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:
“My house has chicken legs. Two or three times a year, without warning, it stands up in the middle of the night and walks away from where we’ve been living. It might walk a hundred miles or it might walk a thousand, but where it lands is always the same. A lonely, bleak place at the edge of civilization.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
We’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: Titles that would make good band names (submitted by Michelle).
Ooh, this is a really fun topic! I’ve never looked at a title and thought it’d make a good band name but now that the seed has been planted, there are quite a few that pop up in my head! You might notice a trend in the types of titles that I pick… Also, for some reason when I’m thinking bands my mind doesn’t immediately think boy/girl pop bands but more like… heavy metal/rock bands? LOL Maybe it’s residual from my emo days when I used to listen to bands with names that (now) remind me of book titles 🤣 It’s weird that my brain does this but interesting. Anyway, without further ado, let’s get to it! I’m really curious to see if any other bloggers will pick the same book titles?!
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!
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 with sibling relationships.
As much as I love a good love ship, I really enjoy books that explore sibling relationships; more specifically positive and healthy sibling relationships! I love the good feels reading about these bring me! Plus, it also makes me more determined to have better relationships with my own siblings! I don’t have “terrible” relationships with my siblings, of course we disagree now and then, though my older brother doesn’t have a good relationship with basically any of us. But I digress! Basically, I love sibling relationships in books and here’s a selection from my TBR that I’ve heard have interesting ones:
Ellery’s never been to Echo Ridge, but she’s heard all about it. It’s where her aunt went missing at age sixteen, never to return. Where a Homecoming Queen’s murder five years ago made national news. And where Ellery now has to live with a grandmother she barely knows, after her failed-actress mother lands in rehab. No one knows what happened to either girl, and Ellery’s family is still haunted by their loss. Malcolm grew up in the shadow of the Homecoming Queen’s death. His older brother was the prime suspect and left Echo Ridge in disgrace. His mother’s remarriage vaulted her and Malcolm into Echo Ridge’s upper crust, but their new status grows shaky when mysterious threats around town hint that a killer plans to strike again. No one has forgotten Malcolm’s brother-and nobody trusts him when he suddenly returns to town. Ellery and Malcolm both know it’s hard to let go when you don’t have closure. Then another girl disappears, and Ellery and Malcolm were the last people to see her alive. As they race to unravel what happened, they realize every secret has layers in Echo Ridge. The truth might be closer to home than either of them want to believe. And somebody would kill to keep it hidden.
Yep, it’s this book again. I know I’ve mentioned Two Can Keep A Secret a few times lately but this is an attempt at subliminally messaging my own conscience to finally read the damn book. 😂 I’ve heard that the twins in this are great characters and honestly, I don’t read books with twins very often.
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:
“If I believe in omens, this would be a bad one. There’s only one suitcase left on the baggage carousel. It’s bright pink, covered with Hello Kitty stickers, and definitely not mine.”
Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?
Hello, hello and welcome back to another episode of WWW Wednesday, a weekly meme hosted by Sam @ Taking On A World of Words, which means I’ll be answering these questions:
What did you read last?
What are you currently reading?
What will you read next?
Oh-em-goodness, can you believe?! Ya girl finished THREE books since last Wednesday! Although gaming is still taking up a lot of my waking hours outside of work, I’m chuffed that I can *finally* say I finished more than one book 😍 Happy tears for sure, fam!
They Went Left by Monica Hesse ★★★★★ This was a blog tour read and ugh, this book! This had me silently crying with tears constantly flowing down my face, punctuated by the occasional sob. It was so emotional and I don’t know what kinda crazy I was in thinking that a story on the aftermath of the Holocaust would be less emotional 🤦🏻♀️ I recommend it to those lovers of historical fiction set in this period and for masochists such as myself!Check out my full review.
Donut Disturb (Donut Disturb #1) by Melissa Williams ★★☆☆☆ After reading the above book, I needed something light and this one sounded perfect! Unfortunately… I felt like I was reading a half-finished novel. No mistake, this was a very light read because all the things concerning character and plot development happened off page. We were shown nothing and told everything. Plus, there were so many tenses (past/present) used in one paragraph it was frustrating because I felt like I was getting whiplash trying to follow the writing. The characters weren’t bad but I also just didn’t feel for any of them. This was definitely not a win! Review coming soon.
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami ★★★½ This is another blog tour read and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t fully connect with the stories or characters. I’ve always struggled to really enjoy short stories and this one was sadly no different. These stories were more like character portraits, and they were very short and easy reads, but I was also left wanting more. Still, I thought it was a good exploration of immigrants and the reasons why people would risk their lives to cross the unpredictable sea in search of a better life; because of hope. I liked how Lalami brought twists to some of these stories as well, but I think I just prefer full-length novels over short stories.My full review is going up tomorrow!
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 Enjoyed but Rarely Talk About (This is for the books you liked, but rarely come up in conversation or rarely fit a TTT topic, etc.)!
OK, I have to admit that I struggled a bit with this one because a lot of the books I loved/enjoyed I DO talk about quite often? I feel like maybe I talk about all of them too much? Admittedly these books are more “recent” reads over the last few years because my memory is truly terrible. It’s weird and (I know) doesn’t make sense but it is what it is! So I went digging through Goodreads and found some reads that I think qualify (sorry if I end up cheating just a little bit)! I don’t talk about these books much because there’ve never really been any prompts in tags, award questions, or TTT topics that necessarily fit it!
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: Heartwarming and I’m going to be focusing on graphic novels specifically!
It’s the first Goodreads Monday of 2020, friends! 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 Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I’m still not sure why I haven’t read this yet since I’m a big fan of Gaiman’s books. I’ve never read anything by Pratchett though so I’m curious about what I’ll think of this book in the end. This urban fantasy has a 4.25 star average with 499k+ ratings and 25.4k+ reviews, which is pretty wow!
I totally spaced yesterday and forgot that it was Saturday because the days have blurred since I’ve been WFH… I only realised I had missed Saturday’s post when I was doing a little after midnight gaming. Oops!
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 with a colour in the title.
I thought that I would be able to very easily recall five titles with colours in them off the top of my head but apparently I can’t! LOL So here comes Goodreads and Google searches to the rescue! I don’t know what I’d without these mad interwebs brains 😂
JADE CITY is a gripping Godfather-esque saga of intergenerational blood feuds, vicious politics, magic, and kungfu. The Kaul family is one of two crime syndicates that control the island of Kekon. It’s the only place in the world that produces rare magical jade, which grants those with the right training and heritage superhuman abilities. The Green Bone clans of honorable jade-wearing warriors once protected the island from foreign invasion–but nowadays, in a bustling post-war metropolis full of fast cars and foreign money, Green Bone families like the Kauls are primarily involved in commerce, construction, and the everyday upkeep of the districts under their protection. When the simmering tension between the Kauls and their greatest rivals erupts into open violence in the streets, the outcome of this clan war will determine the fate of all Green Bones and the future of Kekon itself.
JADE CITY! I can’t believe I forgot this one especially since it’s currently on my bedside table as I was attempting to read it a few weeks back! I put a hold on reading this for now because it requires a lot of concentration and I’m really not in the right headspace for it, although I did enjoy what I read!