About Me

So, I read a lot. I have always loved to read. So far for 2010 I have 233 books in 239 days according to my Goodreads stats – thats 76951 pages, . It hardly seems like enough to me and I still have so many I’m desperate to read. I love my local library – it’s small but the books are free and the librarians are great at sourcing books for me from the bigger city library’s. In all the places I have lived the librarians quickly learnt my name because I visited so often but I’ve not always been able to find what I want. I’ve never had the budget to feed my book habit – book prices in Australia are extortionate – and in the country town I now live in there are no second hand booksellers within a 2 hour drive. Book Depository bought a glimmer of hope – a great selection of reasonably priced books with free shipping but since I am the only reader in the family, and I read a book a day basically, I can rarely justify spending the money on new books. Now I have my iPod  (a generous birthday gift from my grandfather) and I can find ebooks at a reasonable price (and hubby doesn’t always need to know). Its loaded with Stanza, and every other book app I can find – Kindle App, Borders, Kobo, iBook etc. I have the BookCollectorz app for keeping my collection organised, and the Goodreads App to update my bookshelf and check in with my groups. It’s the best gift I have ever gotten and now instead of a paperback, I am most likely wandering around with my iPod in hand engrossed in my latest read.

For a book addict Goodreads is fabulous, finally I have found people who share my obsession and totally understand just why I stayed up til 4am finishing a book even knowing I had to be up in 2 hours to get the kids off to school. I use Goodreads to track my reading wish list, share my opinions, take challenges, read reviews and find new books to read. I’ve won a couple of books through their Book Giveaway program and even had a chance to chat with some of my favourite authors. If you love books you will love Goodreads. You can see my Goodreads profile http://www.goodreads.com/shelleyrae -send me a friend request.

I also like FictFact, if you are a series reader then FictFact makes it easier to keep track of them and even alerts you to new releases. I’m still working on getting up to date over there but its a convenient way to stay on top of your favourite series.

I have just recently joined NetGalley, which was the prompt to create this blog for sharing the books I read. NetGalley  is a service for people who read and recommend books. Publishers upload their galleys, plus any marketing and promotional information; then invite contacts to view their title on NetGalley. Readers can the find new titles through NetGalley’s Public Catalog, and request to review those titles from the publisher. Anyone who reads and recommend books can use NetGalley for free  so if this is something that interest’s you make sure you take a look.

So starting today I’ll be adding reviews of the books I read – don’t expect erudite literary critique, I tend to just write about what I did or didn’t like about a book. I try very hard to avoid spoilers and I am not interested in denigrating anyone, no book bashing allowed. Books reviewed for NetGalley will be categorised as such, you can assume that any thing else I read because I chose to. I don’t expect that I’ll be having guest authors, giveaways or other publishers offering me books to review anytime soon but you never know. I’ll also be posting other book/reading related bits and pieces I come across that I find interesting.

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