The round up // June 2016

I swear June just started yesterday and now it’s already basically over and I don’t even know where the year has gone. A bunch of crap happened in June:

• The disaster that was moving house. A torrential downpour decided to happen on the weekend I was supposed to move – it went for the entire weekend and, naturally, my suburb got the most rain in my area. Because of course it did. It made moving impossible so we had to ask the real estate if we could move the following weekend. There was a whole thing where the real estate were jerks, but in the end we were allowed to stay for a few days past the end of our lease. Basically every single thing with the move went wrong, but I’m mostly settled in now and procrastinating on completing the shitty unpacking process.
• One bonus is that my new house is a 25 minute walk from the train station (instead of the five minutes from my old house). I’ve made a deal with myself to walk to the station every morning unless it’s raining rather than catching the bus and I’ve stuck to it. I walked home for the first couple of nights, but it’s winter here and dark at that time, which means it’s a bit scary so I catch the bus home, but in summer I’ll be walking for sure.
• I now live alone. So far my favourite part of living alone is that every unusual sound is someone trying to break in to my house to maybe kill me in my sleep. It’s been fun.
• My birthday came and went. I’m 31 now and boy do I feel it. Aging is difficult.
• I got my ‘Auto-approved’ badge on NetGalley. This means I’ve been auto-approved (der) by at least four publishers, so I don’t have to press request and wait for them to approve/deny book requests now – I’ll get the book right away. I’m very proud of this.

The only plus from the month was getting some new bookcases and unpacking all my books, some of which have been packed up in boxes for years and years and years. I had a fun time alphabetising my books by author (then year of publication if there were multiple books by an author). Here’s a picture (the ones with purple or yellow post-it flags are my unread ones) (there are a lot) (I ran out of purple flags so had to use yellow, I had just enough of those to finish):

I read some good books in June. They were solid, but not ones that I’m likely to recall in years to come. Some reading highlights from June:

• A Robot in the Garden by Deborah Install. I can 100% guarantee that some would call this book cheesy. But I’ll be damned if we don’t all need a cheesy book in our life sometimes. I really liked this – it was sweet on the surface of it, but underneath it asks some big questions about artificial intelligence and how we should define being alive.
• Before the Fall by Noah Hawley. This guy can write. The book wasn’t perfect by any means, but he knows how to string together a good sentence. [My review]

I also read The Fireman by Joe Hill (just like everyone else did/is planning to do), Magruder’s Curiosity Cabinet by H.P. Wood (like The Night Circus plus fleas, minus the magic), and Should You Judge This Book by Its Cover?: 100 Fresh Takes on Familiar Sayings and Quotations by Julian Baggini (I talked about it briefly here). All good books, all four stars, but nothing mind blowing.

July will be over in like, two days (such is the apparent speed/blurring of time) so I don’t have too much planned. Aside from some further unpacking procrastination, the only other thing I have planned is participating in the next 24 in 48 readathon, which is happening over the weekend of the 23rd/24th July. You can sign up for it here. It’ll be lots of fun and a good excuse for staying in and reading aaaaaaalllll weekend.

Did you read anything good in June? Any big plans for July?