October 2019 Monthly Wrap Up // Ft. A Long Discussion On My First Month At College And Balancing Blogging With School

So it seems that the end of the year is quickly creeping up upon us, which is very shocking. This moth has been… interesting, for sure. This definitely isn’t going to be my normal wrap up, so stick around if you want a long ramble/discussion on my first full month at college, how that’s affected me, and how I’m struggling to balance book blogging and reading with college.

Reading

1. Crooked Kingdom (reread) ★★★★★ // I wanted to settle in and feel at home in my new dorm so I decided to reread one of my all time favorites! I love it every bit as much as I did the first time ❤
2. Hearts, Strings, and Other Breakable Things ★★★☆☆ // This was really cute and fluffy and enjoyable but had pretty much no substance. 

WHAT? That’s it?

Yeah, that’s it. I’ve read 119 books this year, averaging 12ish books per month. In July I read 19 books. And this month I read two books.

Blogging

It may have seemed like I was blogging a lot this month… but I wasn’t. I put out a ton of blog posts but the thing is, I wrote them all during the summer. In the summer, I was posting 3 posts per week, but I was writing 6-8 posts per week. In fact, I have reviews prescheduled through the rest of this year!! (You can tell these are prescheduled because they’re all ARC reviews of books I read months ago haha).

It felt weird to be posting so much when I was almost never blogging. I almost didn’t want to post them since I knew I wouldn’t be checking the comments, replying to comments, commenting back, etc. But I already wrote them and I like them so I put them up anyways.

Reviews:

• The Library of Lost Things ARC Review // A Relatable Cute Bookworm Contemporary
• Fireborne ARC Review // An Exciting Dragon Fantasy
• Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters ARC Review // A Disturbing And Entertaining Mythological TV Show
• A River Of Royal Blood ARC Review // A Complex, Dark, Fantasy World
• Songs From The Deep Blog Tour Review // An Enchanting Murder Mystery Siren Fantasy

Other Posts:

• Why I Dislike The Casting Of Ben Barnes In Shadow And Bone // Please Stop Aging YA Characters
• I Went To The WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER Part One // General Info, Arrival, And Rides
• I Went To The WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER Part Two // Shopping, Dining, House Pride, And Departing
• Taylor Swift Lover Book Tag // Books That Give Me All The Feels And My Squealing Thoughts On Lover Songs!

I also made a guest post over on Kelly’s blog, Another Book In The Wall! I talked about how important it is to have lower YA books, and listed off some of my favorites! If you didn’t see it, I’d love it if you checked it out (because tbh why wouldn’t you want to look at Kelly’s #aesthetic blog?)

• The Importance of Lower YA and Some of My Favorites // A Guest Post by Kay – Another Book in the Wall

Your Posts

Blog hopping? Going through my reader? I might have done that one or twice this month. Not often enough, and that’s sad, but here are a small few I loved.

• Caitlin asks Why Is Reading So Unpopular?
• Marie discusses How To Make It As A Book Blogger
• Xandra talks about Major Things You Forgot From Harry Potter
• Emma is back!!! Talking about book she loves!

Life

And so now we come to the bulk of this post that I wanted to talk about: my first month in college. I don’t talk toooooo much about my life on this blog (I used to never talk about it lol and then I kind of lost my filter), but this is really my place to share my thoughts, so I kind of wanted to ramble on about it here so that I can look back at it, even if nobody else cares. Also I know most people reading this are probably older than me and already went through college so to you I’m going to sound childish probably–but hey, that’s just part of being a teen blogger (and by the way go check out Kelly’s teen blogger directory shameless plug haha).

Moving to college has been… crazy. It’s definitely the hugest change in my life ever–obviously, I lived 18 years at home and now I moved out! I talked briefly on this in my September Wrap Up, but I just moved here in the last week of September so October was my first full month.

Overall, I’m really liking it. I definitely like the set up of it much more that high school–of course I want to be able to choose my specific classes and professors, and go to them throughout the days instead of just having a gigantic block of 8-3 school. I like getting to sleep in more before heading to 11AM classes for sure. I definitely like having more freedom, both academically and just in general life. I got into a pretty good university (top 30), so everyone here is pretty academic and studious so I’m really liking the environment and people I’m surrounded by. And my college is at a beautiful location that I love!

It’s definitely been insanely hard and stressful though–10000x more so than high school. Seriously, I’ve come to learn that high school AP classes are absolutely not college level courses–they’re much much easier. Lectures are so fast paced, and I feel like I’m studying 5 hours outside of class everyday. The homework never ends–if it’s not studying the textbook, then it’s doing those book problems, doing the online homework, doing readings, or something else. When I finally take a moment to breathe, I feel super guilty, knowing how much I have that I should be doing…

Furthermore, I’m a biology major, which is one of the most intense there is. In high school I took basically an even mix of classes of all subjects–math, English, science, history, art, physical education, etc, and some were easy and some were hard and they balanced each other out. Now, I’m taking basically all hard STEM classes. I’m a book blogger so I shouldn’t say that STEM is harder than humanities… but it totally is.

It’s also rather disheartening that intro bio majors can’t take bio–instead, I’m slowly being murdered by intro calculus and chemistry classes that are prerequisites to bio that I have no interest in, yet must invest hundreds of hours of studying for. And on top of that, biology is one of the most popular majors with too many students to support, so these intro classes are designed to be hard weeder classes to get students to drop (the class average on my first chem midterm was a D-, which was a shock from high school, to say the least)… and I’m trying my hardest to not be one of the hundreds who drop the major.

On top of that… I don’t have any friends. I’m an introvert so it’s just so hard for me to talk to people and make friends. There are some days that I literally don’t talk to anyone except my roommates, and I eat every meal alone in the dining hall. It’s not terrible, but I do miss my high school friends a lot, and I remember how much fun we had together, and I’m not too much of an introvert that I don’t like spending any time with people–I rather enjoy spending some quality time with a few good friends, and it’s kind of hard that I have none here. Most days I’m fine, but some days the homesickness really hits me hard.

Anyways… I wanted to bring this back around to book blogging because after all this is a book blog. I read two books, 10 less than average. I think the problem is that I like to read in large chunks of time–sit down for hours and read a book in one sitting–and I just don’t have that kind of time anymore. I have an hour here and there, but not huge chunks of time, and if I do have a big chunk of time that I’m not studying, I feel immensely guilty for not studying given how much I have to do. When I have little gaps of time, I prefer to just spend it on my phone, scrolling through social media or watching YouTube or something, instead of getting into a book and then having to stop. So I’ve basically stopped reading.

And blogging? What is that? I’ve barely written any blog posts since college started (8/10 I posted this month I wrote during the summer), and I’ve basically never blog hopped or gone through my reader, and I even neglect comments at times. I just don’t have time.

It’s definitely a struggle for me trying to figure out how to balance book blogging with college. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. I almost want to just take a “hiatus” (that’s basically what I’ve done), but no because this is my life now. This isn’t a short term thing–this is the easiest it’s going to be for me and next semester I’m taking physics on top of calc and chem. I love book blogging (and reading!) so I want to figure out a way to do it more and get back into my grove, but right now… it’s just rough.

Let’s Chat

This post was stupidly long, if you read it all you can leave a long comment in response??? Are you in college? How do you balance college with book blogging and reading? I’d love to chat in the comments below!