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: water on the cover.
I don’t think I’ve ever done a prompt about books with water on the cover. I love the many ways water can be presented on an eye-catching cover. It can represent dark and tumultuous emotions but it can also present a calm or meditative state. Although all of these titles are still on my TBR, and perhaps I’m reading too much into it anyway, but I feel like the covers represent the stories (and genres) well! I guess only time will tell, when I finally read the books, whether that’s true or not 😂
It’s Friday and I usually do a “Lets Talk Bookish” post but my brain has been feeling pretty foggy lately and I haven’t the capacity to write good posts, so I decided to do a fun tag! I have a million that I still need to do but, of course, I decided to do one that I wasn’t actually tagged in! It seemed perfect for the upcoming holiday season though. Can you believe it’s practically already mid-December? 🙃 WOT.
I saw this on Stephen’s blog and if you haven’t already, I’d recommend checking it out because Stephen writes great posts and reviews, and is all around awesome! 😉 Now without further ado, let’s get to the tag!
🎄“All I Want For Christmas Is You…” 🎄 What book do you want to see under the Christmas Tree?
Is it really possible to choose one book? If you can, you definitely have a lot more restraint than me! But if I had to choose only onetwo, the books that come to mind are: A Song of Wraiths and Ruin and Felix Ever After. I still haven’t bought the ebooks cos I really want physical copies of these beauts 😂
🎄“Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time…” 🎄 WHAT book that you have read this year have you enjoyed the most?
Surprising absolutely nobody: The House in the Cerulean Sea. I mean… Is this answer getting old? I really don’t care because this book was all kinds of heartwarming and wonderful. My heart fills up with all the fuzzy feelings when I think about it and if you haven’t already, please read it! 🤣
🎄“It’s Beginning to look a lot like Christmas…” 🎄 Which book has THE most festive look to it?
Ooh, this is a toughie because there are so many festive covers that I absolutely adore. I just recently did a post with Christmas romance covers that I think really scream ‘festive’ vibes. Some more examples:
🎄“ELF” 🎄 What book unleashes your inner child?
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This book is one of my top favourite childhood reads and every time I read it or hear mention of it I get thrown back to the giddy feeling I got when I read this book for the first time. The joy that the chocolate factory and all its wonderful oddities gives me is really like no other and when I was a kid I absolutely lived for the magic of this story! 🥰
🎄“The gRINCH” 🎄 your favourite villain…
I think this is gonna be a toss up between Eli and Holland but both are villains in Schwab’s books (Villains and Shades of Magic, respectively). I really love to hate these two 😂
🎄“The HOLIDAY” 🎄 Name your favourite TWO couples…
Oh this is so tough because I read a lot of romances and whenever I love a romance I ship those ships in a big way 😂 The first two couples that popped into my mind were: Calla & Jonah from The Simple Wild (*swoon*) and Maia & Edan from Spin the Dawn (*still swooning*)
🎄What book would you like to give as a present to your followers? 🎄
Hmm… I guess I should go for something other than Cerulean Sea? 😂 I’m also gonna pick a few because I can! These books are from (mostly) different (sub-)genres and ones that I feel deserve more love (well, TPW gets a lot of love but I can’t not mention it because this book!!!). This is kind of inspiring me to do an end of year giveaway, so maybe stay tuned for that? 😉
And that’s a wrap, folks! This was fun and exactly what I needed because I didn’t have to think too hard at the end of a long working day/week.On that note, I’m not tagging anyone specifically but feel free to link back if you wanna do the tag so I can check out your answers too! 🥰
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:
“There was nothing cute about the first time Kerry Fuller met Jesse Strong. He broke her glasses; she bloodied his nose and they both ended up in a tangle of yarn on the floor in the loft space of Strong Knits being scolded by Mama Joy.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
I’m back with another blog tour with The Storytellers on Tour for Stone & Steel (The War of the North Saga #1) by Kate Haley. Thanks to the author for providing a copy in exchange for an honest review!
Be sure to click on the banner below to check out the rest of the bloggers on tour!
The amnesia was supposed to be a good thing. Other soldiers bask in its freedom. Except for Elvac it doesn’t feel right. When he returns from his first year at war he can’t shake the niggling sensation that something is missing. His life has been turned upside down, yet he can’t remember being gone. The only proof of his time away are the scars, and the haunting dreams of fire. With the help of his friends, Elvac begins to regain his lost memories, and with them uncover the truth of his missing year, and what the Church of Sunne is really doing with their War of the North…
So, we’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is:Holiday/Seasonal Freebie (holiday books/covers/titles, wintry reads, snow on cover, cool color covers, takes place in cold settings, cozy scenes on cover, etc.), so I’ve gone for Christmas Romances that I hope to be reading!
