June Wrap-Up

June Overview

Wow, that was a crazy month. I spent the first week of June in Louisville, Kentucky for my second-to-last grad school residency. Guys, if I don’t drop dead from exhaustion, I’ll finish grad school in November. That’s hard for me to believe. It’s been a long two years.

Louisville, KY from my hotel.

As soon as I got home from Kentucky, I got bronchitis. This was coughing-all-night-drowning-in-mucus-and-whining-constantly bronchitis. 

It was a bad time to get sick because I had a giant school assignment due at the end of the month. I spent the middle of June doing frantic research while drinking insane amounts of caffeine to counteract the brain-fogging powers of cough medicine. Actually, I felt a lot like this dude. (I probably looked like him, too.)

Anyway, the bronchitis went away, and I did get my giant assignment done on time. I’m not exaggerating when I say “giant.” The thing was 238 pages. Somewhere during all of this madness, my assistantship was renewed for the final time. I get to keep editing a literary journal until the end of the year. Then I have to find something else to do with my life.

Oh, I have one interesting non-school-related thing to tell you. A robin built a nest in the tree outside my bedroom window. I got to watch the baby birds grow up. I even got to see them leave the nest and flap around awkwardly. I tried to take pictures of them without incurring the wrath of the mother bird, but my camera doesn’t zoom in that far. This is the best I could do.

If you can’t tell what it is (my photography skills are awesome, right?), it’s a baby bird sitting on the rim of the nest. This picture was taken during the awkward-flapping stage of life. The babies are all grown up now.

Books I Read

So, bad news. I only read 5 books in June, and I didn’t completely love any of them. Actually, I kind of hated two of them. Here’s what I read:

Beautiful You – Chuck Palahniuk

Walk on Earth a Stranger – Rae Carson

Charm & Strange – Stephanie Kuehn

The Thing about Jellyfish – Ali Benjamin

The Stepford Wives – Ira Levin

I made a tiny bit of progress on my challenges. Click here to see how I’m doing.

Best Book Of June

I usually pick three favorites each month, but June was a disaster in the reading department. This book was my favorite. I learned so many terrifying things about jellyfish.

Most-Viewed Reviews

1. Stuck in Neutral – Terry Trueman

2. Walk on Earth a Stranger – Rae Carson

3. Reality Boy – A.S. King

Most-Viewed Non-Reviews

1. Top Ten Tuesday: Words That Make Me Buy Books

2. Top Ten Tuesday: Reasons I Love Book Blogging

3. Discussion: I’m A Series Hater

Tentative July TBR

If I don’t fail as hard in July as I did in June, here are a few books that I know I’ll be reading. Let me know if you’ve read any of these.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock – Matthew Quick

All the Light We Cannot See – Anthony Doerr

I’ll Meet You There – Heather Demetrios

All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque

An Exceptionally Brief Mid-Year Update

I don’t use star-ratings on my blog, but I know that some people are curious about how I rate books. Hopefully this screenshot will satisfy your curiosity. These are all the books I’ve read so far this year.

All The Things

All The Things (AKA my TBR Pile) = 27 books. The stack is under 30 books! I’ve now been on my book-acquiring ban for six months. The ban has not been entirely effective. (Because: cheap books happened.) However, I am reading faster than I’m getting new books, so the TBR pile has been going down all year.

I’m currently reading Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick.

I hope you had a great June!