Oh it’s suddenly the end of summer? How did this happen?? I’m so grateful I got to spend time this past month reading at the beach. I absolutely devoured The Seven Year Slip during my long beach reading, and I also made tons of progress on the Petal Pages Summer Book Bingo!

I’m looking forward to some really incredible reads in August and I have an ambitious goal to fully fill out the bingo board. Do we think I can do it?

July Reads

July Numbers

📖 read: 2,235 pages
🎧 listened: 11.35 hours

August TBR

Petal Pages Summer Book Bingo

Join the Petal Pages stream team for a summer full of reading! We’ve got two bingo boards and $300 worth of prizes to give out to participants at the end of the month! I’ll be aiming to do as much of the bingo boards as possible and we’ve got a special place in the community Discord for trading book recommendations and setting up buddy reads (for fun but also to help with book bingo)!

Click the link above to get full details on the book bingo event and download the bingo boards. Happy reading!

Bella’s Queer Book Recs

In June I participated in a reading raid train and shared a MASSIVE list of queer book recommendations with y’all live on stream and ever since then I’ve been promising to share the list. Well… I’m late, but it’s finally here! Mostly! You can click the title of this section (or this next part) to link to my ever-growing Notion site of queer book recommendations! At the time I’m sharing this post the site does not have 100% of the books I originally recommended, but keep an eye out because I’ll keep adding them to the database over in Notion! The site will allow you to filter by genre, queer identities represented, if I’ve read the book, and more! Enjoy, and please let me know if you add any new books to your TBRs!

Books with Pals

August’s Books with Pals guest was Lili (@tulilipz) and we had an awesome conversation about our buddy read book, The No-Girlfriend Rule by Christen Randall, and Lili’s #ReadFatPositive readathon, happening in August! If you missed the stream and would like to catch up you can find the VOD here on Twitch.

Saint Martin’s Press (SMP) Boycott

Social media influencers who create book content are currently boycotting Saint Martins Press (SMP) in response to their lack of accountability after an employer made harmful zionist, islamophobic, and racist statements. Please read more about this boycott from the Readers for Accountability carrd and keep up to date on the status through their social media accounts, @helloR4A on Twitter and @readersforaccountability on Instagram. I encourage fellow book-focused influencers to join me in boycotting SMP!

More Book Stuff

You can watch the VOD of recent Books with Bella streams and keep an eye out for future streams on my Twitch channel. If you miss a Books with Bella stream you can catch up on all of them in this YouTube playlist. I also post regularly on my book-focused Instagram and recently also on my book-focused TikTok account.

Great places to get books:

  • Audiobooks: Libro.FM (use my referral code: lfm461686)
  • Free books: use the Libby app to get audiobooks and ebooks for free with your library card
  • Public domain books: use the Project Gutenberg website to view ebooks and digital copies of books in the public domain
  • Digital ARC books for reviewers: NetGalley