Since it’s a holiday/seasonal freebie today, I was debating whether to do a post on the books I want to read before the end of 2020, but I thought it’d end up being not very festive, so I decided to share ten Christmas romances that I’d like to read at some point this month (but also maybe even in January). I’m quite new to seasonal romances but I went a bit wild last year looking at all the gorgeous Christmas covers, and ended up snagging a fair few for 99p on Kindle! I can’t remember what many of these are about but just looking at them gives me those cosy and comforting feels. As with many holiday themed things, I find that sometimes holiday romances can get a little cheesy, but y’know what? We’re here for the cheesy feel-good vibes, especially when so much has been a hot mess this year!
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 Daughter of the Burning City by Amanda Foody. This is a YA fantasy and mystery that was published in 2017 and has a 3.71 rating on Goodreads with almost 1.5k reviews.
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 spent time curled up reading in bed with, or which book you wish you had time to read today!
Well, we basically know that I’ve been “reading” Spellbreaker for quite a while now but since I finished my previous read last night, I decided to pick this up and give it my full attention, so this Sunday I’ll be tucking into bed with it! I don’t know why I’m having such a hard time focusing on this story because I am enjoying what I’m reading but I keep getting distracted while I’m reading and it’s starting to frustrate me 😂 I feel like I need to slap some focus into my head! Haha
The orphaned Elsie Camden learned as a girl that there were two kinds of wizards in the world: those who pay for the power to cast spells and those, like her, born with the ability to break them. But as an unlicensed magic user, her gift is a crime. Commissioned by an underground group known as the Cowls, Elsie uses her spellbreaking to push back against the aristocrats and help the common man. She always did love the tale of Robin Hood.
Elite magic user Bacchus Kelsey is one elusive spell away from his mastership when he catches Elsie breaking an enchantment. To protect her secret, Elsie strikes a bargain. She’ll help Bacchus fix unruly spells around his estate if he doesn’t turn her in. Working together, Elsie’s trust in—and fondness for—the handsome stranger grows. So does her trepidation about the rise in the murders of wizards and the theft of the spellbooks their bodies leave behind.
For a rogue spellbreaker like Elsie, there’s so much to learn about her powers, her family, the intriguing Bacchus, and the untold dangers shadowing every step of a journey she’s destined to complete. But will she uncover the mystery before it’s too late to save everything she loves?
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: apocalyptic books.
Well, I guess it’s about time I did a prompt for (post-)apocalyptic books this year, huh? I’m actually surprised I haven’t done one yet 🤔 Though in all honesty I can’t recall for sure right now because I’m operating on like 10% battery 😅 But I digress! All save one of these titles have been on my TBR for a while now and I did have plans to read either one or two of them this year but I haven’t been in the right mood for them (unsurprisingly). I do usually really enjoy post-apocalytpic stories though, so I’m hoping to get to these at some point in the hopefully not too distant future! So, on that note, here are the books I’m keen to read:
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:
“Let me be clear: I never intended to raise my brother from his grave, though he may claim otherwise. If there’s anything I’ve learned from him in the years since, it’s that the dead hide truths as well as the living.“
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
Can you believe it’s already December? I’m a little shook at how quickly November seemed to zoom right by me and that I can’t recall reading much of anything at all last month!
Work in November was been overwhelmingly busy with projects ending, people leaving, and new things to start sorting for next year as my organisation goes through a merger. Having to prepare communications for the region and projects, as well as representing Southeast Asia in our global works council (similar to a union), on top of finding time to blog and read, really stretched me quite thin! To say that everything seemed to be overflowing might be a bit of an understatement and part of me is even glad to see that we’re in the last month of 2020 now because I’m truly running low on steam 😂
But it hasn’t been all bad! It has been an incredible month for book mail and I’ve received many of the special editions that I ordered earlier in the year. I haven’t spent much on regular book buying in 2020, but I’m 100% positive I made up for all that with the many special editions that I purchased. I really kissed that money goodbye, friends 😂
1) Stack of random new books; 2) SE A Deadly Education; 3) SE The Invisible Life of Addie LaRueIllumicrate Archives: The Poppy War, naked cover art + mind-blowing jacket art!
Now… ON TO THE “FUN” STUFF!
In November, I read 15 books! **Okay, I just totally surprised myself with that count because I expected to see that I only managed to read five books or something because that’s really what this month has felt like 😂 LOL I didn’t have any five star reads or DNFs and the majority this month were 4 stars. If you can’t tell I went on a bit of a historical romance binge and the light reads were exactly what I needed! The books were a good mix of blog tour reads, ARCs and new books on my TBR.
Being the only book I rated 4.5 stars this month, The Cousins was my favourite read but I think the Moose Springs series are close contenders because they really brought me a lot of joy and I can’t wait to continue on with the series in December as I was lucky enough to get the ARC!
dinipandareads 