 Welcome back to my channel and welcome to my Reading Rush TBR for Reading Rush 2020. I am so excited for this because not only is the Reading Rush a great readathon that is put on by some amazing booktubers, which of course I will have the announcement video down below in the description so if you want to participate, go right on ahead. But the Reading Rush is also very special for me because filming the Reading Rush readathon was like the third video I ever posted on my channel so that's kind of how I mark like a year on booktube and so because of that well I'm about to celebrate one year on booktube and I am very excited for that because it's kind of hard to believe that I've been on booktube for a year especially since you know it's my first year so it's I've been figuring so many things out like what kind of videos I want to post and like kind of how I fit into a booktube community and things like that and I still don't have it all sorted out not at all like I am not posting as many videos as I was hoping I would I'm definitely hoping to I'm making plans to change that and to post more videos and post more fun videos and more like a single book review like I've done so many readathons in this past year and just like challenging myself with my reading but I'm really excited to just kind of get back into a normal schedule and read books normally again almost but yeah so reading rush is very special to me because it's basically going to be how I mark how many years I've been on booktube so that being said I'm gonna go ahead into the TBR for this year so I'm really excited for the challenges this year and I've decided that I'm going to only read three books because I've noticed as my trend with with readathons is that I always wait until like the last possible few days or few hours and I'm like oh I can totally finish it I can totally read five books in four days and like three of the books are over 400 pages I can totally do that for some reason I think I can pull this off so this time I'm gonna take it a little bit easier on myself and only read three books but it's gonna be interesting because of what those books are so I'm gonna get right into the challenges and finally tell you what I'm gonna be reading for this one week in July yeah first challenge is to read a book with a cover that has the color of your birthstone and they put like links in their description on where to figure out what month is what birthstone so that you can look it up if you don't know I as a young child was obsessed with gems and crystals and rocks and just geology in general so I know like I used to have all the months memorized but I will never forget that May is an emerald and my birthday is in May so I have to read a book with a green cover and for that I have chosen the gilded wolves I chose this book because it's one that kind of captured my interest a while back but I didn't think I was gonna get to it this year just because of the genres I've been choosing for the next few months I decided that since the cover is mostly a deep kind of emerald green I thought it would work well and it will be a book that I'm able to double up with other challenges and yes this is a read-a-thon where you can double up on the challenges you can even triple up quadruple up you can even do one book for all seven challenges anyway so I have chosen the gilded wolves for this first challenge second challenge is to read a book with the titles starting with the word the the I know like the way they explained it was so good cuz I was like oh my word you know turn around there are so many books on your shelf let's start with the but it's like depending on the kind of books you read and like like how old your books are that's not so guaranteed as you thought so for this challenge I decided to go with the Secret Garden by Francis Hogsden Hogsden Burnett the thing about the Secret Garden is that I started reading in middle school for a classics club and I DNF'd it because I didn't like the main character and I was just kind of getting bored of the book and I thought this movie kind of slowly but I was like you know what July is my month of reading classics because I use I used to read a lot of classics and I used to read a lot of like older books but I haven't done that so much recently so I decided to throw in a month to kind of catch up a little more on the classics that I have been wanting to read and just haven't so I decided that I'm gonna give the Secret Garden another chance and this is gonna be really funny and I'll explain why in a couple of challenges so moving on to the third challenge and this is to read a book inspired by a movie or an adaptation that you've already seen so it's the idea that you've watched a movie or an adaptation of something you have not yet read you can go ahead and just watch a whole new movie and then read a whole new book or it can be something that you have seen before and been like oh yeah that has a book and I haven't read that so I was pondering this for a while cuz I was thinking I was like oh there are a couple movies that I've seen that I haven't read the book and I wanted to but they all ended up being super long but funny story I was at my fiance's house and his siblings were like let's watch The Princess Bride and I was like yeah sure I like that movie and I was like oh my word the Princess Bride it's a movie I've seen before I'm about to rewatch it and I haven't read the book so that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna read The Princess Bride because I've seen it before and I just watched it again so I'm gonna read the book fourth challenge is read the first book you touch they had a lot of fun coming up with physical challenges and see the thing is is that with the gilded wolves and with The Princess Bride I'm probably gonna be reading those as audiobooks and I wanted the first book that I touched to be one of the books on my TBR just so that I can overlap it better and the only physical book I write have have with me right now is a secret garden so first book I touch from my TBR is this one so now it counts for two challenges this is where it starts to get fun because challenge five read a book