 Sean McGuire, I say this every time I talk about this book, is a genius. She is a genius. No one can top her. All other others. People call me over the top, but lately I prefer being a bottom. Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. I hope you are well. My name is Megan if you are new here. Today we're doing a really exciting video. We are doing my quarterly wrap-ups. I do quarterly wrap-ups on this channel. I don't tend to do monthly wrap-ups but I'm thinking of bringing them back. I'm thinking of doing a bit of a shake-up. I just don't typically do them because I don't typically watch them. That's why I don't know if anyone would be interested in watching me do a monthly wrap-up. But I'm kind of feeling like bringing them back. So let me know. In this video we go through all my reading stats for the past three months. We talk about my most disappointing, my most surprising, my worst and my top three from those three months. So all the physical books I read in those three months are in these two stacks here. I read a total of 34 books these past three months which is one less than I read the other quarter, the quarter previous. I'll link the video below where I go through the quarter previous. That doesn't surprise me actually. I've been a bit slumpy the past two months so I'm glad it was not drastically below what it had been. So of those 34 books 13 were in April, 10 were in May and 11 were in June. I also read 9,253 pages and listened to 63 hours of audiobook. I don't count the pages that I read via audiobook in the page count. I read 3,495 pages in April, 3,204 pages in May and 2,554 pages in June. So I actually thought I had a better reading month in June and read some long books but apparently not. Delusion. Convince yourself. But to be fair I did listen to 29 hours of audiobook in June and only two hours in May. So that's pretty why there's a big difference there and I listened to 32 hours in April. So still more hours in April. April was a great reading month. If we get into genres this was actually quite surprising for me this month. I read 12 fantasy books which always seem to be pretty high for me. I read a lot of fantasy books. I don't know if I'd call it my favourite genre. I don't think I would but I think that they're something that I recommended a lot. I watch a lot of booktubers that read a lot of fantasy. Then my next popular one was Contemporary with Six which was really surprising. I'm not really usually a big fan of contemporary books but I think I just read some YA contemporary books to like get me through my slumps. That's probably why that's there. Then it was Nonfiction with Five which I'm really happy with. I always say I want to read at least one nonfiction book a month and so the fact that I've read five I'm really really happy with. Someone's car alarm is going off outside. It's rude. Could you please have quiet in the studio? Quite please. Fucking shut up! Thank you. So now it gets a bit surprising. I read two historical books, two horror books and two thriller books. I thought thriller would be much higher. It was much higher for me last quarter. And then in terms of the ones I read one graphic novel, one magical realism, one mystery, one poetry and one sci-fi. So I would usually say that mystery and thriller is probably my favourite genre now especially murder mysteries. I love old school, a bit of a campy murder mystery. That is definitely my favourite genre I would say but I've read none these past three months which is really sad actually. Hopefully I'll read some more in the next quarter. I've got a lot that I have my eye on. I'm thinking of doing another like reading only murder mysteries for a week video because I need to fit them in somehow and at the moment I'm just not fitting them in. I had a really good reading month in terms of ratings. If we go bottom to top I only read one one star which is pretty good. However I did read two two stars and three two point five stars. That is quite a lot of lowish books. I did some rereads of some old favourites that just didn't work out for me which is sad but they all rated quite low. I then read five three stars. I read four three point five stars. So my kind of like three star range is quite a lot of books that's nine books. I read six four stars five four point five stars and eight five stars. So I'm really happy that over half of my books were four to five star. This quarter I think that's a really really good split. So in terms of audience I read 14 adult and 20 YA. I didn't read any middle grade or children's which I had been doing previously. In both quarters my YA has been higher than my adult. I have a feeling in my next quarter my adult is gonna be a bit higher. I find it easy to read YA because let's be honest YA is easy to read. Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave? Whereas adult is always a bit more of a slog. It's always a bit more hard to get through. It's always a bit more intimidating but looking at my TBR I think I have kind of like gotten rid of a lot of the YA that I've been wanting to read and so I think I'm gonna be reading a lot more adult. Going forward I would like half of my quarters to be more YA than adult and half be more adult than YA. I think that would be a really good split for me personally. So then in terms of author race and this is the first time I've tracked this. I didn't track it as I was going along. I've tracked it retrospectively like looking back on the quarter and so it wasn't something I was aware necessarily like paying attention to the degree I should have been and will be going forward. So I read eight books by Black authors, three by Asian authors, one by Latinx author, 20 by white authors and one where the race is unknown. I didn't want to like prescribe the race to the author if I wasn't 100% sure. I'm not 100% happy with this but it is actually better than I thought it was going to be before I started logging it. Almost a quarter of the books that I've read were by Black authors. Ideally I would like to see that in like the 35 to 40% range. 