Monthly Motif 2020

 

In the year 2019, I had embarked upon a plan to get back into blogging again and started a self-hosted blog. I started with updating myself about everything and everyone I could get a hold of in the blogging world. I followed bloggers, I participated in blog hops, I started to review books and to talk about my travels, and much more. My blogging third life had taken off well. Then Covid happened…

With all that was happening during the middle of the year 2020, I lost track of everything blog related. I tried once again in July to write, I couldn’t. Forget writing, I couldn’t even read!

But then slowly I picked up my reading and got to a point where, like everyone else, I too got adjusted to the “new normal”. Sitting at home has not been easy. But honestly, I am not much of an extrovert, so that part was not the toughest hurdle. The mental and emotional stress when both your kids are away at college in different countries and you are stuck in a different country can be agonizing!

I had given up on all the reading challenges. But I continued to read. I have read over 60 books so far this year. That’s a first-time accomplishment for me. Last week, I sat down to try and match the books I had read to the Reading Challenge Prompts. I was pleasantly surprised when I could fill up most of the prompts for a couple of challenges! I had the book lists up and ready even before the beginning of 2020, complete with a monthly reading list, to help complete the five reading challenges I was attempting for the first time in my life. I have not read half the books on that initial list. The physical books I had collected, were in a different country you see.

Although I have not actually followed the rules and read the books per month, I think in the year 2020, a lot can be forgiven.

So here goes one such Reading Challenge that I completed.

My Monthly Motif 2020 Reading Challenge list complete with my ratings of them: ( I was supposed to review these too, maybe I will someday…)

	Monthly  Motif Prompt	Book for the prompt	Rating	Fiction/ Non-Fiction
1	JANUARY-  Winter Wonderland	A week in Winter - Maeve Binchy	3	FICTION
2	FEBRUARY- Seeing Red	Red, White and Royal Blue - Casey McQuiston	3	FICTION
3	MARCH- Sub-Genre Sound Off	Muffins & Murder - Heather Justesen	3	FICTION
4	APRIL- Classics or Currents	Postscript - Cecelia Ahern	5	FICTION
5	MAY- Author Introduction	Telling Lies - L.A Dobbs	4	FICTION
6	JUNE- Name or Number	20 thousand leagues under the Sea- Jules Verne	3	FICTION
7	JULY- Around or Out of this World	Tao Te Ching - Stephen Mitchell	3	NON-FICTION
8	AUGUST- Creature Feature	Puma: A Soldier's Dog - Richa Kashyap	4	FICTION
9	SEPTEMBER- When Text Just Isn’t Enough	Book Love - Debbie Tung	4	FICTION
10	OCTOBER- Thrills and Chills	Yakshini - Neil D'Silva	4	FICTION
11	NOVEMBER- Dynamic Duos	Born A Crime - Trevor Noah	4	NON-FICTION
12	DECEMBER- Sugar, Spice, Everything Nice	Anxious People - Fredrik Backman	5	FICTION