November Book Haul!

This month I was able to pick up some popular (mainly fantasy) books that coincidentally are all quite red! It has been a while since I have stepped into a bookstore and this month, I went in not one but two bookshops! #heaven

Here are the books I picked up this month:


Scythe by Neal Shusterman 

I have heard quite a bit about this book. It follows a world where everything has been cured and the only way that people can be killed is by the hand of a scythe. Scythes are members of society that are chosen to have this duty. They are told to 'glean' humans according to the statistics of how people died and the demographics of people that died before death was stopped. Everyone fears the scythes but they leave them to 'glean' as it is deemed necessary to maintain the size of the population. In this book we follow two characters who are chosen to potentially be scythes.

I have already started reading this book and I am really enjoying it so far. It is quite unique from what I have read in the past and I'm finding the writing style fast-paced which is perfect for me.

4 Spiritual Ways To Improve Your Mental Health

When it comes to your mental health, you may feel like you’ve got self-care covered. And yes, self-care is keeping your body clean and healthy, and it may be applying a facemask some days. However, embracing the spiritual could bring you one step closer to finding your true and happy self, and if that’s true, then we think it’s worth a try. Even if you currently think it’s all made-up fluffy stuff, it has actually been linked to good mental health and a strong sense of self. So, here are four ways to give it a go.


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1. Meditation

Meditation is really good for your mental health, even if you think that it sounds a bit cliche. Taking some time out to think about what has really happened in your day - what you’re happy about, and what you want to change going into tomorrow - will keep you in touch with your inner sense of self, and focused upon the little goals that you’ve set for yourself. Headspace is a useful app if you need a bit of guidance.

2. Get a Psychic Reading

I know what you’re thinking, what does this have to do with my mental health? Well, keep reading. This is another way for you to secure your sense of self, as you’ll be able to hear what your future may hold, and what the implications of your past are. Whether you believe in it or not, a Psychic Reading will help you to think about the future, and we can’t see anything wrong with that. Especially if they tell you that you’re going to win the lottery, and buy a private yacht.

3. Exercise kindness

This one doesn’t require too much spirituality, but it is deeply important to the Buddhist tradition. Exercising kindness will not only improve the lives of those around you, but you’ll see it come back into your life as well. Though we can all be a bit worried about interacting with strangers, helping someone you don’t know will make you feel great afterwards, too. Win-win, good karma all around.


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4. Reconnect with your body

Reconnecting with your body, and giving it all of the nutrients and love that it needs, will give you a more positive all-round aura, and affect your life in more ways than you can imagine. Ditch the alcohol in favour of something that your body really needs, and remember that it really is something worth looking after. It’s yours, after all, and you’ll be navigating the world in it for the foreseeable future. So give your body some love!

So, there are four things that you can do to utilise spirituality, and improve your mental health in the process. Recovery from any mental health issue is ongoing, and always a process of coming back to yourself. Trying some of these things could help you to not only spend more time on yourself, but also strengthen your connection to others. So give them a try, we’re rooting for you!


This is a collaborative post and it may contain some affiliate links

Mastering Your Own Mental Health

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As time goes one, it is becoming less and less of a stigmatized issue to talk about mental health.
That is just as well, as looking after your own mental health is always going to be hugely important, and it’s something that we all need to think about doing. It’s not just for those with apparent or obvious mental health signs who need to focus on this - everyone can benefit from ensuring that they are looking after their mental health in the right way. In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the ways in which you can understand and improve your own mental health. As long as you do that, you should find that you are much more able to be happy and well in the long run.

Keep An Eye On Your Vices

We all have one or two vices, and in a sense they are necessary to ensure that we don’t lose our sense of ourselves. More often than not, these vices are there to help us with difficult times and to keep stress down. But as a rule, they tend to be things which are not so healthy for us, and which we would therefore be well advised to keep a close eye on. If you have vices, you should make sure to do this, and not to allow yourself to fall prey to them too much, as that could easily lead to further problems. You might well like a drink, and as the answers to a wine quote quiz will testify, that can help in the short-term - but you should make sure not to get too carried away with that, or any other vice.


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Manage Your Stress

But if you are to do that, you might need to find a more productive means of keeping on top of your stress, and that is something that you should think about as well. There are fortunately many ways of managing your stress, and as long as you are aware of some of them you will find that you can easily make it easier for yourself to manage whatever stress may arise for you. Deep breathing and meditation exercises are generally advisable here, as are methods for keeping the stress down in the first place, such as not over-working. Do this, and it will have a profoundly positive effect on your life in the long run.

