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 The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen. It’s a YA** romantasy that came out in 2020 and has an average rating of 4.11 with several thousand reviews/ratings on Goodreads. It’s the first book in The Bridge Kingdom series (1 of 5).
I just had a look for when I did my last Top 5 Saturday and it was back in April! It’s been a long time but earlier this week Mandy announced that they’re bringing back the weekly meme and I’m happy to be taking part in it again! As usual, I’ll be listing the new topics at the end of the post.
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: People on the cover.
This week I’ll be listing five books from my Goodreads TBR! I’m not always a fan of people on covers, especially when they’re “real” people but I am a huge fan of illustrated characters on covers. I don’t know if I can say that this trend is illustrated people on covers trend is quite new but I have noticed it more and more in contemporary romances over the years, and now in a lot of other genres, too. I hope that these covers will continue being made (especially in romances!) because they’re absolutely some of my favourites 😍 On that note, here are some of my most recent adds to the TBR with people on the cover!
The first openly nonbinary contestant on America’s favorite cooking show falls for their clumsy competitor in this delicious romantic comedy debut “that is both fantastically fun and crack your heart wide open vulnerable.” (Rosie Danan, author of The Roommate)
Recently divorced and on the verge of bankruptcy, Dahlia Woodson is ready to reinvent herself on the popular reality competition show Chef’s Special. Too bad the first memorable move she makes is falling flat on her face, sending fish tacos flying—not quite the fresh start she was hoping for. Still, she’s focused on winning, until she meets someone she might want a future with more than she needs the prize money.
After announcing their pronouns on national television, London Parker has enough on their mind without worrying about the klutzy competitor stationed in front of them. They’re there to prove the trolls—including a fellow contestant and their dad—wrong, and falling in love was never part of the plan.
As London and Dahlia get closer, reality starts to fall away. Goodbye, guilt about divorce, anxiety about uncertain futures, and stress from transphobia. Hello, hilarious shenanigans on set, wedding crashing, and spontaneous dips into the Pacific. But as the finale draws near, Dahlia and London’s steamy relationship starts to feel the heat both in and outside the kitchen—and they must figure out if they have the right ingredients for a happily ever after.
It’s been ages since I’ve done one of these and the long list of tags that I need to do have been growing and sending me into a mild panic, so I figured now is as good a time as any to start cutting it down! I decided to go with something a little simpler to ease me back into the groove of doing tags so I’ve decided to do The Last Ten Books book tag that Kerri @ Kerri McBookNerd tagged me in last month.
Thanks so much for the tag, Kerri! If you haven’t already done so, do check out her blog for awesome reviews, spotlights and other great bookish content! 😍
Now, let’s get down to business…
After doing a little internet sleuthing, I found that this original tag was created by booktuber: Marc Nash and you can watch his original video below. Thanks for creating such an awesome tag! 😊
THE LAST BOOK I GAVE UP ON
This took me a little while to figure out cos I actually couldn’t remember the last time I DNF’d a book. So I had to dig deep into my archives and I realised the last book was Relentless Habit by Karen Renee. It was a sexy romance but I found it neither sexy nor romantic… So 🤷🏻♀️
THE LAST BOOK I REREAD
Oof, this is another thing I haven’t done in months! I think the last book I re-read was Aurora Rising in preparation for my buddy read with Sammie for book two, which we finished earlier this year. I listened to the audiobook with my re-read and it was fantastically done with a full cast and I loved it!
THE LAST BOOK I BOUGHT
Battle Royal by Lucy Parker. I am so incredibly excited to start this book because I’ve been seeing reviews for it everywhere lately and the hype is big, friends! I took a peek at the first few paragraphs last night and I could already tell I’m going to love it 😍
THE LAST BOOK I WROTE IN THE MARGINS OF
I’m going a bit rogue on this one because I don’t ever write in the margins? But I did write sticky notes and place them along the margins for a few books this year and the last one was Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman. This one came in like a wrecking ball and I needed to chronicle my feels.
THE LAST BOOK THAT I HAD SIGNED
Well, I do have quite a few signed editions thanks to being subscribed to a book box (which has now changed so I’ll definitely miss that)! The last ‘signed’ purchase that I made was the Brown Sisters Series by Talia Hibbert. It’s a digital signature though, which is kind of a bummer, but still counts, right?
THE LAST BOOK I LOST
It’s been a very long time since I last lost a book—which is actually kind of surprising to me considering I’m pretty forgetful 😂 The last book I lost was The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. I think I might’ve left this on a plane or airport back in 2009/10 and it made me pretty sad cos I was getting really into it!
