Amber's Books of 2019

Today I want to introduce you to Amber, a blog tour organizer and a friend I met through Stephen Zimmer, one of my favorite indie authors! I thought this would be a neat way to share about what it means to organize blog tours and get a sneak peak into the many books that come her way.

Like all posts in the 2019 in books series, remember that Amber’s words are in italics and since this is a bookish discussion, all book links open in a new tab so that you can refer to them afterwards.

Welcome to Armed with A Book, Amber. 🙂 Tell me a little bit about your love for books.

I’ve been an avid reader almost my entire life. I spent many summer vacations as a kid inside the Flint Public Library or holed up in my room reading anything and everything, I could get my hands on. My reading frenzy really began with my Grandmother and her collection of vintage Nancy Drew books. 

I love reading Nancy Drew and my grandma had a huge collection too! Do you participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge or set reading goals for yourself? How do you usually chose this goal and what was your goal for this year?

I participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge and have since 2011. I also participate in the Craving for Cozies Reading Challenge and the Literary Escapes Reading Challenge both organized by Great Escapes Book Tours. Besides these three reading challenges, I don’t really set reading goals other than trying to figure out how to reduce my TBR pile.

For the 2019 Goodreads Reading Challenge I set myself up to read 110 books. I’m currently at 84 but I have a lot of books to write reviews for still. I finished up my Master’s degree in May of this year so, while I was able to read a lot, writing reviews for what I’ve read was impossible. I’ve been playing catch up since then. Do you participate in any reading challenges and if so, which ones? I may be interested in joining others along with the three I’m already part of currently.

I haven’t done a lot of challenges – 2020 is actually going to be the year when I will seriously try them. I am organizing Armed with a Bingo with my friend Ariel (I hope you will come join us – it won’t affect your other commitments!) and Ginger Mom and Company’s A to Z Challenge.

Talking about reading challenges, how do you choose your books to read?

I’m a cover whore (really, I am). I’m truly one of those people that loves a fantastic cover. I don’t just base what I read on the covers, though. I find the synopsis often gives me enough to go on to decide to read the book or not. I also have specific authors who are just auto-reads for me regardless what the book covers look like. As a tour host for several book tour companies, I find a lot of my books that way, too. When I receive the materials to post on my blog, there is often an excerpt included so the cover, the synopsis, and the excerpt really help me decide if I want to read the book.

How do you decide which books to review?

I finished my last degree in April 2019 – it was a teaching degree and I was still deciding between applying for a teaching job and taking a job in IT at an organization I worked part-time for the last 3 years. I had this one week when I was done with school and didn’t have to restart work yet, and that was my time to think about next steps. 

I spent a lot of time thinking but also reading that week – just books I had wanted to catch up on. I had started my website the year before and was looking for ways to promote it when I came across a website called the book blogger list. That gave me the idea for being a book blogger since I have always loved books. Previously, I had been writing about teaching and had been worried if I did not go into it, what would the blog be about? The book blogger list gave me direction and people on twitter gave me some feedback and opportunities to expand. Here we are now! 🙂

How did you get into organizing blog tours?

I was a publicist for a small Colorado-based publishing company until they, unfortunately, had to close their doors. After helping so many authors through my work as a publicist, I decided I wanted to continue to support authors and that is how Sapphyria’s Book Promotions was born. I’m happy to have a team of dedicated tour hosts and I love working with the authors and publishers who hire me to help them.

That’s very cool! 🙂

About the books this year

Were there any books this year that challenged your thinking or you learned a lot from?

I wish I could say yes and provide examples, but I really don’t read many books that challenge me or provide learning experiences. I was in college from 2008 until May 2019 working on a Bachelor’s degree and a Master’s degree. When I wasn’t reading textbooks, doing homework, or writing papers, the last thing I wanted to read was something challenging. I’m not saying the books I read are less than stellar, weak, or 2-dimensional, I just read books that I didn’t have to think too hard about. I read a lot of cozy mysteries, contemporary romance, and paranormal (all genres) and am not one to dissect a book into a million pieces while reading.

