First Lines Friday – 05 March

March 5, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads13 Comments

Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Here are the rules:

Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“My first dive was followed by my first drink of rye. The sea was filled with the sound of gemstones as I swam, following my mother’s silhouette toward the puddle of light rippling on the surface of the water.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: Characters Whose Job I Wish I Had…

March 2, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads38 Comments

So, we’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Characters Whose Job I Wish I Had (maybe not even because the job sounds fun, but maybe the co-workers are cool or the boss is hot?)

I wasn’t too sure if I was feeling today’s prompt but I decided to just have fun with it and not think too hard about being serious or realistic! I honestly think being able to do what any of these characters do in their stories would not only be so amazing but also so much fun! 😍

#TopTenTuesday: Books That Made Me LOL!

February 23, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads47 Comments

So, we’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Books That Made Me Laugh Out Loud (Claire @ Book Lovers Pizza)

Ooh, I quite like this topic and I don’t think I’ve ever made a list of books that made me LOL before (although maybe I have and my memory is just that bad)! To be honest, I’m an easily amused person and I tend to laugh out loud quite a lot especially if something’s cheeky or cheesy. If you ask my family and friends they’ll tell you that I love to laugh, and usually at things people don’t often laugh at–not in an inappropriate way though, it just really doesn’t take much to get a full-on laugh out of me! I don’t even know where to begin with this list because I’m not kidding when I say that books make me LOL quite often! 😂 I looked through my 20/21 reads and I already have a list that’s overwhelmingly large, so to make it easy on myself I chose some books at random from the big list. These books didn’t just have me giggling, some of them had me breathless with laughter for a while! I do so love to laugh 😉

#5OnMyTBR: Food, Glorious Food!

February 23, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads14 Comments

Hello Mondays, welcome back to #5OnMyTBR, a meme created by the wonderful E @ The Local Bee Hunter’s Nook. This bookish meme gets us to dig even further into our TBRs by simply posting about five books on our TBR! You can learn more about it here. You can find the full list of prompts (past and future) at the end of this post!

This week’s prompt is: Food.

Top 5 Saturday: Books with Daughter in the Title

February 20, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads20 Comments

Welcome back to another Top 5 Saturday! Just in case you don’t know Top 5 Saturday is a weekly meme created by Mandy @ Devouring Books and it’s where we list the top five books (they can be books on your TBR, favourite books, books you loved/hated) based on the week’s topic. You can see the upcoming schedule at the end of my post 🙂 This week’s topic is actually: Books with Family Relationship in the Title (Mother, Father, Daughter, Brother, etc.)

I was hoping this week’s list would be a good mix of family relationship titles but apparently the mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters are incredibly popular while there was a surprising dearth of titles with husband, father, and brother on both my TBR and read list! It’s funny, now that I think about it, it’s always about the woman and mostly in relation to the man? I actually never noticed this before and now I’m wondering why 🤔 In any case, I decided to focus my list on books with ‘daughter’ in the title since this relationship is the one that had the most hits on my TBR (which is usually the focus of my Top 5 lists)~! So on that note, here are five books that I’m looking forward to reading:

First Lines Friday – 19 February

February 19, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads6 Comments

Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“As she woke up in bed, she remembered three things. First, she was traveling through open space. Second, she was about to start a new job, one she could not screw up. Third, she had bribed a government official into giving her a new identity file.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: Mardi Gras Colour Covers!

February 16, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads21 Comments

So, we’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Purple, Yellow, and/or Green Book Covers (in honor of Mardi Gras, which is today!)

I’ve never celebrated Mardi Gras/Carnival in real life although I spent a few hours yesterday participating in the Festival event in Animal Crossing New Horizones and it was a definitely a fun time! 😉 So today’s prompt was a really fun one and I know I’m probably gonna be missing out on a ton of purple, yellow and green book covers but I tried to get a good mix of colours and genres on my list today (lol who am I kidding it’s mostly romance and fantasy! 😂). I’ve loved all of these books (and highly recommend them!) but it also doesn’t hurt that they have great covers too! 😍 I love the brightness and colour pop of all three colours but especially the purples and yellows! Anyway, without further ado, let’s take a look at these popping covers:

#5OnMyTBR: Where’s the Love?

February 16, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads11 Comments

This week’s prompt is: No Romance

Goodreads Monday – The Shadows by Alex North

February 15, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads8 Comments

Welcome back to Goodreads Monday! It’s been a very hot minute since I did one but I figured I might as well get back into it! This weekly meme was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners and it invites you to pick a book from your TBR and explain why you want to read it. Easy enough, right? Feel free to join in if you want to! I’ll be using a random number generator to pick my books from my insanely long GR Want-to-read list.*

*Sorry if a book has been featured twice. I need to make better note of which ones I’ve done already!

This week’s featured book is The Shadows by Alex North. This is a mystery/thriller with some horror that was published in 2020.

Top 5 Saturday: Books with Unique Formats

February 13, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads21 Comments

Welcome back to another Top 5 Saturday! Just in case you don’t know Top 5 Saturday is a weekly meme created by Mandy @ Devouring Books and it’s where we list the top five books (they can be books on your TBR, favourite books, books you loved/hated) based on the week’s topic. You can see the upcoming schedule at the end of my post 🙂 This week’s topic is actually: Book with Unique Format (Diary entries, verse, documents, podcast, blog, etc.)

I can’t believe I had such a hard time coming up with five books for this week’s prompt because I do love a book that’s written in mixed-media format. As it turns out though, I don’t seem to have a lot of them on my TBR although I can think of quite a few that I’ve read and loved, such as the Illuminae Files–which you MUST read if you haven’t yet! In the end, I’ve managed to come up with five books that are a mix of verse and epistolary, and some have been on my TBR for way too long (looking at you, Dracula!) but all of them are high on my priority list for this year!