New Book on the Shelf! (Summer Book Swap)

Hosting reading challenges attracts a lot of book-loving bloggers to my little corner of the Internet. One of these bloggers is Carly from Carly Blogs Here, and when I heard she was co-hosting a summer book swap with Tiffany, Emily and Lauren, I knew I had to participate. What's better than getting a book in the mail?? (Getting a book paw-delivered to you by a corgi, of course. Sorry, I've just been on a huge corgi kick lately....)

Anyway, I was so excited to be paired with Sara from Life & Leopard—she's a fellow Literary Junkie, so it was fun to have a familiar name to swap with. And when she emailed me her favorite authors, I just knew I'd found my reading soulmate. So of course I was confident I would receive an awesome book from her, but I didn't expect her to know me quite so well.

Words of Wisdom from Norton Juster

I reread The Phantom Tollbooth earlier this month, and if you know anything about my reading habits, you may know I don't reread books often. This was one novel that had been on my mind for a while—actually, I even mentioned wanting to reread it someday in the post I just linked to—and it just so happened that reading a children's book was one of the categories in this summer's book challenge! (Okay, so that category might have been totally planned to encourage me to reread The Phantom Tollbooth. I guess that's one of the perks of being the challenge host!)

Anyway, the point of all this rambling is that this book is absolutely fantabulous. I couldn't stop telling people about how great it was when I was reading it. If you haven't read this book in the past five years, read it again. It's a quick read and definitely worth your time to remind yourself of some very important life lessons! Including ...

Best of April & May: Two Months in Review

Once again, I completely missed a monthly check-in, so I'm going to fill you in on two months of happenings in my life and on my blog today. I have to say, it was kind of weird thinking back to April and what I did that month. I fluctuated between "That was really two months ago? It feels like yesterday!" and "Oh my goodness, that was only two months ago? I barely remember that." Is anyone else feeling like 2014 shouldn't be almost halfway over already???

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So basically, y'all are telling me the only thing you like better than photos of books are photos of my fiance? I can't say I blame you. ;) But really, April and May were relatively tame compared to some of our busier months this year. We celebrated our one-year engagement anniversary on May 18 by registering for wedding gifts, treating ourselves to In-N-Out and opening a bottle of wine my sister and her boyfriend got us from the vineyard where we got engaged. I also started my third annual summer reading challenge (it's not too late to join!) and have been reading some great books (details below).

June is shaping up to be another crazy month; we had family visiting this weekend and we'll be out of town the next three weekends, but we were able to take some time this afternoon to nap and for me to catch up on some blog reading. Oh—and did I mention we're training for a triathlon? We're on week five of the training plan now to plan for the big race on July 19! (That reminds me: I guess we'll also be out of town at least the first three weekends of July as well! Yikes!) Looks like my next two monthly recaps will be chock-full of fun stuff. :) For now, continue reading after the jump to see what you (and I!) liked the past two months.

Summer 2014 Book Challenge: Month 1

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Welcome back, semi-charmed readers! If you've joined the summer 2014 book challenge, today is your first chance to check in and tell me what you've read so far. If you haven't joined yet but are intrigued by the idea of joining a fantabulously fun reading challenge with some awesome bloggers and blog-reading individuals, there's still time! Simply click here to read the rules and categories, and feel free to look back to May 1 and count any qualifying books you've read since then. Continue reading after the jump to learn how to check in with your progress.