Top 5 Saturday: Royalty in the Title

February 6, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads10 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: Royalty in the Title (King, Queen, Princess, Prince, etc.)

This was only easy because of the search function on Goodreads but otherwise I had a surprisingly difficult time calling to mind the “royal titles” I have on my TBR. Memory, she eludes me often! 😂 On the whole, while it does seem that there are a lot of titles with royalty in them, I don’t seem to find myself gravitating towards them more than other kinds of titles/books. I do read quite a few stories about royals as they’re found in abundance in fantasies, especially YA, but perhaps I think that because I read mostly YA. With that said, here are five titles that are on my TBR that I’m looking forward to reading! Unsurprisingly, most are fantasy but there’s a romance and poetry collection in the mix too! 😉

KING OF SCARS

#TopTenTuesday: 10 Books from the 1980s

February 2, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads41 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 Written Before I Was Born (These can be books you’ve read or want to read!) (submitted by Davida Chazan @ The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog)

Well, I can’t say that I’ve ever done a prompt like this one before! Prior to starting this book blog I never really paid attention to when books were published. To be honest, even with this book blog, I’m only mostly aware of pub dates for books that I’m reading for blog tours or for ARCs, but otherwise I still don’t pay dates that much attention. So I wasn’t even sure how to go about doing this list but thanks to Goodreads’ compiled lists for books going back to 1980, my decision was made easy! Since I was born in 1988 (I’m old?!) I thought I would share two books from my born year and share one each year going back to 1980. I’m quite surprised to find that I actually do have at least one book for each year! All of these are on my TBR (but like, long, long list TBR with the only exception being Midnight’s Children which is almost immediate TBR lol) and I’ll read them one day… One day! 😂

Top 5 Saturday: Weapons on the Cover

January 31, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads17 Comments

I didn’t think I would struggle so hard to think of covers with weapons on them but I ended up spending a good chunk of time scrolling through my Goodreads TBR to find books for today’s prompt. I’m probably going to be smacking myself in the face when I see other peoples Top 5 Saturday lists because I’ll probably realise I have plenty more books with these covers on my TBR and I just totally forgot about them! 😂

Do I search out these kinds of covers? Not particularly. Do I also find myself more intrigued by a book if it has a weapon on the cover? I think it depends on what else is on there. I know none of these pulled me in because of the weapons–well, okay maybe a bit for These Violent Delights, but all the elements of the cover merge together so nicely and I love how the weapon is kind of obscured but also stands out the more you look at it! Anyway, before I go waffling on any further, here’s what I got on my list:

First Lines Friday – 29 January

January 29, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads7 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:

“Don’t look down, I told myself. If you look down, you’re friggin’ screwed.
There I was, hanging from a second floor window of St Ambrose Hall in a denim miniskirt and my motorcycle boots.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: New-to-Me-Authors from 2020…

January 26, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads24 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: New-to-Me Authors I Read in 2020 (if you didn’t read 10 new authors, that’s fine! Just do what you can)

I thought this was gonna be hard because my memory fails me but I took a quick look at my 2020 reading challenge and had to give myself a smack upside the head because the majority of the books I read last year were by new to me authors. 😂 If you’ve seen my December monthly wrap up and my 2020 yearly wrap up none of these titles will come as a surprise because I’ve mentioned some of them quite a few times (*cough* House in the Cerulean Sea *cough*), but all of these books and authors deserve to be read so I won’t stop gushing about them! Also, I’m mentioning 15 authors because there were so many new and amazing discoveries! 😍

#5OnMyTBR: Challenging Reads

January 26, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads12 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 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: Challenging Reads.

Goodreads Monday – A Short History of Falling: Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying by Joe Hammond

January 25, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads5 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 A Short History of Falling: Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying by Joe Hammond. This is non-fiction that was published in 2019.

First Lines Friday – 22 January

January 22, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

It’s been a hot minute since I did my last FLF but I’m back with it today!

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:

“I never meant to kill my brother. I never set out to hate my father. I never dreamed I would bury my own son. Nor could I have imagined that I would betray the childhood friend who saved my life, or win a Pulitzer Prize for telling a lie.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: 10 Books I Didn’t Read in 2020… But Will Read in 2021!

January 19, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads56 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 I Meant to Read In 2020 but Didn’t Get To (You could take this opportunity to tell us what’s left on your seasonal TBRs from last year. Or books you were super excited about and then you didn’t get to them.)

At the tail end of December, I made a list for the weekly meme, #5OnMyTBR, about five books I planned to read in 2020 but never got around to before the year ended. There are obviously a lot more than five, so I’m glad to highlight even more books this week, but on top of that, these are the backlist books (including 2020 releases) that I want to prioritise this year. I’ve heard pretty much all good things about so many of these titles and I know they made it onto a lot of peoples’ favourites lists, so that makes me even more excited to read them!

While the books I listed in the #5OnMyTBR post are also top priority, I won’t be repeating them here today! On that note, here are ten of the books I didn’t get to read last year but will be prioritised (and for sure READ!) in 2021! 😉🤞🏽