I’m smushing the 5^th and 6^th together so I don’t mess up my blogging goals for December too badly.

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2017 was a really good year for me book wise.

As in I bought a lot of books.

I’m really good at sales.  I mean, if there’s a book I want on sale, chances are that I’ll find it. Couple that with our on-campus Barnes and Noble and the fact that I’ve made bargain bin diving a hobby and well… I’ve bought a bunch of books.

2017 was also the year that I started seriously preordering books in order to support my favorite writers.  I have minor memory issues so if you don’t remind me repeatedly to do something, I straight up won’t do it. I’ll think about it every once in a while, very fondly even, but my brain needs active reminders or… in the case of book pre-orders, it needs choice taken out of my hands.

Pre-orders make it poissible for me to get a good book (usually at a relatively cheaper price) and since 99% of my pre-orders are on the kindle, I don’t need to wait for shipping and can be pleasantly surprised once the book shows up on my home screen.

(Some of the books I preordered (and received) in 2017 include:

• Queens of Geek by Jen Wilde
• Grace and the Fever by Zan Romanoff
• Renegades by Marissa Meyer
• Cold Spectrum by Craig Schaefer
• The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo
• Archangel’s Viper by Nalini Singh
• 27 Hours by Tristina Wright
• His Convenient Husband by Robin Covington
• Mask of Shadows by Linsey Miller)

Like… I did that.

I’ve also decided to shut down my inner shame voice castigating me for daring to put up a book wishlist on my Support Tweet or to talk about the ARCs I’d like to get if anyone could get them for me. It’s hard because of course I don’t think I deserve anything good at all sometimes (thanks, depression), but the fact of the matter is that I read books so I can talk about them either with my fellow English majors or online with y’all.

And I can’t afford to buy every book I want because well… food is more important than books sometimes.

I’ve been really lucky that I had a brief stint where I could afford to do book subscription boxes for a few months (more on that at  a later entry), but I think what’s been really lovely has been the people who’ve been like “I have extra money and I know Stitch likes books so… let me get her one”.

My friend Kristen bought me Julie C. Dao’s Forest of a Thousand Lanterns. A friend from tumblr (who I’ll call A) got me Tochi Onyebuchi’s Beasts Made of Night. Just now, when I got back from spending a week with the family that housed me all of last year and haf of this one, I came home to a copy of one of the Elementary novels from my friend Jill.

I’ve been blessed to have friends and followers who are like “yes, give the Stitch all of the books”. This is huge because these books have helped keep me in one piece and from losing my shit. When anything went wrong in 2017, I knew I could reach for a book and dive right into another world for a couple of hours.

No idea what I’m going to do with them once I graduate and leave the dorms and have to return to my sister’s tiny apartment, but that’s a problem for April 2018 Stitch. Not me.