Now that I’m not in school anymore I may move into more complex books and add more classics to my list. What ones do you suggest?

Did you read any books that had practical strategies to apply to life?

Not really. 😊 Do you have suggestions you could give me?

I read a couple of books about productivity this year and was going to post about them but didn’t get around it to. I would recommend two books:

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The Productive Life by Mark Tittley is the cheat sheet to all productivity books and its short! It was 50 pages and he has to many ideas in that book! I posted about it on the blog couple weeks back. I listened to Atomic Habits as an audio book and had to go get the book because I wanted to annotate it like crazy (have not gotten to it though haha). Since you are just out of school and still adjusting to not being a student, I would recommend them both. I learned so much from them about planning, habit tracking, Journaling and want to go back and see what new things I want to do for 2020.

Both the books come with immerse resources so even if you don’t get around to reading them, just Google about them. Mark Tittley and James Clear have active blogs.

I know it is hard to give recommendations, especially when we read so many books in a year! If you had to choose, tell me about four books that I should check out and why.

Ooh, you like to ask the hard questions! I’m going to focus less on specific books and more on an author or series.

• If you like cozy mysteries, I highly recommend Sherry Harris’s Sarah Winston Garage Sale Mysteries. The series is well-written, has realistic and likable characters, and each mystery is unique. The mysteries are engaging and not just 2-dimenstional, featuring several twists, turns, distractions, and multiple storylines.

• If you like romantic suspense, I highly recommend anything by Katie Ruggle. I’ve read all but one of her books and it’s on my list for January. The chemistry between the hero and heroine of each book is strong, realistic, and sparks off the page. Her stories in each series tend to blend together so, for example, the main theme in the Rocky Mountain K9 Unit series is threaded throughout all the books in that particular series. I love that about her books but if you don’t like cliff-hangers make sure to get all the books at the same time so you can move right to next one.

• Rhenna Morgan’s Haven Brotherhood/Men of Haven series is a spectacular contemporary romance series. Each book features a different “brother” and their perfect match along with humour, suspense, and fantastic characters and imagery. If you like alpha males and the family they protect, this series is a winner.

• The Hush, Hush series by Becca Fitzpatrick is a YA paranormal, fantasy series. I found the entire series to be utterly amazing. Each book pulled me into the world the author created. I devoured the entire 4-book series as fast as I could.

Have you read any of the series’ I described above?

Unfortunately, I’ve not! But I’ll take a look at them. Love the cover for Hush, Huh!

Kriti, what are your favorite genres and series recommendations?

I honestly don’t read a lot of series anymore but I will try.

I read a lot of dystopia this year and since I started reviewing, I feel I enjoyed it even more because I kept thinking about all the different versions that I was reading! Yesterday I posted about the 5 dystopian books that would highly recommend.

Dystopias of 2019

Another genre I enjoy is fantasy. Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series is my hands down favorite and he continues to write side plots for it – I can’t get enough of that world!

I used to love historic fiction growing up and I hope to pick up more of it in 2020.

The Year Ahead

Would you change anything, whether it is your reading habits, review routine or reading goal, for 2020?

I am going to try and change how long it takes me to write a review. I have a habit of reading a lot of books and putting off the writing of the reviews. Authors depend on reviews and I know how important they are to them. I’m not a 3-sentence review writer, though. I like to add substance to the reviews, not just do the bare minimum so review writing takes me longer than a few minutes. I just hit certain points where all I want to do is read and not worry about writing anything up about the books.

I totally get it! My reviews can be pretty long too, especially if I am posting them here. Looking forward to seeing more of your work next year!

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Amber! Please let us know what you think and share with your circles and if you would like to be a blog tour host, check out her website (link below)!

Ways to connect with Amber:

Blog

Twitter

Next up tomorrow, I’ll have a new book blogger friend, Kristy, over to learn about her year in books. That’s the last conversation in this series – the 20th at that – can you believe it?! 🙂

Thanks for reading! ❤️