outside of the house secret garden it takes place outside of the house so makes sense to read it outside I'll probably end up reading it in my tree or in my fiance's backyard but and also just with audiobooks I love listening to those when cleaning my room or doing chores or you know just kind of being at home so I can't rely that I will always remember to only listen to those out of the house like when I'm driving or when I'm working so I thought this was the safest bet to go challenge number six a genre you want to read more of and as I said earlier on this video I want to read more of classics because it's been a while since I've read classics for challenges which is more than half of the challenges I am reading this book this book that I DNF'd in middle school for a club that's gonna be very interesting I'm essentially going to force myself to finish reading this book no matter what because so much of this read-a-thon is going to hinge on this and I mean like since middle school I've bought a pretty cover of it so like hopefully that'll be more motivating also I've grown up and matured more so hopefully that will also be more motivating and then the last challenge the seventh challenge is to read a book that takes place on a different continent than where you are from or you know where you live so I am American I live in North America I'm United States of America in and so I was obviously I can't read something that was set in the North America and I'm totally cool with that initially I really wanted to read a book in either South America Asia or Africa because I haven't read too many books from those recently I've had I've read more books set in Asia and Africa but still not as much as I want to or should be and I really haven't read anything from South America however because I am trying to limit myself with these three books I am going to do a book that is technically set in Europe it is in Paris and that is the Gilded Wolves yeah if the thing is is that I right now I have that down as for this challenge because it does take place in Europe and I've only ever visited Europe I haven't lived there but if you know like a couple days pass and I've read all three of those books and I still have time to read another book for this read-a-thon I would really love to read like a song of race and ruins the blossom and the firefly was another one I was really interested in or there was even a third one written in the stars those were three books song of race and ruins was based on like African mythology and kind of takes place in Africa the blossom and the firefly is about Japan in 1945 it's a love story in Japan and then written in the stars is a girl whose parents sent her back to Pakistan and like all those books sounded really interesting to me but because I wanted to make sure I could complete the read-a-thon I didn't go with them but like I said if I complete the read-a-thon and I still have time left I would love to read one of those in place of the Gilded Wolves for the last challenge just because I don't want to read more European books and just kind of push these other ones to the side so I do recognize that and I and like again with everything happening there's been this whole kind of movement of decolonizing your bookshelf and that is something that I kind of turned around and been like yeah I I need to do a better job of that I definitely have fallen into the easy out oh just finding whatever's popular oh the all these like white authors so that is something that I am being more cautious of moving forward and I would really love to film a haul or film a video about the books I've chosen to help decolonize my bookshelf I also haven't like gone through looked at every single book and then been like okay who's the author where are they from what's their nationality what's their background I haven't done that because that's again something I haven't paid attention to because I choose a book based on its summary not by its author I will fully admit that and I will recognize that wrong in my life and in my shelves so if you guys want to see that video that is something I have been wanting to do and I and like the thing is too is that my bookshelves are pretty small because I just I did not use to buy books and I've talked about this in previous videos that I did not buy books because I checked books out from the library or I listened to audiobooks through apps connected to my library so it's not that I haven't read books by non-white authors but it's that I'm not buying them and I think that in order to support them better if I enjoy the book I should buy it so that's definitely what I'm gonna be going through and doing in the next couple months or at least trying to so yeah so those are the seven challenges and those are the three books that I decided to read for these challenges again so much of it hinges on this sucker so we'll see if I can actually get through it this time I really hope I do and like I said July is my month to read classics so I will be reading other classics early on in the month and that will be a separate video but yeah I know if you guys are also participating in the reading rush comment down below letting me know if you're posting videos to do their video challenges or you're doing your Instagram challenges leave all that good information down below so I can like follow you subscribe to you and we can kind of support each other through this readathon because it's so much fun so yeah feel free to break comment click the subscribe button if you like this video and you want to keep up with my reading rush journey or any of my other journeys talking about different genres until the end of the year next year I probably will not be doing something like this because I found it to be very limiting and that was good because it motivated me to read almost all the books on my shelves like I've read so many books on my shelf I just found it to be very limiting and kind of been like oh I'm not reading all the books that I want to read because I don't own all of them so yeah anyway with that I'm gonna stop blabbering on about non-related content and wish you guys a happy reading and a happy reading rush