I group these two months together merely because I took a picture of both month’s worth of books (on account of my YouTube video being late). So that’s how lazy I am. I read some great books towards the end of 2019 and I’m very excited to share them with you.

This was not such a successful month of reading but there was one saving grace in the bunch, and thank goodness because it was the longest.

I’m still catching up with my reviews so please forgive me if they are a little more brief than normal. There were some great books this month that made their way into my top books of the year, which you can read about here.

August was a very successful month; I read a lot (thank you, summer hols), and what I did read was either interesting or enjoyable or both (with minor exceptions).

Right so this post is about six months late… but I read some pretty good books in July. Forgive me if the reviews are a little on the short side; I read lots of them by the pool and didn’t take as many notes as I usually would.

I couldn’t let January slip by without paying homage to some of my favourite books of 2019. I started writing my list in October and by the end of the year I had landed on an even twenty books, which I thought was a sign I shouldn’t try and cut any of them from the list. Okay fine, it’s twenty-two - I added two more since I started writing this post. I read around a hundred books last year which is more than I’ve ever read in previous years, (though I would say I must have read at least that equivalent in criticism during my uni years), and I think that is partially down to the challenge I set myself of clearing the piles of books that sat on my unread shelves.

Absolutely ages ago, I asked on Instagram for questions regarding reading and books. This may seem an unusual topic to dedicate a whole Q&A to on here, but I actually get tons of questions about my reading habits, so I wanted to collate everything into one post for those of you who might be interested. As many of you asked similar questions, I won't be naming anyone in this post, for which I hope you can forgive me.

It's that time again when I do a round up of the books I read in a particular month, this one being June. As usual I'm running late with the reviews but we've got there in the end. Because I was finishing up various books from May at the beginning of the month once again we did *not* hit my targets, but here goes.

It’s been a wee while but I’m back again with a round-up of the books I read in May, and you can watch the accompanying video here. This month I didn’t get round to reading as much as I wanted, mostly because I got stuck in a rut with two of the longer titles listed below that I really wasn’t enjoying; I need to get better at giving up on the books I don’t like. Anyway, there were at least a couple of hits which I can’t say for every month, so it's not all bad.

A round up of the last few month’s reads, and there are some real wins…

I thought instead of doing singular reviews of just some books I read every month on here, I would try doing one big post to accompany this week’s book video, that would go into more depth on the best and the worst and give synopses of some of the others so you can easily locate them if you need in the future. Let me know which way you prefer.

Whilst I do love to read, one of my favourite things to do which I don't often talk about at length on here or on my channel, is binge-watch a good TV show. I go through phases of watching lots of films, but I'm almost always on the hunt for a new series to dive into.

Instead of individual reviews to go with this book video, I thought that it would be the perfect time to do a round-up of the best books I read this year. I'm so nitpicky with books these days that I figured it'd be a nice thing to point to those ones that I absolutely loved (or at least found intriguing) and would wholeheartedly recommend. It’s also that time of the year that I suspect a few more of us are curling up on the sofa to dip our noses into new worlds, so if you do need a little inspo this is for you.

The title of this post is a little misleading because this is not really going to be a ‘how to’ so much as a few observations I made whilst writing mine. I have already (purposefully) lost much of the experience to the mists of memory and time, but I hope that some of you writing undergraduate dissertations this year might find a little comfort in it. I’m not going to write too much about the content of it because for some strange reason I still feel strangely protective over it and I don’t know if I’m ready to open it up to the world (how ridiculous am I), plus I think it’s so specific it wouldn’t be wholly useful to dwell on it too long.

Anyone that knows me knows that I have an unhealthy obsession with ramen. For the uninitiated, ramen is a Japanese dish of noodles and various different toppings in a broth of some kind: meat, fish, or vegetable. In the last few years especially – though I distinctly remember having ramen as a kid around town, too -  this dish has become a bit of a food fashion in London and lots of new places have popped up around the city to try.