THE LAST BOOK I HAD TO REPLACE
I had to request a replacement copy of The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones by Daven McQueen from BD last year because my order was so water damaged and ripped that I couldn’t even open the book! This is my interpretation of the question lol
THE LAST BOOK I ARGUED OVER
Oh… Um… Have I ever argued over a book before? I don’t think that I ever have… At least not that I can actually remember 😂
THE LAST BOOK I PRE-ORDERED
As an international reader, I don’t actually pre-order a lot of books unless it’s for a special signed edition or for pre-order goodies because most of the time I get them late anyway. 😂 But according to my records the last book I pre-ordered was Jade Fire Gold by June C.L. Tan! It looks and sounds so good and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.
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 To Best the Boys by Mary Weber. It’s a YA fantasy/dystopia that came out in 2019 and has an average rating of 3.71 on Goodreads.
I was inspired to do this post after watching one of my fave booktubers, Jack Edwards, post a video reading the highest and lowest rated books on his bookshelf. It looked like a lot of fun and I thought, why not give it a go cos it seems like a great way to continue slashing down the TBR!
I initially thought about cataloguing all the unread books on my bookshelf like he did, but I admittedly have a lot more and I was feeling a little lazy! 😬 So instead I decided to take a look at my Goodreads “to-read” shelf, which definitely changes up the dynamic because the list includes books that I don’t own and also books that aren’t published yet. I also realised that would affect the average rating more as I noticed many of the books have a lower number of ratings/reviews, which obviously skews the results that come up top and bottom. So, it was already a little more complicated but instead of abandoning the idea I thought I’d still go through with it and I’m glad I did!
I chose the books based on 1) whether it was out or not and 2) whether I had a copy (physical/digital/ARC)—it’s not a perfect solution but it did end up working for me! In the end, the two books I had to read were: With You Forever by Chloe Liese and The Perfect Date by Evelyn Lozada. Both were ARCs that I had on hand so that was a good start and again, I know it’s not the most perfect system, but I just rolled with it! Here are some stats for the books:
Lowest rating: The Perfect Date Genre: Contemporary Romance Series: No Publication: June 2019 GR Rating: 2.61 (1,232 ratings)
Although I’ve been in a romance mood for a while, as a mood reader whose moods can flip very quickly, I was a bit hesitant to start the books, though I was also pretty excited about starting this small ‘project’ that I knew could help me get back into reviewing and blogging. Plus, I’d be knocking out two books from my TBR and my ARC list and what’s not to love about that, right?
Thankfully, things went pretty smoothly overall. I read the lowest rated book first which I thought might’ve been a mistake but it ended up working out well in the end. Both are also contemporary romances so I felt that put them on an ‘even’ level to start and I managed to read both pretty quickly, finishing one for each day of the weekend. That said, my reading experience for both books were very different. 🤣
THE NOT SO PERFECT DATE
To say that I didn’t enjoy The Perfect Date would be an understatement and after putting myself through the torture that was reading it, I can understand why this title has the rating that it does. Before I started I thought that it surely couldn’t be that bad—it’s got a cute cover, it’s a single-parent fake-dating trope romance that promises a sweet love story—what could possibly go wrong? The answer is a lot. I mean, a lot can go wrong and if there’s anyone who truly thinks this book had the “perfect date” I would ask them if they were okay. I know that sounds harsh but… this hero is the worst I’ve ever read in a romance to date. He was a condescending, egotistical, misogynistic asshole that did not change and I could not fathom how anyone would consider him perfect in any way. Long story short, it took me until the 10% mark to realise why I never finished this (very overdue) ARC in the first place but I truly wish that I had DNF’d it. It was a slog and I gave it 1 star—my first of 2021. 🥺
STAY WITH ME FOREVER
After finishing that perfectly hot mess, I was honestly unsure whether I wanted to keep reading romance but I thought: this is Chloe Liese, there’s no way I’m not gonna love it. As much as I jinxed myself when I said the first book couldn’t be that bad, I’m so happy to say that I wasn’t wrong about this one. With You Forever is a wonderful addition to the Bergman Brothers series and if you’ve been around my blog for a while, you’ll know this series is one of my all-time faves (shameless plug: check out my reviews for the first three in the series: Only When It’s Us, Always Only You, Ever After Always)! There was so much heart and tender emotion in this book and I only swooned about a thousand times because the slow-burn romance between Axel and Rooney was so not only super steamy but it was beautifully heartwarming as well. I cannot recommend this book (and this series) enough and you just might hear me gushing about it a bit more until release date. I gave it 4.5 swoontastic stars (rounded up)! 😍
DO I AGREE WITH THE RATINGS?