Look After Your Body

It is enormously helpful if you are able to look after your body as well as the mind, as actually the two are very much closely related, and likely to be affecting each other. If you are looking after the body, then you can be sure that you are also looking after the mind, so this is definitely something to consider. You might even be surprised at what a difference it can make in the long run. The more you look after your body, the better a state your mind will be in.


This is a collaborative post and it may contain some affiliate links

Spookathon TBR!

Spookathon is a week long readathon hosted by Lala from BooksandLala. It begins today, October 15 and runs until 21st October. The aim is to read anything that is spooky. There are optional challenges and you can do as many as you like. I don't expect to read all of these books but I thought it would be fun to create a TBR anyway!

Why You Should Never Give Up Learning As An Adult

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You may have thought your learning days were behind you. The minute you walked through those school gates as a teenager, celebrating the possibility that you may never have to look another teacher in the face again, you probably thought you had learned all you need to. Well, from a textbook anyway. We all learn something new about ourselves every day; it's all part of growing up and learning from experiences, so we are never too far removed from learning something.

But it's still important to pursue learning, whether that's going back to school, browsing the internet to expand our knowledge beyond the info we gain from our friends on Facebook, or picking up a book or two from the local store or library. Despite the everyday learning we all go through as adults - there are reasons why you should make the effort to tantalise your brain.

By continuing learning, you will…

Cookies, Book Content and Friends

Guest Post!

Today we have a guest post from Melissa! Trigger warnings for death and suicide. --

I am an avid reader. I don’t remember a time in my life where I didn’t have a book in my hand. Growing up, the library was my favorite place to be, and then when I managed to save some money, I traded the library for bookstores. To this day, I can’t walk past a bookstore without going in, looking at all the books I want to read, and wondering where my books (once I finish writing them!) would end up.

But throughout all the books that I’ve read, there are some that just stuck out and changed my life. Here are four of them:

Summer Biannual Bibliothon TBR

Hello! Today I am here with a readathon TBR! I am participating in a few readathons this month and the first one is the Summer Biannual Bibliothon which runs from 14^th July to 20^thJuly. This readathon comprises of optional reading challenges, video challenges and Instagram challenges. Here is my TBR for the reading challenges:

1.       Group book:

So the first challenge is to read the group book which is The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw. This is a book that I was planning on reading at some point. In this book, three witches are said to come back every year and lure boys to die by drowning.

2.       Choose from someone else’s TBR:

The second challenge is to read a book from someone else’s TBR. I researched the TBRs of booktubers, book bloggers and bookstagrammers and decided to read Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire which is on Little Red Reader’s TBR. This is a short book that I have wanted to read for a while. This book series follows children who have come back from other worlds such as Narnia.

Lucy's Reading Diary: July 10th

Hi everyone! I absolutely love watching reading vlogs and I wondered if I could translate this to writing somehow. I came up with the idea of an ongoing blog diary, writing about my thoughts whilst reading and my progress. I hope that you like these posts!

I started reading Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and I was really enjoying it. You can definitely tell that the author has a scientific background but I actually like the technical speak. It isn’t too overwhelming and as someone who enjoyed studying biology, it is a welcome return and it is about dinosaurs which I find interesting too! I won’t write too much about the book because I will be describing it in my review. I have been making slow progress. I find that when I start a book, I am really excited about it but if I don’t get too much time to read my excitement wanes and it takes me longer to read.

Yesterday I felt like reading but I didn’t want to read Jurassic Park. I thought of a few books that I would like to read and posted a poll on Twitter. I ended up picking up Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. I’m not very far into it but so far I really like it. It is a fast-paced mystery (although at the moment I feel like I have figured out the mystery but we’ll see). This book also has a scientific element but how heavy that is, I cannot yet say.

What are you currently reading?

The Fifty Bookish Questions Tag

I am really enjoying doing book tags so whilst I am making slow progress in my current read I thought I would do another one! Here is the fifty bookish questions tag:

1. What was the last book you read?
I’m currently reading Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. The last book I finished was Fairy Tail volume 1.

2. Was it a good one?
Yes.

3. What made it good?
Comedy, fantasy, magic.