Why, hello Sunday night. I sort of decided to take last week off from blogging because the fourth was a holiday for those of us in the States. To be honest, though, it’s been a pretty uneventful week here. Mostly because it’s been extremely hot – which I assume sucks even for people whom unlike me enjoy summer time. Yeah, I really hate summer and have spent most of the last week indoors where there’s air conditioning. Sadly, that didn’t really translate into very much reading. I did finish Legend by Marie Lu, which I enjoyed. I guess that’s something, but I was almost done with the book anyway. There won’t be a review of the book here because I’m not really feeling a review. A part of me would really like to write and post reviews of every book I read, but I find that it’s really difficult for me to write a review of a book that I didn’t have a strong reaction to. Sometimes the reaction that sparks a review is extremely positive, sometimes it’s extremely negative, and other times it’s somewhere in between. So please don’t take my lack of a review as any indication of how good or bad I think the book is. I’ve just gotten to the point where I feel like I shouldn’t push a review of a book if I’m not feeling a review. Attempting to write a review under those kinds of conditions isn’t a satisfactory experience for me and I’m sure it greatly impacts the quality of my reviews anyway. It’s just that sometimes it can feel like I’m “giving up” on the potential for a post when I’m already feeling strapped for post ideas anyway.

The good news is that I do actually have three posts planned for this week, not including this one. As I think I’ve mentioned, I’d ideally like to post here at least three to four times a week, so I’m happy to be making that goal this week. I have a Top Ten Tuesday post scheduled for Tuesday (obviously), a post about tropes in YA literature planned for Wednesday, and historical fiction post planned for Thursday. The latter two posts still require some work on my part, but I’m pretty confident I’ll get them done.

The bad news is that I’m not really feeling this month’s theme of French history. When I decided to do the monthly theme thing this year, I thought it would not only be a fun for me but also make me stand out from all the blogs out there that focus on new releases. I stand by my decision to do themes, but one mistake I think I made was trying to have every month planned out at the beginning of the year. I based my theme ideas on what I already owned and in part on other things going on that month (I chose French history this month in honor of Bastille day, for example) but I’ve found that sometimes I get to the month and I’m in the mood to read something else. Yet, I feel like I’m stuck with the theme I already chose. Maybe I’m just weird/anal like that. So I can see that next year I’m going to have to be more flexible. I want to continue with themes and maybe even have some vague themes in mind, but allow myself some more flexibility in terms of when I tackle which theme. As it is, I’m already thinking I’m going to have to reconsider the theme I chose for August. After all, reading is supposed to be fun. This blog is supposed to be fun. The minute this starts feeling like a chore, I need to re-evaluate what I’m doing.