June Reading Wrap-Up

Posted July 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 12 Comments

Photo of a blue tit on a branch

July’s here, so it’s time for a look back at June! Which was a bit of a weird month, but I seem to have said that last month too…

June in general:

Mostly the thing that sticks out about June this year was how hot it was, in the UK. I’ve had cause to be very glad that we have a couple of portable air conditioners, and even our bunnies ended up having to chill out in an air conditioned room… We rush ordered a pen so they could hang out in comfort, given the rooms with the portable air conditioners aren’t at all bunny-proofed.

A photo of two bunnies in a smallish pen. One brown bunny on the left is flopped with her legs kicked out; a white bunny with brown spots and stripes cuddles up to her side. Both have very alert ears.

It isn’t a huge amount of space, but it worked okay as a place for them to stay cooler during the hottest parts of the day, and they got comfy in it after a while!

I didn’t work on my bookcase blanket a lot during the heatwave, but I did make quite a bit of progress this month all the same, completing the second “shelf”. In the first shelf I stuck quite close to the pattern, but in the second I’ve started modifying the pattern now that I’ve learned the principles, to keep things looking a bit more varied (otherwise I’d be repeating the same book patterns a lot). Here’s a peek at the progress, with a book (of course) for scale!

Photo of a blanket made in mosaic overlay crochet. It shows two "shelves" of a bookcase so far, mostly filled with books, with a cat sitting in the lower right on top of a book. The background colour is a deep purple-red, while the book/cat details are in cream, and the actual shelves are a tan colour. A hardback book is included for scale, showing the two shelves so far are a bit taller than it.

Gaming-wise, I tore through the puzzles in the game inbento, which was on a pretty steep sale at the time and still is. It wasn’t super tricky, so it didn’t take me that long, but the simple-and-cute story and clever puzzles kept me busy a while. It was nice to play for a short break from other tasks, since you can just do a level or two at a time.

Other than that, my wife and I finished up PowerWash Simulator and PowerWash Simulator 2 (until the new DLC comes out in July!), and finally went back and finished everything in It Takes Two (a game with fun mechanics but a story we don’t recommend), so we started on Flock Around, which is a fairly chill bird-watching co-op game. We haven’t played a ton of it yet, but there was a lot of excited running to each other to find new birds and such.

I finished the month playing a lot of DREDGE, which is a game themed around fishing and eldritch horrors. I confess to some very loud surprised yelps at times when something came after my poor little boat. I have a lot still to do in this game, but I think I’m close to finished with the main story.

Reading stats:

Right, let’s get to the meat of things, ahaha. First up, my StoryGraph graphics for last month!

StoryGraph reading stats for June 2026: 25 books, 5,652 pages, average rating of 2.84. My top rated reads included How to Kill a Language, Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint vol 3, and The Wife Comes First vol 1. The number of pages I read per day was low for most of the month, with big peaks in the latter half of the month. More reading stats for June 2026: I read 64% fiction, 36% non-fiction, and 75% of my books were under 300 pages long, with 25% between 300 and 500 pages. I read 76% in print and 24% in digital editions, and my top genres were LGBTQIA (7), fantasy (7), history (5), poetry (5) and romance (4).

Total books read: 25
Total pages read: 5,652
Rereads: 0
ARCs: 1
Series finished/up to date: 2
Books owned pre-2026: 2
Books owned from 2026: 13
Borrowed books: 10

Fiction: 14
Non-fiction: 7
Poetry: 4
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 2

Slightly fewer books again, but almost the same number of pages as last month — if I’d read at the same pace I was doing at the end of the month, I’d have read a lot more books in total, I think, and it looks like I was reading longer books! So I was pretty happy with that. I changed up my reading habits a bit, trying to read a bit closer to how I used to before I was thinking in terms of how many books I finish a year and all of that… and it seems to be working well.

(Which, if you’re curious and hadn’t seem me talk about it already, is basically that I have 3-4 books “active” at once, and I rotate through them reading a chapter or two at a time. There’s no “rule” about it — I can sit and mainline an entire book if I want! But if I get restless, the next book is there to grab my attention again.)

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books: 171/400 (30 books behind)
Overall pages read: 39,309/100,000 (10,828 pages behind)
Books read from backlog: 30/100 (20 books behind)
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 20/20

20 Books of Summer: 6/20 (0/5 bonus)

As you see, I’m slipping ever further behind on my goals. If I don’t recover things by the end of July, I’ll probably just adjust the targets. Although I set high targets, part of it is just having a good sense for how much I’m reading relative to my “normal”. If I’m struggling to read as much, that usually means something’s wrong, and that’s a very good signal for me to have… but it doesn’t stop me adjusting my goals if it feels crappy.

However, I’m off to a good start with my 20 Books of Summer list! I picked 20 specific books to finish and 5 potential bonus books just in case I wanted to swap some in, and so far I’ve finished six of my original picks: two non-fiction, two books that were in-progress that I’d stalled on, and two danmei.

Blogging stats:

Views: 13.2k
Visitors: 12.4k
Likes: 332
Comments: 325
Reviews: 22
Other posts: 21

Down on pretty much all metrics! Including number of reviews, which is probably part of it.

Most viewed posts:

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

Once more, I’d saved a lot of really good and interesting reviews (not all positive, or for books I’d necessarily be interested in!) so it was really hard to whittle it down to a reasonable number… but I’ve managed!

I really need to start drafting these posts earlier in the month, though, so I don’t have to spend nearly two hours getting it all organised, ahaha.

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12 responses to “June Reading Wrap-Up”

    • Nicky

      And we’re not even that far south! Yorkshire got so hot too.

      I really enjoyed How to Kill a Language, though I have a lot of thoughts about it I need to write out.

      Reply
  2. Tammy

    Oh my gosh, those bunnies!! I really hope the heat doesn’t come back, or at least not as bad as it was. Your stats look really good! I read less in June too, for some reason. Thanks for linking my reviews

    Reply
    • Nicky

      Supposedly next week the temperatures are going back up, but shouldn’t be as hot… we’ll have to see how it goes. We got a bluetooth thermometer now that can ping us if it gets too hot for the bunnies!

      Reply
    • Nicky

      I read 500 books a year in my early twenties, admittedly when I was studying English lit! It’s been downhill since then, haha.

      Reply
  5. Liz Dexter

    I know what you mean about the hours spent on round-up posts! My state of the TBR takes forever and I know I could pre-write at least about the NetGalley books I win, but I never seem to! Lovely reading stats, I always like seeing people reading even more than me (I got how do you read so much?? again last month and it always feels very slightly judgy, doesn’t it!).

    Reply
    • Nicky

      It does feel kind of judgy; I seem to get it almost every month, and it’s a bit saddening because it’s like people are treating reading as a competition.

      Reply
    • Nicky

      We’ve even got high tech and have a bluetooth thermometer in the room they live in, which sends us an alert if they get too warm!

      Thank you!

      Reply

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