61% of the books I read were by white authors and I would like to see that at about half or a bit less than half. So I've definitely got improvement to kind of skew those results and look again at like who I'm reading, what I'm reading. I'm not 100% happy with this at all. Like I've got a lot of room for improvement and I'd also like to prioritize reading like Indigenous authors. So that is all the stats I have for you. Like I said I'm pretty happy with how my reading went but July I am going to be pushing, pushing, pushing to have a great, great reading month. Now let's talk about kind of my most disappointing, worst etc. For most disappointing I'm going with Turtles All the Way Down by John Green. This was not it. This was not it. So I had high hope for this book. I was so excited for it. How are you? I'm okay. Yeah. I really loved all of John Green's books when I was like a kid, when I was 13, 12, whatever. And so I had high hopes for this. However, did not deliver at all. It was bad in my opinion. I gave it two stars. It's so unmemorable to me. I read it, I think at the start of April. So it was a bit difficult for me to tell you why I hated it. However, I just found it so one note. The character is so one-dimensional. You're promised that like it's kind of like a murder mystery or a billionaire has gone missing and there's this cash prize and so she becomes friends, the protagonist becomes friends with the son in order to try and be the one who figures it out. However, it was not that. That was like the first 20 to 30 pages and then it's just like this boring ass romance between these two characters. I was just like, oh, give me the tea. Give me the drama. I was promised drama and it was not delivered. I don't know because of this if I'm going to read any YA that John Green puts out in the future. For me, I think he would be amazing at writing a adult. I would love a new adult or an adult, but from him, I think that would be great. I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon. I think that he's just stagnated in YA and I think he needs to push himself out the box and write something that's a bit scary for him to write in order to really produce something great. This was just bad. It was just bad and I don't recommend it at all. The only thing that I think made me give it a two star rather than a one star was that the character in this is sometimes spoken about as OCD. I think John Green said it was OCD, but I saw a lot of mirrors in my relationship with health anxiety that I suffered last summer, last year. I didn't know what health anxiety was or even that it was a thing and this character's kind of OCD anxiety is very much based around health and so I thought it was just a really good representation of that. I really helped for representation and a great thing for young people to read and hopefully then it'll be easier for them to recognise the symptoms because obviously when I when I started experiencing health anxiety I had no idea that it was like a thing. I didn't enjoy the aspect of it however it was shite. Get that fire rixito. I'm off. And then for most surprising I don't think I really had any super surprising books this quarter. I think all the books that I read I had been really hyped up for and I thought they were going to be great. So for this I have gone with Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. I was surprised just how much I love this, how much I love Roxanne Gay's writing, her writing. I'm obsessed. I never thought I would love so dearly and be so obsessed with an essay about Scrabble yet here we are. This is getting weird. My favourite chapter in this I mean it's great all this discussion around gender and race and politics but I just love the chapter about Scrabble. Like I could read that daily. That could be my morning wake up is why it's rooting about Roxanne Gay loving Scrabble. So if you don't know this is by Roxanne Gay and it is about her articulating her difficult relationship with feminism and race and politics as a black woman living in the US. It's so insightful if you're looking for a more personal approach to like the black woman's experience in America rather than something more statistical based because statistical based stuff is important but what I loved about this was just how personal, how insightful, how raw, how honest it was. I love hearing things from people. I think it makes things come alive for me. I thought this collection of essays was incredible. I read it in like a day. It taught me so many things that I didn't know about. It taught me about so many harmful things, so many harmful things in movies and music etc that I wasn't educated on and I just love Roxanne Gay and I can't wait to read all of her stuff. For the worst book I read this quarter is going to be the one book I gave one star and that is Jonas the Beautiful Dead by Eden Maguire. So no one, we don't need to spend long on this because no one will know what the hell this book is. I read it for a rereading my favorite book studio that I did. That's so upsetting. Where it was all the kind of paranormal romance I loved when I was a young girl because of Twilight. Twilight was my literary awakening. I read it when I was eight I think and I just had to read everything that was vaguely Twilight after that because I loved Twilight so dearly. This is about a girl whose boyfriend has died and she stumbles in on him being like exercised or brought back to life by this cult and she kind of becomes their like detective