The Blogging April A to Z Challenge has now ended. As 2023 is my eighth year of participating in this challenge, I’ve become quite used to April being a very busy month. For me, the key to completing the challenge successfully is planning and organisation. My theme this year was book reviews, so there were books to read, and reviews to write. I read all books that were reviewed. Some, in the past couple of years, but most of them in more recent months. I love the planning and choosing of books, according to a letter of the alphabet. This often has me choosing books that I wouldn’t usually read, just to be able to write a review on a particular letter. This often brings up some lovely surprises.

This year, because I knew I would be time poor, I was quite organised, and this meant that I was able to read and comment on more blogs than I ever have in previous years. I’ve given a bit of thought to the 2023 challenge and have come up a few things that I am happy about and a few challenges that I had.

What I Am Happy About

By the time 2022 had become 2023, I had written a plan of the books that I was going to review, and still needed to read.

On the day that the challenge website opened, I had written rough drafts for most posts.

Almost all posts were written, and ready to be published before the challenge started.

I visited many great blogs on a huge variety of topics and themes during the challenge.

There were many comments made on my blog, with some of those comments being made by bloggers other than book bloggers.

I loved that bloggers often commented about their favourite books.

A relationship has developed with a few bloggers that I hope will continue into the future.

A few posts that were not completed by the start of the challenge, were left until the last minute. Those posts were for W X Y Z. Because of this procrastination, the final week was quite hectic, which is what I was trying to avoid. This was the only challenge that I had with the AtoZ this year.

5 star books: Two4 star books: Thirteen4.5 star books: Four3.5 star books: Six

3 star books: one book