NetGalley April Read-A-Thon

It’s April, which means it’s time for the quarterly NetGalley catch-up month at Red House Books.

Emily has declared this month to be a Read-A-Thon, a chance to clear some of the backlog of NetGalley books and just plain maintenance tasks associated with reviewing.

Mmm. Well. Mmm. Marlene sticks her toe in the ground and looks down shame-facedly.

On the maintenance, I’m good. On the backlog, not so much.

I did finally take advantage of the “Kindle books don’t expire” option and mailed every possible NetGalley title to my Kindle app. Whether that will help or not, we’ll see. One thing I don’t see with that option is book covers. They are all “docs” and documents don’t have book covers. There is one word for them, and that word is “UGLY”.

Also very hard to tell apart.

I had a second reason for doing this. The Kindle app probably doesn’t get full. Bluefire, much as I love the app, does seem to have a limit. And I found it. Every time I need to add a book to it, I have to delete one.

Guess what? You can fill up an ebook reader, if you try really, really hard. Or at least, you can fill up an ebook app. (I’ve emailed Bluefire support and we’re in the middle of figuring this one out. It seems to have to do with expired books. Update: It turns out it definitely has to do with expired books. I have too many and there’s no easy way to get rid of them. Only very boring ways.)

In the meantime, I’ve got to take a look at my NetGalley queue. There’s plenty in there (shudder). I absolutely must post a couple of reviews this month for the Read-A-Thon.

After all, I can’t let the side down. I’m one of NetGalley’s Librarian Voices.

NetGalley Review-a-Thon

What an utterly cool idea!

Lisa at Adventures of 2.0 is hosting a NetGalley Review-a-Thon event as the post-NetGalley Month “debriefing” this weekend. The thought being that since we read all those lovely NetGalley books last month, we need to catch up on our reviewing.

Because reading the books is fun. Writing up what we read can be, well, not so much.

Since we have to commit to how many reviews we’re going to write (but not necessarily post) this weekend, I’m going to say three. I have one book finished that I have to write up, and I should get two more read this weekend and written. I read a lot when I’m stressed (see this morning’s post), and if I’m going to be up half the night I might as well write the reviews while the books are still fresh in my mind.

Every time I see the hash tag for the read-a-thon I have to smile. It’s just perfect. Because the hash tag for the review-a-thon–wait for it–it’s #netgalleyrat.

I think the NetGalley books are the cheese.