys too.

The day I finished The Wicked Deep is also the day I jumped into my next read: The Brightsiders by Jen Wilde! Both Sandra and Caro had read this book earlier and they both absolutely loved it which had me even more excited to start this book.

Unlike probably a good number of bookworms I hadn’t read Wilde’s previous book Queens Of Geek yet so I had no idea what to expect here but I’ve really been enjoying contemporaries so much more this year so I went into this with a pretty positive mindset and without really checking out the synopsis. I loved experiencing the book that way, by the way!

This was such a fun and quick read (I read it in one sitting one afternoon) and has me more excited (and more likely, let’s be real) to give Queens Of Geek a chance too.

I ended up really liking the characters in this story even though I had a quick moment of worry that the story was going to be taken in a direction that would have been quite harmful to the bisexual community but luckily that was never actually where the story went.

Also, if you guys are big fans of some of the more used tropes (think along the lines of ‘there’s only being one bed for characters to share‘ type of popularity – I don’t want to give away too much here, so I’m doing my best to be vague) this might be just what you’re looking for! As soon as I stumbled upon it I was basically at an excitement level of about 100 and so ready for the rest of the book to happen!

One thing to note though, if you haven’t read Queens Of Geek but plan to – you might want to read these in publication order. I’m pretty sure there is a spoiler for the end of QOG in here (if I remember the plot correctly) and that might be something you want to avoid.

Another quick, final thing: this book ended up being closer to a 4.5-star rating rather than a 4-star rating.

When I first set out writing this blog post I had ‘only’ finished the two books mentioned above but I figured since there were still a few days left in the readathon I would get a couple more books read – be it just one more. And I did get about 70 pages into Forest Of A Thousand Lanterns Julie C. Dao (which I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read so far, don’t get me wrong!) but I kind of fell off my reading wagon after three days or so.

Which sucked because I was really hoping to read a lot more during the readathon. But I am feeling really motivated to read more (and I’ve read about 40% of a book already) while I’m ‘babysitting’ my brother (which by the time this post goes up will have already happened) so who knows, maybe I’ll just extend the readathon a little bit for myself! 🙂

Guess we’ll all find out in my wrap-up for July, huh? *hopes for the best*

How about you guys? What are some books you’ve finished recently? And if you’ve read either of the two books I managed to complete for the readathon – what did you think of them? Do you share my feelings? Why or why not? Let’s discuss in the comments down below! 🙂