Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, a weekly featurefor 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:
“Can you see the girl crying? She’s not always easy to spot. She may have her head down, pretending to be on her phone, using her hair to cover her blotchy face.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
Just two months ago (yes, just) I was tagged by the very wonderful Mani of Mani’s Book Corner to do the Mystery Blogger Award! Thanks so much for the tag, lovely 💞 And sorry it has only taken me two months to get around to doing it! Go on and check out + follow Mani’s blog if you haven’t done so already — you won’t regret it 😉
So, what’s the Mystery BlogGER award?
The Mystery Blogger Award is an award for amazing bloggers with ingenious posts. Their blog not only captivates; it inspires and motivates. They are one of the best out there, and they deserve every recognition they get. This award is also for bloggers who find fun and inspiration in blogging; they do it with so much love and passion. The award was created by Okoto!
some rules…
Acknowledge the blog that gave it to you and display the award
Put the award logo/image on your blog.
List these rules!
Thank whoever nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
Mention the creator of the award and provide a link as well.
Tell your readers 3 things about yourself.
You have to nominate 10 – 20 people.
Notify your nominees by commenting on their blog.
Ask your nominees any 5 questions of your choice.
Share a link to your best post(s).
3 things about me…
i’m 32 years old!
I know this isn’t particularly… interesting — age is nothing but a number after all — but I do get curious about the ages of those I interact with online, so I thought I’d throw that out there. Plus, I just turned 32 about ten days ago now, so that’s fun!
i love to bake things… but I rarely eat what i make!
You’re probably thinking that I must be an awful baker… But I’ve been told that my baked goods aren’t bad (not the best obviously but still homely and delicious)! I love the whole process of baking (I am one of those people that love to measure things out precisely otherwise I’m convinced it’ll be a disaster) but the time I finish baking, I just don’t feel like eating it anymore? Is it just me? LOL! It’s a good thing my friends/colleagues/family are always more than willing to eat what I make! 😂
I don’t have a favourite number or colour…
I used to say my favourite number was 4 because it was my favourite boy band member’s favourite. I usually say my favourite colour is black because I do love black and the majority of my wardrobe is black/grey, but it also really depends on my mood. I do love everything and anything pastel though — so if I had to pick I’d just say anything pastel 😂 I’ve been leaning towards pink/purple lately! I’ve said it before but I’m really bad at picking favourites 😅
mani’s questions:
What is the best book you’ve received as a gift?
It’s kind of sad to admit but… I really don’t receive books as gifts? The last time I received a book as a gift (without asking for it or winning a giveaway or anything like that) was actually… Christmas 2012! LOL so sad. It was my first Christmas in the UK and I was staying with my bestie who was visiting Bristol at the time with her hubs. We had a secret santa at his and one of his friends gifted me this gorgeous copy of Doctor Zhivago. Ashamed to admit that I haven’t read it yet… 🙃
Do you re-read, and if so which book was your latest re-read?
I hardly ever re-read. There are a few books that I have re-read over the years and well, that’s mostly Jane Austen (my comfort read!) 😂 But earlier this year I did decide to re-read the first two books of The Arc of a Scythe series before reading the third and final book immediately after.
tell us your favourite book quote
As I’ve mentioned about a million times by now, I struggle a lot with these “favourite” questions because I’m so indecisive! 😅 So, while this may not be my number one, the quote below is definitely up there in favourites. It is from one of my all-time favourite books The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, which I’ve also mentioned a million times on my blog 😂
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside of you.”
Which were your favourite subjects in school?
With an answer that will surprise absolutely nobody: English/Humanities were my top favourite subjects! But I also really liked Computer Science, which was all the “back-end” related things to HTML, creating websites etc., and Environmental Science! Enviro sci ended up being a lot more practical with us doing lots of data gathering from the “field” (lol going to the river behind our school etc.) and my teacher was just grand!
As you know, if books are my first love, animals are a close second, so do you have any pets? Please feel free to share some cute photos!!!
I do have two floofs! Their names are Tripper and Cookie. We adopted them when we were living in Cambodia in 2010 and they’ve been with the family ever since. They’re actually pretty well traveled doggos and have moved with us to the Philippines and now to Indonesia, where they live with my parents in Jakarta. Leaving them to go to do my Masters in the UK was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do — pretty sure I cried more over leaving them than my parents/siblings (I can’t even say I’m joking lol) 😂 They’re no longer young but they’ll forever be my fur babies 💞 These aren’t the best photos of them but for some reason I can’t find other photos of them right now 🙃
my five questions to you
If you were forced to choose, would you eat only sweet or only savoury foods for the rest of your life? 😈
What type of content tends to inspire you and your blog content (or your instagram)?
If you could gift a person of your choice a book that holds a lot of meaning to you, which person would you give this book to and what book would it be?
You wake up one morning to find yourself in the world of the last book you read. Where are you and would you survive the day?
(partly inspired by Mani’s last question!) What fictional creature/animal would you like to have as a pet/animal friend?
I’M TAGGING:
Please feel free to ignore this post and the tag if tags aren’t your thing! No pressure at all and if you’re not tagged but want to do it, go for gold!Don’t forget to link back so I can see your answers too 😍
Hi, friends! I’m so excited to be back with another The Fantastic Flying Book Club tour post today for Half Life by Lillian Clark! Huge thanks to the FFBC for organising these amazing tours and to the authors for making the eARCs available to us.
Be sure to click on the banner above to see the other bloggers on tour! 😊
Half Life Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers Release date: 09 June 2020 Genre: Young Adult Science Fiction
Panda Rating:
An overachiever enrolls in an experimental clone study to prove that two (of her own) heads are better than one in this fast-paced, near-future adventure that’s Black Mirror meets Becky Albertalli.
