Books and Tea Book Club | February Read-alongs
I have no idea how the first month of the year is already nearly over but I’m back with more information for my Book Club! We have our monthly read-along feautring two great books, a little surprise update, and a small change too.
I gave the book club the theme of “Lesser known books” with the restriction of only nominating books with 5,000 ratings or less on Goodreads. At first glance people thought this was a bit difficult but once they got started the recommended list was ridiculously long. This meant when I came to creating the poll I actually dropped the bracket down to books with 1,000 ratings or less to make it easier to then drop to only 15 books to vote from.
I did promise the book club that there was a chance at a dual winner and thats is exactly what happened. I said it would only happen if two shorter books won but in the end I decided that supporting these authors that are lesser known is such a good thing that I had an obligation to host two.
Both authors have also replied that they’d be happy to be involved so I’ll probably be reaching out more formally than I did on twitter to organise some things! The winners are:
The Gilded King by Josie Jaffrey | Return to Dyatlov Pass by J.H. Moncrieff
(Yes I did just review Return to Dyatlov Pass so perhaps my talking about how much I was enjoying it influenced this vote a little)
A little surprise update is that we launched a secondary server that is directly affliated with Books and Tea, its called Blogs and Tea!
As Books and Tea has grown a lot these past three years we’ve been aware it can be a little overwhelming to those who join just for the Blogger Hub section we had within the book club. Allie had been pondering over the idea for a while and last week we got to work on making this a reality.
Now that Blogs and Tea exists we’ve been able to expand the Blogger Hub and provide a quieter area for any bloggers to support each other in figuring out how to make their blog the best it can be. Whilst this is a new area for us we’ve had some great feedback and have a few ideas for it in the future; and will hopefully help bring back Micro Review (oh yes, we have a rebranded tag feature coming your way).
The last, much smaller, change that I actually haven’t mentioned elsewhere yet is that I’m going to test out having each Readalong’s chat existing for the full year to encourage new members to pick up older read-along books and support those who are slower readers or who’ve been too busy to pick them up. We’ll see how this goes!
I do still promise that I’ll be writing an updated Chat Overview for this year but here is last years post should you want to know more about the Book Club. I’ve been a lot busier than anticipated, oops. I hope at least one of these books interest you, if not we’re also taking suggestions for March’s Read-along of “Urban Fantasy” for a week or two. Then I’ll get a poll up next weekend for people to vote on their favourite choice.
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Northern Plunder 
Blogs and Tea is amazing! Thanks for all of the work everyone put forth to make it exist!
Aww thank you! :) we couldnt function without memberslike you
Yay another server! How exciting! And I really need to read Return to Dyatlov Pass! But I must resist the urge to buy it atm X’D the struggle is real
Well I guess you’re lucky we’re going to test keeping the readalong chats open for the rest of 2019 then hahaa ;)
and thank you!! feel free to stop by, were nice + smol and supporting each other best we can <3
Ah so happy for how big your book club has grown and creating the other server Lauren! I actually have a copy of Josie’s book, which I really need to read this year.
Ah thank you Clo! I grabbed it at the end of last year so Im glad it won haha
The Gilded King actually sounds really interesting!
Josie currently has a link on her twitter where you can get it for free btw :)
did you say book club?? >_> also the gilded king was a good read!! i hope more people get into that series
yess!! come join us to talk about all kinda books :D a lot of people have read it and we’re doing afull series readalong now bc ppl enjoye dit