It's That Time of the Year Again...A.K.A. The Big Annual Book Haul 2018-19

 Hello sweeties! and Happy New Year again!

Today I'm doing that thing I usually do in January...that is, showcasing my big annual book haul.
Some of you might remember that my birthday is close to Christmas - just 11 days before it. So, as per my usual birthday/Christmas tradition, every year I order a bunch of books from this Italian site that sports a wide selection of books in English as well. And I post the list on here for the world to admire...and wonder why I'm so late on all these books LOL. Well, but NOT so late as I used to be this year. There are SEVEN EIGHT 2018 BOOKS in here, folks!!! SEVEN EIGHT OUT OF FIFTEEN!!! And one has been reissued in the same year. And it's actually eight instead of the original seven, because I won a Twitter giveaway generously offered by Sam @ We Live and Breathe Books, so I included that book in my list as well! Here goes said list, broken down by genres/Reading Rooms...(P.S.: all the books are YA unless otherwise stated).

2018 Wrap-Up: In Which I Congratulate Myself

Hello my beauties!

Welcome to my last post of the year, where I will wrap my 2018 up. This was my first whole year since I started blogging when I scheduled all my posts and all my reading. And...it worked like a charm! I won't lie to you - it wasn't always easy. Some hard work was involved. Planning ahead was the easy part - it's what I'm best at. I ADORE filling Excel spreadsheets with all the things I mean to do. I REVEL in breaking books into page numbers and assign them to each day. I'm the best time manager I know (when housekeeping is not involved, that is). And I took great care not to overload, though most of the times, I realised that setting small goals meant that I not only was able to meet them, but even to double them. Like, I set my sight on reading 40 pages on a day, and I ended up reading 80, so that I ultimately found myself moving my daily goals up and up in my schedule. That's how, in July, I had FOURTEEN posts scheduled all through October, what with having planned ahead for Halloween (and I only lacked 3 of them to cover ALL the time slot in the middle).

Still, as I said, it was hard work. All through the year, all through the hottest summer in ages (a.k.a. the season when I was used to call it quits, blog-wise), I strove for productivity and consistency. I had set up a goal of one post a week, and even that was able to stimulate me to do better...to the extent that I managed to end the year with a total of FIFTY-NINE posts - which, in my situation, is a MASSIVE achievement. Now, I can't promise I will be able to replicate my success next year. You never know what kind of lemons life's going to give you. It's not always possible to make lemonade out of them. But I've proved something to myself, and now I know that, in normal conditions, it CAN be done. So, I'm ending this year on a proud and happy note, and I hope I can sustain it for the longest time.

Pt. 1: This Year in Blogging

As of today, I've been blogging for 6 years and a couple of months 😃.

This is what happened on Offbeat YA during the year, broken down by number of posts, events I took part in, books I reviewed, authors I interacted with and discussion posts I wrote...

Adrienne Maria Vrettos: "Burnout"

Title: Burnout [on Amazon | on Goodreads]
Series: None
Author: Adrienne Maria Vrettos [Site | Goodreads]
Genres: Thriller/Mystery, Contemporary
Year: 2011
Age: 12+
Stars: 3/5
Pros: Honest depiction of an imbalanced friendship. Realistic main character.
Cons: Lacks a strong emotional punch. Some events are a bit far-fetched.
WARNING! Alcohol abuse, rape intent, self-image problems.
Will appeal to: Those who have had at least a toxic friend in their life, or one who didn't love them as much as they did.

Blurb: On the day after Halloween, Nan wakes up in a subway car. She’s missing a whole day from her life. And she’s wearing skeleton makeup and a too-small Halloween costume that she doesn’t remember putting on. Nan is not supposed to wake up in places like this anymore. She’s different now, so far from that dangerously drunk girl who hit bottom in the Nanapocalypse. She needs to find out what happened to her, and fast. As she tries to put together the pieces of the last twenty-four hours, she flashes back to memories of her previous life. But she would never go back to her old friends and her old ways. Would she? The deeper Nan digs, the more disturbing things get. This time, she may have gone one step too far. This time, she may be a walking ghost. (Amazon excerpt)

Review: Before I bought this one, going by the last line of the blurb above and the two-line prologue on Amazon, I inferred it told the story of a dead character recalling/investigating her demise, so I was excited. It turned out that it wasn't the case, so I don't really get what the whole "ghost" reference was about (OK, I sort of understand the metaphor, but it sounded much more like a literal description to me). Then again, I don't regret reading this book, even if under false pretenses. I just meant to tell you - don't get fooled like I did...read this for the right reasons.

THE WRONG SIDE OF UNREQUITED

I shelved this book as Mystery/Thriller, and a mystery it is - with the main lead Nan desperate to uncover what she did the previous night, and more than anything, what happened to her best friend Seemy. But at its core, Burnout is a contemporary of the dark variety (albeit not at all as dark as it might have been) - a story of bad choices and the places they take you, and even more than that, a story about the length we go for a friend even when they don't love us as much as we do (or precisely because they don't). This was the aspect that resonated with me the most: while I've never been in a toxic friendship of the "bad influence" variety (and I wouldn't, because I'm one of the less influenceable people I know), I have been in a sort of unrequited friendship for a long while - until the friend in question set to size me down once and for all, and since I couldn't cope with that, we ultimately split. If you've ever loved a friend more than they did, and you've ever been aware of it (and hurt because of it), Vrettos captures this feeling perfectly. Then again, in a short book like this (less than 200 pages), emotions gets somehow constricted and lose some of the impact they could make...more of this in the next paragraphs. [...]