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?

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?

First Lines Friday – 27 November

November 27, 2020November 27, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads10 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:

“Picking up hitchhikers never worked out for Easton Lockett. It would start fine, but then things always got really weird, really fast.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

First Lines Friday – 20 November

November 20, 2020November 20, 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:

“The police officer’s body goes blurry, then sharpens again.
I don’t stare at him directly. I can’t really focus on one thing in this room, but when I do look, his face shimmers.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

First Lines Friday – 13 November

November 13, 2020November 13, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads13 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:

“After they found the third body that year, Justin Hawthorne knelt in his backyard and prepared to hear his future.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

First Lines Friday – 06 November

November 6, 2020November 6, 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:

“Wizards never came to Ellicott Mills anymore. Beatrix stared at the contrary specimen striding toward her and had a fleeting thought–more of a hope, really–that he simply needed directions to some other place.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Top 5 Saturday: Award Winning Books

September 20, 2020September 19, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads15 Comments

Ooh, this is a tough but fun prompt! I gotta admit that I don’t pay close attention to which books win which prizes, so it took a bit of digging to find what on my TBR fit the bill. I’m surprised to say that I actually have quite a few award winning books on my shelves! These are books that I saw hyped up through book clubs (like Oprah’s and Reese’s) and mainly through gorgeous pictures on bookstagram. They’re also mostly a departure from my go-to YA SFF and Romances and are contemporary/literary fiction books that I do enjoy and can be a good challenge to read, but sometimes they also go over my head. 😅 That said, I’ve picked five from my TBR that I’m really looking forward to reading in the (hopefully) near future!

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

Top 5 Saturday: Science Fiction Books

September 13, 2020September 12, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads23 Comments

Oof, do I have a lot of these or do I really have a lot of these on my TBR? 😅 I found a love for SF books when I first started reading Michael Crichton’s books back in 2010. I can’t even remember when I started reading more SFF but I do have quite a few that I’ve added to my TBR, especially in the last year+, thanks to all your wonderful recommendations. The five below are ones I already have on my physical/digital libraries and they’re just waiting to be read… (lol what’s new) I have to admit that I’m most excited to get to Becky Chambers’ books because I’ve heard endlessly good things about them!

(book covers are linked to the Goodreads pages!)

#TopTenTuesday: Middle Grade Reads for a Younger Me!

September 8, 2020November 17, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads42 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 for My Younger Self (these could be books you wish you had read as a child, books younger you could have really learned something from, books that meshed with your hobbies/interests, books that could have helped you go through events/changes in your life, etc.)

Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking a lot about the middle grade fantasies that I’ve read and that I still really want to read, and these thoughts fit so well with this week’s prompt, so I was quite excited to dive right in. Then I realised that I actually have more MG reads on my TBR than ones I’ve read so this week I’ve split the post into read and unread books, but they’re all books that I think my younger middle-school self would’ve very much enjoyed reading!

READ

Nevermoor Series
The Ship of Shadows
Malamander
Wonder
The Tea Dragon Society

UNREAD

Other Words for Home
Race to the Sun
The Unadoptables
Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky
Wonderscape

Top 5 Saturday: Young Adult Detective Books

August 29, 2020August 29, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads8 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: detective books but I really wanted to do last week’s topic on Young Adult Books and I’m sad that I missed it. So I decided that I would combine the two topics this week to share: Young Adult Detective Books!

After making the decision to focus on YA Detective Books I realised that I wasn’t even sure I had (m)any on my TBR in the first place! Luckily, after a quick sweep through my Kindle shelves and my Goodreads TBR, I’ve managed to find a few. A lot of these are pretty hyped and popular titles although one is a much older release from 2014 but I only added it to my TBR last year. I’ve had the majority of these on my shelf for at least one year? So I’m hoping that I can get to at least a few at some point this year!