I don’t mark my favourite parts in books. Instead, I either write down the page numbers or take pictures with my phone. Afterwards, I go back and copy the lines in my little black notebook. Currently, I’m a little behind on transferring but I’m trying to catch up. I love browsing through all of my favourite quotes from time to time. It’s like revisiting the books I’ve taken them from; their hearts and souls contained in a couple of sentences …

They divide books into delicious morsels ready to be devoured – and sometimes we decide to eat up the whole serving tray in one go resulting in a major hangover with the flavour of our huge disappointment that there’s nothing left. They help us remember where we left off – well, at least those people who have awesome memory. Everyone else lets the good old bookmarks do the remembering. They are wonderful excuses to procrastinate – “Just let me finish this.” – “Only one more.” – we’ve all been there. Sometimes, they make us tear out our hair because they leave off with a cliffhanger and we have to stop to do annoying real life stuff or have to read half the book to get back to this certain point of view – or even one and a half books, in case you’re reading A Song of Ice and Fire. They come in different sizes and even more shapes to look their very best.

Well, to be exact, it should be “currently not reading.” On the one hand, I’m moving in two days and have so much to prepare. On the other hand, I’m procrastinating reading this one …

I’m kind of in a reading slump right now. It all started, because I’ve been procrastinating reading Quintana of Charyn throughout March. Still haven’t read it yet, because I’m so afraid of ALL THE FEELS. Instead of turning to other books, I just didn’t read at all. Furthermore, I’m going to move in a couple of days and preparations are taking up a lot of my free time and I’m just not in the mood for reading …

Joanna Campbell’s world of thoroughbred racing is one of my horse novel favourites. Both the Ashleigh [Aileen] as well as the Thoroughbred [Vollblut] series (and its specials) have a special place in my heart. They’re the reason I started working on my English skills: I was way to curious to wait till the German publisher translated the books, I just had to know what was going to happen. There was a great fan page back in the days with profiles of the horses, characters, authors and tonnes and tonnes of trivia (since the books were later on written by a rotating panel of authors, the mistakes, character transformations, et al. were numerous). I spent hours translating it all. I also became so mesmerised by the world of American thoroughbred racing that I wrote my A-level research paper on the Sport of the Kings. So far, I read all 15 Ashleigh novels, 1 of the 4 special editions and 38 of the 72 Thoroughbred novels, although I own considerably more …

Just to clarify: my Goodreads to-be-read shelf contains all the books I already own but haven’t read yet. I have separate to-buy lists for the books I’d like to read one day but don’t own yet. Since this topic’s not suggesting it’s about the books I recently bought, I’ll write about the books I recently shelved to-buy …

The first book I remember reading myself and actually enjoying was a horse novel I got for Christmas when I was 8 years old. Up until then, I had loved books and other people reading them to me, but I had hated reading myself. After said book, I couldn’t stop anymore. In recent years, my horse novel addiction had gone unnoticed. The only people who knew about it were a couple of Internet friends I haven’t been much in touch with and like-minded people on the PonyClub book club board. I was content and left in blissful peace. Then, I started to make new friends on Goodreads, which was also just fine – until I went on Twitter. Gone were the peaceful days in my horse novel paradise, replaced by constant mobbing and my silent tears …