Category Archives: Reading

Happy New Year folks! Welcome to the January YA SFF Winter Blog Hop, where we’re talking fresh starts, new beginnings and setting goals for the year ahead. Plus, there’s another fabulous giveaway to enter and a whole bunch of new freebies and gifts to discover!

Keep reading to find out how I spring clean my TBR, grab your free novella, and enter our big giveaway…

January Blog Hop Stops

1. New Young Adult Books: What’s Coming in 2022? 
2. Resolutions and Reviews
3. New Year’s in the Slytherin Common Room: Celebrating the Most Ruthless & Ambitious Characters in YA
4. 2022 LGBT Books We Are Excited For
5. New Beginnings No Matter the Season
6. New Year, New Reading Goals!
7. Bookish New Year Resolutions
8. Non-Resolutions (Unless You Were Born in January)
9. Eos: Goddess of New Beginnings
10. Spring Clean Your TBR Pile (YOU ARE HERE)
11. My 2022 Reading Journal
12. The Best Fantasy & Sci-Fi Debut Books (YA & Adult)
13. YA characters who made their dreams come true

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How to Spring Clean Your To-Be-Read Pile

Christmas has come and gone and the decorations are down, it’s time to give your house a spring clean for the New Year. While you’re tidying your space and decluttering your belongings, don’t forget your most important possessions – your books!

Here are my tips for spring cleaning your bookshelves for 2022:

Physical Books – Read

Go through your collection of read books and divide them into three piles:

• books you want to keep (to read again or just for display),
• books you want to lend/gift to friends who’ll enjoy them,
• books to donate.

Give your bookshelves a clean and re-shelve your keep pile, add some bookish scented candles, character art prints and figurines, or any other fun bits of book merch you own – maybe a string of fairy lights or a couple of potted plants (real or fake, no judgement here!) – and take a few photos for your bookstagram account, to commemorate the occasion.

Physical Books – To Be Read

Now, do the same with your unread books. Reread the blurbs and check out some reviews on Amazon or Goodreads to decide whether you’re still interested in reading them, then split them into three piles. You could even take photos of your donation pile and offer them to your social media followers for the cost of post and packaging. Or drop them off at your local charity shop or free library, whatever feels right.

Stack your new physical TBR pile on your bedside table, or buy one of those gorgeous three-tiered storage trolleys in a shade that you love and divide your TBR between the shelves. Dreamy AND organised!

Ebooks

Now the hard work begins! If you’re anything like me, your Kindle will be chock full of unread ebooks, either because you wanted to support the author and preorder their new release, or because the cover or blurb caught your eye but you never got around to starting them. Well, now’s the time to tidy up that cluttered device.

• Go through and remove your read books from the device to save space.
• Sort your unread books by length or alphabetically, whatever works for you, and take a chunk of 10 or so each day until you’ve filtered your whole library. (If you’re around the 1000 mark, then… I’m sorry. Hang in there.)
• Read the blurbs and decide which books you still want to read and which you’re no longer interested in.
• Grab a new notebook or reading planner (I have the perfect thing if you’re looking for one! Click here to buy the Once Upon a Name 2022 reading planner) and jot down the titles of all the books you’re still planning to read.
• Choose a couple of physical books and a couple of ebooks to read each month (depending on your reading speed), or write the titles of all of your TBR on separate slips of paper and put them in a jar to choose from when you’re ready for your next read.
• Or, if you’re a mood reader, add a couple of notes to each book (e.g. fantasy, enemies to lovers, futuristic, found family, etc.) to help you choose something to suit your mood each month.

Your Goodreads TBR

Now that you’ve decluttered your physical and digital TBRs and made notes in your reading planner, tidying up your Goodreads lists should be fairly simple. Add any books you’ve read to your Read list and update your Want To Read list with any new books you got for Christmas. Then go through your Want To Read list and untick any books you’ve decided you no longer want to read.

And that’s it, you’re all done! Well done on spring cleaning your TBR for the New Year.

Now treat yourself to a new book for all your hard work! In fact, I’ve got one here you could have…

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Your January free gift!

Grab your free copy of my novella A Fair Deception here:

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Enter our Mega Giveaway

Click here or on the image to enter and be in with a chance of winning a $30 Amazon gift card: https://kingsumo.com/g/wtnrzh/new-year-new-books-win-an-amazon-gift-card

May the odds be ever in your favour.

Lyndsey

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