because this is so convoluted, no one cares but there's four kids who have died recently and they're back to get closure and so she's like helping one of the other boys get closure before his year is up and it was just it's so awful. It was laughably awful, it was so bad. I can't believe I loved this series so much and I got everyone to read it. I thought it was amazing. On reread it was terrible just so like badly written. The characters are so bad. They've like everything about it is so bad. Y'all already know how we feel about this show. We move on solid. And so now we talk about my top three of the court so far and considering I barely read any mystery or thriller, two of my top three are the two thrillers that I read. So obviously I love thriller. I just need to be reading more of it. Let's firstly get into the one that I can't hold up which is one by one by Ruth where this is a release that is coming out. I think in October or November I read an arc of it and I'm so happy I did. So this is about a company called Snoop which is basically like a combination of Spotify and Twitter. You follow famous people or your friends and you can see what they're listening to at any time and listen in with them. So like say they're listening to Beyonce or Beyonce is listening to herself. You can listen along at the same time and see what people are listening to and they take like this big corporate holiday to this ski resort and the group is a very isolated group which I love it. That's history. There's the group and there's one woman who's perspective we follow a lot. We follow this woman's perspective and the woman who runs the chalet but the woman who's come on holiday hasn't worked with the company for years and you don't know why initially and I don't think it really is a spoiler. I think it's something that going forward a lot of people will know. Why? She's there with them but I don't want to be the one to spoil it in case no one else speaks about it. People start dying. People start getting and you have to figure out who's doing it and why they're doing it and what's going on. I was so tense throughout reading this book. Ruth Ware is obviously a fucking icon when it comes to thrillers. Honestly. Honestly. Honestly. Truly. Honestly. This is me. Honestly. Truly. Honestly. Honestly. Honestly. I wouldn't lie to you. Truly. Honestly. Truly. Honestly. I can't wait to read all of her stuff. I'm slowly going to make my way through all her backlist because both the ten of the key and one by one which I had two most recent ones, I've given five stars. This is one I think a lot of people are going to love. I think when it comes out towards the end of the year it's going to be like crazy, crazy, crazy. Everyone's going to be talking about it. Everyone's going to be obsessed with it. And then the other thriller which was my favourite this quarter was No Exit by Taylor Adams. I read this in a reading vlog and was obsessed. So this is about a girl called Derby who turns into this rest stop during a snowstorm and finds out that in one of the few cars that is also at the rest stop with her there was a girl locked inside of a cage in the car who has obviously been kidnapped. Again we've got a very closed circle mystery here. Can you tell that that is my favourite thing? So they're all stuck in this rest stop together and this isn't a who done it. I think it's important that you know that going into it. You know who the again much earlier than one by one like you know pretty much straight away almost who not to trust in this. What is so great about this is the suspense. Now when I say I felt tense in one by one I felt 50 a hundred times as tense reading this. This gave me heart palpitations. This gave me chest pain. Oh god my heart hurts. I could not stop thinking about it. It was terrible and yet so wonderful at the same time. What Derby manages to do? What heroics this girl manages to pull off? I am just obsessed. And then my final favourite book this quarter which I'm going to struggle to even explain it vaguely to you was Middle Game by Seanan Maguire. This is about twins called Roger and Dodger who have been created by this crazy alchemist scientist guy and he wants to use them to attain godhood and take over the world. It is about them growing up. You follow them kind of from the start really from birth. It's about them growing up separately. They are separated. They're able to communicate kind of telepathically I guess. It's about them coming together and coming apart throughout their lives. It's about them resisting against the hand they've been dealt and then also taking advantage of the hand they've been dealt. It is impossible to describe. Seanan Maguire I say this every time I talk about this book is a genius. She is a genius. No one can top her. All other authors. People call me over the top but lately I prefer being a bottom. No one does it like Seanan Maguire if we're honest with ourselves. Genius. I love complex clever books and this is it. This is it. So if you're in if you're vibing with that right now my god please go pick Middle Game up. I don't know how I'm going to pick my favourite book of the year. It's going to be very hard but Middle Game was definitely out there. So there we have it. That is my courtly wrap up. I can't believe we're six months through the year. I am very much on course for my goal of 100 books this year. I've read 69 so I'm not going to aim for 120. I don't see why not. I think I can definitely do it. I don't think I'll do 150 though. I don't think I'll reach that but 120 I'd be pretty happy with. So yeah I hope you enjoyed this video. Let me know down below how the quarter has gone so far for you. What your favourite and least favourites are and I will see you very very soon in another video. Bye!