July Favourites

I love July with it's 2 weeks of awesome winter holidays (which is not so winter-y on the Sunny Coast ~ an average of 24C/75F during the day). I also love how July is like a mid-year reflection period and a new start to the second half of the year. I have so many books I'm looking to reading in the rest of 2017 and still so many on my TBR I have not gotten to yet... Having said, that, I've read 87 book so far in 2017, and 20 of them I've marked as new faves (I'm so happy with nearly a 1/4 of my reads being perfectly matched to my reading tastes and moods)

July was an awesome reading month. I:

• discovered 2 new fun authors to follow (Ingrid Paulsen and Lia Weston)
• read new books from 3 fave authors (Kasie West, Lucy Clarke, Mhairi McFarlane)
• read a long-standing TBR backlist title (a classic Meg Cabot! ~ The Guy next Door)
• reread an old fave (P.S I Like You ~ on a glorious Saturday sleepy lie in bed morning)
• listened to a fave book in audio format <3 (The Piper's Son!)

July Book Total

Books: 11
Audiobooks: 1 

Adult fiction: 7
Young Adult fiction: 4
Australian fiction: 2
Rereads: 2

Fave Young Adult Read

Ingrid Paulson's debut Why I Loathe Sterling Lane was totally fun and full of things made of win:

• boarding school and pranks
• genuine loathing with barbed and witty banter and revengeful scheming
• Veronica Mars-style sleuthing
• steamy, swoony pay-off

My review elaborates on why I loved this book and I am so hoping more people find and fall in love with it too <3

Fave Adult Read(s)

Australian author Lia Weston's Those Pleasant Girls is a cool, ridiculously smiley, seriously funny, awesome read with a wild sense of humour and just the right touch of whimsy. I really loved this and you can read my full review here (with bonus mentions of The Gilmore Girls, Jaclyn Moriarty and Anne of Green Gables).

I love Mhairi McFarlane so much (her books have such a brilliant, funny UK vibe, with characters I genuinely care for). My two fave books of hers are You Had Me At Hello and Who's That Girl ~ so I was ridiculously thrilled to see Mhairi released a novella sequel to You Had Me at Hello (I've read YHMAT three times, I love it so). After Hello was pretty much perfect and I grinned my way through it ~ so happy to be back with Rachel and Ben (BEN!!!) and the gang. Mhairi's books bring a whole heap of addictive light and life and smiles into my life <3

Fave audiobook

Being back with Tom and Georgie and the gang was just perfect. I didn't even realise how much I missed them until I was listening. The audiobook was a really compelling format and my work commute was a definite highlight of my day for the week I spent listening to this. 

Fave reread

Oh, mate, some of the tropes in this book are my personal kryptonite: the whole secret identity/letter writing thing (which never gets old to me) and also a good old fashioned hate-to-love antagonistic romance. Even on the reread (when I knew where things were going) I struggled to put it down. I love this brand of cute, funny and smiley contemporary YA. I think this book is up there as one of my fave Kasie West titles ~ along with The Distance Between Us.

So there's my happy-making faves of July titles

What about you? What's one book you've read recently and fallen in love with?