First Lines Friday – 16 April 2021

April 16, 2021August 13, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads9 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:

“No matter what century you live in, the world will always be filled with assholes.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: Bookish Crayon Colours

April 13, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads20 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: Book Titles That Sound Like They Could Be Crayola Crayon Colors (Take a moment and Google some of the crazy Crayola crayon colors that exist. Can you think of any book titles that sound like they could also be a crayon color? It might be fun to include a description of the kind of color you’re picturing.)

This was a super fun topic but it was also hella hard because my imagination is weak? Or maybe it’s just too wild 😂 I definitely went a certain route for this one and thought about glittery crayons. I honestly don’t even know what crayons are like today (i.e. how cool have they become?!)—I think I remember the peak of crayon coolness back then was actually the glittery ones? Maybe? I don’t know. Some of these (okay, pretty much all of them) were kinda obvious choices based on the obvious titles but some were also heavily influenced by the cover colours. That said, here we go:

#5OnMyTBR: A Sucker for Sports Romances

April 13, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads10 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. You can find the full list of prompts (past and future) at the end of this post!

This week’s prompt is: Sports (Romance).

Goodreads Monday – The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso

April 12, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads6 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 The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso. This is an Asian epic/high fantasy that was released last year and is Villoso’s debut novel. 😍

Top 5 Saturday: Bloody Books!

April 11, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads15 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: blood on the cover.

So… I’m surprised by how much I struggled to come up with five books on my TBR for this prompt! I even struggled to think of five books that I’ve already read with blood on the cover and I don’t know why but this really surprises me? 😂 What I’ve decided to do for this week’s cover is take the prompt literally and I’ve found five books with the word blood on the cover (cos at least this was easier to find on my Goodreads TBR)! Without further ado… Here are five ‘blood-y’ books that I hope to read this year (she said) 😉:

First Lines Friday – 09 April 2021

April 9, 2021August 13, 2022 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:

“I sit with my wrists cuffed to the table and I think, But that I am forbid / To tell the secrets of my prison-house, / I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul. The guard stands by the door, watching me, like he’s waiting for something to happen.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: Books Overboard (Buh-Bye)!

April 7, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads30 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’d gladly throw into the ocean

Well, this was a pretty fun topic! Thankfully I have Goodreads to remind me of all the books that I’ve rated one-two stars and these are the books that I’ll feature in today’s post. I’m gonna keep it simple and just link the book titles to the Goodreads pages. Most of these I read ages ago and so I didn’t actually write reviews for them but they are also books I will never ever revisit so it is what it is? 😂 I’m really not good at chucking books (just thinking of all the books I’ve read once and didn’t fully enjoy that are still sitting on my shelf but I’d gladly do away with these!

I’m also gonna say: please don’t take offense if one of these was a favourite of yours or if you really enjoyed it—we all have different tastes, and we can’t like all the books we read, right? On that note, let’s get to it:

Top 5 Saturday: Books with Diverse Characters

April 3, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads20 Comments

Well, this is gonna be tough because I can pick way more than five books with diverse characters off my TBR, and I’m looking forward to reading all of them soon! In recent years, I’ve made an active effort to diversify my reads because I realised that many of the books I had access to in the main bookstores in Indonesia tended to feature mostly white authors writing white characters. I also never questioned what I was reading and never actively sought out diverse reads—well, not anymore! It has been amazing to read more stories with characters of different ethnicities, nationalities, religions, LGBTQ+ and abilities in contemporaries, romances, and even SFF and I can’t wait to read even more in the future! For this prompt I decided to focus on books with Asian characters because I love to see the Asian rep! So without further ado, here are five books with diverse characters that I’m really excited for.

First Lines Friday – 02 April

April 2, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads7 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:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a brilliant idea, conceived and executed by a clever young woman, must be claimed by a man.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

#TopTenTuesday: Places in Books I’d Love to Live!

March 30, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads26 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: Places In Books I’d Love to Live

I honestly thought that this topic would be much easier than it ended up being but that could possibly be because I am dead exhausted right now but of course, I can never plan posts ahead 😂 We also don’t need to read me harping on in this post so I’m gonna keep it as short and sweet as possible! Most of these places are fantastical/fictional worlds but some places are real and they’re on my bucket list to at least visit in this lifetime! Also, there’s a very good chance that I’d die very quickly in most of these worlds but … they’re also too amazing to pass up. Without further ado, here are ten places I’d love to live in!