Top 5 Saturday: Water on the Cover

December 12, 2020December 12, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads19 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: 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 😂

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

First Lines Friday – 11 December

December 12, 2020December 11, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads15 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:

“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?

#TopTenTuesday: Christmas Romances for the Holidays!

December 8, 2020December 8, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads44 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: 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!

#5OnMyTBR: Small Towns…

December 8, 2020December 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads31 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: Small Town.

Goodreads Monday – Daughter of the Burning City by Amanda Foody

December 7, 2020December 7, 2020 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 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.

Top 5 Saturday: Apocalyptic Books

December 5, 2020December 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads16 Comments

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:

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

First Lines Friday – 04 December

December 4, 2020December 4, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads17 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:

“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?

#TopTenTuesday: Books I Want to Read Again

December 1, 2020December 7, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads43 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 want to read again.

Well, I thought that this was a pretty fitting topic as just last Friday, I shared my thoughts on rereading and I said that while I’m not much of a rereader, I would like to do it more–if only it weren’t for all the books sitting on my ever growing TBR! I didn’t mention in my post what books I’d like to reread again so what a perfect time do it with this TTT!

Almost all of these are part of a series and they’ve made it onto this list because my memory is the worst thing to exist™️ and I need to refresh it before I move onto the final book in the series. The standalones are because I remember loving them so much when I did read them (some as far back as middle school!) but I don’t recall (m)any details now so it might even be like reading a brand new book again, which is always super exciting! Yay for having terrible memory! 😂

#5OnMyTBR: Shorties (Under 150)

December 1, 2020November 30, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads14 Comments

This week’s prompt is: Shorties (under 150 pages).

Goodreads Monday – The Book of M by Peng Shepherd

November 30, 2020November 30, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads5 Comments

*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 Book of M by Peng Shepherd. This is a post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel that was published in 2018 and has a 3.69 rating on Goodreads with 2k+ reviews.