There aren’t enough hours in the day for Lucille–perfectionist, overachiever–to do everything she has to do, and there certainly aren’t enough hours to hang out with friends, fall in love, get in trouble–all the teenage things she knows she should want to be doing instead of preparing for a flawless future. So when she sees an ad for Life2: Do more. Be more, she’s intrigued.
The company is looking for beta testers to enroll in an experimental clone program, and in the aftermath of a series of disappointments, Lucille is feeling reckless enough to jump in. At first, it’s perfect: her clone, Lucy, is exactly what she needed to make her life manageable and have time for a social life. But it doesn’t take long for Lucy to become more Lucy and less Lucille, and Lucille is forced to stop looking at Lucy as a reflection and start seeing her as a window–a glimpse at someone else living her own life, but better. Lucy does what she really wants to, not what she thinks she should want to, and Lucille is left wondering how much she was even a part of the perfect life she’d constructed for herself. Lucille wanted Lucy to help her relationships with everyone else, but how can she do that without first rectifying her relationship with herself?
It’s the summer of 1955. For Ethan Harper, a biracial kid raised mostly by his white father, race has always been a distant conversation. When he’s sent to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in small-town Alabama, his Blackness is suddenly front and center, and no one is shy about making it known he’s not welcome there. Except for Juniper Jones. The town’s resident oddball and free spirit, she’s everything the townspeople aren’t―open, kind, and full of acceptance.
Armed with two bikes and an unlimited supply of root beer floats, Ethan and Juniper set out to find their place in a town that’s bent on rejecting them. As Ethan is confronted for the first time by what it means to be Black in America, Juniper tries to help him see the beauty in even the ugliest reality, and that even the darkest days can give rise to an invincible summer.
Note: The quotes below are taken from an advanced/unfinished copy and are subject to change in the final version.
“It is also, first and foremost, a story about race. It’s a story about the struggle that it was and is to be black in America. And because that is a hard thing, this story deals heavily with racism in the attitudes and languages of certain characters.”
At first I wasn’t sure how to answer this prompt despite how straightforward it is but then I realised that I was unnecessarily complicating things for myself and when I thought that, everything fell into place really quickly 😂 For this prompt, I’m looking specifically at my Goodreads ‘Want-to-read’ list which is currently… a whopping… 1.1k+ books. *COUGH* Yep. That’s insane, right? It really is. It does make me feel better to say that I don’t actually own all these books but because my list is so long, there are undoubtedly plenty that I don’t remember! With my goldfish memory it’s also not surprising that I’ve found more recent adds that I don’t remember adding too 😅 But before I ramble on even further, let’s get to it!
Although these books have been picked randomly, my list was sorted to ‘ascending’ so it turns out that all of these were added between 2017-2018, and I have absolutely no memory of even coming across some of these books let alone ‘wanting-to-read’ them 🙃
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 or in the post announcing it. You can find the full list of prompts (past and future) at the end of this post!
This week’s prompt is: Pride Free Day. I’m taking this to mean that it’s a freebie so I’m looking atmy most anticipated LGBTQ+ releases for the latter half of 2020!
Welcome back to Goodreads Monday! 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.
This week’s featured book is If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio. This mystery/thriller was published in 2017 and has an impressive 4.10 rating on Goodreads!
We’re back with another Sundays in Bed With… meme! This meme dares to ask you what book has been in your bed this morning and is hosted by Midnight Book Girl. Come share what book you’ve been you’ve spent time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!
I spent Sunday morning in bed finishing my read of The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones and let me tell you friends… The tears did not stop for the last 30%! Oh granola, I’m an emotional reader and we all know how intense emotions have been running these last few weeks but… This book was just… so everything? It was heartwarming and heartbreaking. It’s a poignant YA historical fiction coming-of-age story about race, friendship and family. It’s out later this month (16 June) and it couldn’t be more relevant right now. I’ll be sharing my review for it as part of the FFBC blog tour on Wednesday, so keep an eye out!
It’s the summer of 1955. For Ethan Harper, a biracial kid raised mostly by his white father, race has always been a distant conversation. When he’s sent to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in small-town Alabama, his Blackness is suddenly front and center, and no one is shy about making it known he’s not welcome there. Except for Juniper Jones. The town’s resident oddball and free spirit, she’s everything the townspeople aren’t―open, kind, and full of acceptance.
Armed with two bikes and an unlimited supply of root beer floats, Ethan and Juniper set out to find their place in a town that’s bent on rejecting them. As Ethan is confronted for the first time by what it means to be Black in America, Juniper tries to help him see the beauty in even the ugliest reality, and that even the darkest days can give rise to an invincible summer.
We’re back with 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: books set near/on the sea.
This is a great topic that I don’t think I’ve ever answered in a meme before. Now that I’m thinking about it, I realise that I have a lot of books set near/on/in the sea, so it’s clear I love the idea of a story set by the sea or on the sea. I say I love the idea because these are all on my TBR (*cough*) LOL
It’s funny when I think about it because when I think of books set on the sea I always think of fantasy (mostly YA) and when I think of books set near/by the sea, a lot of the time I think about women’s fiction books that are set in the summer and revolve around quaint sea-side towns and have cute fluffy romances! That said, when thinking about books for this list none were the latter but one was the former 😂 I’m looking forward to reading all of these though and I’m really hoping I’ll be able to get to them them at some point this year!
Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, a weekly featurefor 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:
“All good stories start with bad decisions.“
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
dinipandareads 