By the time I finished reading both books I couldn’t disagree with their respective ratings on Goodreads. Obviously, Liese’ book has a higher rating with a lower number of reviews, but I do feel that once the book is published and more people read it, its rating will remain high. I was also wondering whether my feelings for The Perfect Date were swayed at all by my knowledge of its low rating, and while I might’ve briefly toyed with the thought, I really don’t think that was the case. The totality of that book (characters, plot and writing) was just not good and I’m honestly a little shocked it was actually published by a major publishing house!
Overall, I had a lot of fun doing this little reading project. I thought it was a great way to bring some different content to my blog (although nothing ground breaking or anything) and it helped me get back into the swing of writing and reviewing! I’m quite tempted to keep doing this for books on my various TBRs: physical, digital, andARCs, and seeing whether those turn out as well as this one did!
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Have you read either of these books or are they on your TBR? Do you have any fun ‘reading project’ ideas that you’ve seen or done yourself? I’d defo love to hear about them!
(I honestly can’t type that without singing the first bars to Adele’s song!)
It’s been… a while, hasn’t it? This mini-break that I intended on taking took on a life of its own and it resulted in me taking a break for the last… almost 3 months now? Oops! If you’ve stuck around, you would’ve noticed that I posted a few blog tour reviews and spotlights during my break but for the most part I have really disengaged. I’m honestly quite surprised that there are still people out there who continue to engage and comment despite my absence, so thank you so much for your support! I appreciate all of you so much ❤️
In the time I’ve been away, part of me felt really free knowing that I don’t have to come online after work or on my days off to write a post or do other blog related things. It was so nice to not have that pressure I put on myself as I was pretty overwhelmed with constantly being online and spending so many hours behind a screen in my down time, when I was already staring at the screen for hours for work. That said, a bigger part of me really missed this community! I missed feeling productive by creating posts, reading and especiallyreviewing all the books, but I especially missed engaging with all of you. But when I go MIA, I tend to really go MIA and so I haven’t been hanging out online that much over the last few months! It’s been weird cutting off so abruptly but I think it did really help me in the end (even though it took much longer to get here than I anticipated)!
I’ve been trying to find the “right time” to come back and because I never found it, I kept postponing writing this post and kept pushing back my restart date. Sometimes though the right time never comes around, so I decided to suck it up and write a short post today to say HELLO! and share a quick update of what I’ve read (most recently), what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next. I hope to catch up with more of your blogs very soon and hopefully it won’t take me too long to get into the groove of blogging again. Who knows, maybe this time I’ll even manage to get myself organised enough to start scheduling posts in advance?! 😂
I’ve been in a pretty big romance mood lately, so I’ve been bingeing a lot of those (and I only plan to read more asap)! 😂 I discovered a new romance author that I’d love to read more from, a fun urban fantasy by a new-to-me indie author, and a favourite YA anthology with stories full of change, love and hope. I also devoured the latest book in a romance series by an author that never fails to make me laugh, andI finally picked up a romantasy series that’s been sat on my TBR for ages, thanks to a buddy read with Leslie and Maya!
I’ve currently only got the one book going right now. Revenge of the Sluts has been a pretty interesting YA contemporary mystery set in high school that explores slut shaming, revenge porn, toxic masculinity and society’s double standards. The writing is overly descriptive, the pace a little slow, and the mystery a little predictable but it has been a pretty interesting read and could generate some good discussions!
I’m not quite sure what I want to read next. I did just get an ARC for a Katee Robert book so I’m tempted to pick that up now, but I’m also hoping to catch up on some more ARCs this month, so these are some other highly likely possibilities…
So, that’s it! I’m back (hopefully)! How are all of you doing? What have you been reading? I hope to catch up with as many of your blogs as possible in the days/weeks to come!
For this week’s topic I decided to focus on middle grade books because they have some of the BEST colourful covers! Maybe I’m biased because I love illustrated covers and middle grade books always serve hard when it comes to those. You can bet that if I had the money and the space, I would populate a whole section of shelves with these gorgeous books and it’d be fire 😍🔥 This list is a mix of books I’ve read and a few that are still waiting for me to pick them up!
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. You can find the full list of prompts (past and future) at the end of this post!
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 Night Spinner by Addie Thorley. This is a YA fantasy and is the first book of a duology. It’s apparently a retelling of The Hunchback in Notre Dame? 😍
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: Longest Books (Books you’ve rad, on your TBR.)
I usually look at books that are on my TBR for my Saturday posts but I feel like I’ve already looked at the biggest books on my to-read list quite a few times already so I thought it’d be fun to take a look back at the longest books I have read. I had a few predictions for some titles but I was surprised to find only one of my ‘predictions’ made it onto this list, and it was the shortest of the lot! I also focused this list on books that are standalones or the first books in a series, so there were a couple that were even longer than the ones mentioned here but they were all the third or even fifth and sixth books in a series. All that being said, here are some of the biggest chonksters I’ve managed to tackle:
dinipandareads 