Summer Book Trek 2016

Well, here I am again after a long break.  My reading has kind of suffered lately, although I have been reading, just not as much as I have in the past.  Mostly this has been because cross stitch has taken over as the preferred hobby in my life (which you can follow my adventures in that field on my other blog if you're interested.)  On top of that, some ongoing health issues and a crazy few months at work and I just lately haven't been reading as much.  Which is something my Goodreads Reading Challenge button delightfully informs me of every time I log in, that I'm 8 books behind schedule so far this year.

Anyway, that brings me to the reason for this post, the Summer Book Trek.  I found this on a Facebook page I follow that features new releases by LDS authors (writers who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints).  Being LDS myself, I love me some LDS writers, and I thought what better way to jump start my reading than with a challenge?  It runs the whole month of July and you earn points for reading and reviewing books written by LDS writers.

The idea is to start by setting up a goal of what books you'll read throughout the challenge.  I'm really horrible at lists like that, because I almost always end up changing them later.  But, I do know there are a few books that I definitely will be getting to in this challenge.

First of, I know I will be reading Across the Ages by RaShelle Workman, The Duke's Undoing by GG Vandagriff, and Super Daisy by Jennifer Griffith.  Why do I know I'll get to those three specifically?  Well, they're all Kindle loans I accepted this week knowing this challenge was coming up, so I have a limited amount of time to read them before they are returned to the owner.

Beyond that, I would like to get to a few books I've had on my to read list for awhile that are by some of my favorite LDS authors.  And since Middle Grade and YA books are kind of my thing, there's a lot of those on the possibility list.  Right now I'm considering the two Spirit Animals books by Brandon Mull, the new Princess in Black books by Shannon Hale, Wings by Aprilynne Pike, Paranormalcy by Kiersten White, Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George, Rise of the Wolf by Jennifer Neilson, or The Passion of Dolssa by Julie Berry.

Of course, I also like sweet clean romances, which fit this challenge to a T, and I have tons of them I've bought for free or close to free for my Kindle that qualify for this challenge.  So I may eventually mix it up a bit.  But right now, I'm excited to get started and see how far I can get!

You can check out my Goodreads shelf I created for this challenge to see what all my options are.  And yeah, there's no way I'm going to read every one of these during July.  There's over 100 options after all.  Guess I'll have plenty of backups for the challenge next year!

If you'd like to join up for yourself, check out the Summer Book Trek page at this link: http://bit.ly/1GZuwPE