#TopTenTuesday: Summer Vibes

June 2, 2020June 2, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads46 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 Give Off Summer Vibes (submitted by Kristin @ Lukten av Trykksverte)

Prompts to do with seasons are always a bit tough for me since I live in the tropics and it’s basically summer the year round 😂 But I can get on board with the idea of summer! Thinking of books that give off summer vibes obviously means a lot of cover judging, right? I mean, what catches my eye when I think of summer vibes are bright and vivid splashes of colour leaning towards pinks, yellows and blues. Maybe some flowers, palm trees, beaches (this is sounding cliche, isn’t it? LOL)… In terms of the plot, I think lighter and maybe even shorter reads would do the trick. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with more serious topics being discussed of course but just thinking of that blazing sun slowing down my brain waves definitely has me thinking the lighter the better!

So after a little bit of digging through my TBR and this slightly long-winded post introduction 😂 I’ve come up with this list of 10 books on my TBR that give off summer vibes:

#5OnMyTBR: LGBTQ+ Main Character

June 1, 2020June 1, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads19 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: LGBTQ+ Main Characters

Goodreads Monday – Romanov by Nadine Brandes

June 1, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads16 Comments

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 Romanov by Nadine Brandes. This is a standalone Young Adult Historical Fiction/Fantasy re-telling about the famous Romanov family. This was released in May 2019 and currently has a 3.80 rating on Goodreads!

Top 5 Saturday: Books from Male only POVs

May 30, 2020May 30, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads27 Comments

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: male POVs — I’m taking this to mean male only POVs

Okay wow, I didn’t think I’d struggle as much as I did to think of a list for today’s prompt! Turns out, a lot of the books I own on my TBR aren’t written from male (only) POVs 🙃 I also don’t think I ever properly paid attention to this before (oops! 🙈) but that’s pretty interesting to note! Also interesting was that when I took to Google and Goodreads (as I usually do to jog my memory for these prompts), it turns out a lot of male POV lists are either romance or YA related (or both), with little to no mention of contemporary fiction, mysteries/thrillers, adult fantasy or the sub-genres. So that wasn’t really useful… but after deep-diving into my failing memory (and my Kindle shelf!) I’ve managed to make a list of five books from mixed genres including adult fantasy, middle-grade fantasy and contemporary fiction!

First Lines Friday – 29 May

May 29, 2020May 29, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads5 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:

“As seems to be the custom, bad news comes with the afternoon mail: the news that his granddaughter was rejected from her top-choice college, then a call to jury duty. Today, though, it is much worse.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: Opening Lines from Five-Star Reads!

May 26, 2020July 18, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads55 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: Opening Lines (Best, favorite, funny, unique, shocking, gripping, lines that grabbed you immediately, etc.)

Who doesn’t love a good opening line?! I certainly do and I usually share some first/opening lines every Friday for my “First Lines Friday” posts! Since this week’s prompt is open to interpretation I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do since it’s so hard for me to choose “favourites” — there are always so many, how do I choose?!

(Also, my memory is really not that great 😂)

So I decided to keep things simple, especially as I’m writing this during one of my quick work breaks lol, and look at the opening lines from my last ten ★★★★★ (5 star) reads! Yes, some of these might be more than just the first line, but opening lines plural, right? 😂

#5OnMyTBR: Blue Covers

May 25, 2020May 25, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads19 Comments

This week’s prompt is: Blue Covers

Goodreads Monday – Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw

May 25, 2020May 25, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads11 Comments

Wooh, it’s been a hot minute since I did one of these but I’m glad to be back with it!
This week’s featured book is Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw. This is a standalone (I think) Young Adult Fantasy that was released towards the end of last year and it currently has a 3.82 rating on Goodreads!

Top 5 Saturday: Books with Plant/Flower Covers!

May 23, 2020May 23, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads24 Comments

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 about plants/flowers (can be on the cover, in title or plot)!

I’ve only ever read one book that’s about plants specifically and it was a horror novel that left me feeling extremely uncomfortable being around any vine-y plants for quite some time! Thanks to The Ruins for that nightmare!

I think having flowers and leaves on covers has been a big trend in recent years as I’ve seen my fair share of them. I’m admittedly a sucker for these kinds of covers though! They’re eye-catching, bold and colourful but also sometimes just really appealing in their simplicity. That said, I don’t think any of these are actually about plants/flowers, so this is going to be an appreciation post for books on my TBR with plants/flowers on the cover!

First Lines Friday – 22 May

May 22, 2020May 22, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads11 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:

“My parents didn’t seem the sort of people who would end up killing someone. Everyone would say that – except the boy who died, who isn’t saying anything. He carried his story with him off the edges of the earth, like the others who died along the way. This story, my story, belongs to them too.”