#TopTenTuesday: Books I Should’ve Abandoned…

May 12, 2020July 18, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads76 Comments

Side note to the actual post: Thanks so much to everyone who was so supportive and understanding of my much needed mini-break last week. I’m back, feeling much better and less drowning-in-my-emotions, and it feels good! I’ll be taking it a bit slow but I’ve missed everyone (and blogging) so much (I know it was only one week LOL)!

So, we’re back with another Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s prompt is: The Last Ten Books I Abandoned (this could be books you DNFed, books you decided you were no longer interested in, etc.) (submitted by Claire @ Book Lovers Pizza).

I think we all know by now that I don’t ~~really~~ DNF books and it’s something that I’m (very) slowly working towards. I know, I know—”why read a book if you’re not enjoying it?” It’s a good question and honestly, I’m not going to say anything different to what other non-DNFer’s would say. I feel guilty when I think of DNF’ing and that guilt means that if I abandon the book, it’ll linger in my head for longer than if I push through it. That FOMO feeling in me also always thinks: “but what if it gets better?!” Yeah, it usually never does but 🤷🏻‍♀️ So instead of listing books that I abandoned, I’ll be looking at ten books that I should’ve abandoned!*

*Possible unpopular opinions ahead! I don’t intend to offend anybody but I’m sorry if anything I say offends you, but please don’t attack me! LOL

Mini blogging break…because times are not good

May 5, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads26 Comments

Hello, my lovelies! How are we all doing?

I feel like this week only just kicked off but it’s already mid-week tomorrow (what how) and at this rate, May might just end up speeding by as quickly as April did! I’m honestly not even mad at that thought because right now I wish that May was already over. In fact, I think 2020 just needs to be over! 😂 But I digress…

I’m just here to make a quick announcement to let you know that I’ll be taking a mini blogging break this week. I have two blog tour posts to make but other than that I won’t be making my weekly barrage of posts. I know it’s silly but it actually makes me sad that I have to take a break because of how much I love blogging and how much joy it brings me. That said, the situation at home right now is so bad and it’s severely affecting my mental health. Being in this weird situation where I can’t leave home to escape the person who is making my life miserable AF is just awful. I know running away from problems isn’t healthy (etc. etc.) but sometimes it really helps to get a breather. What with work also being mental, it seems like all the space in my head has been taken up by these two things and I feel completely overwhelmed and so drained just thinking about trying to make room for anything else.

Sadly that means pulling the breaks on blogging. I’m still hoping to engage and blog hop as much as possible, but I don’t think I’ll be creating content until… Well, hopefully just the end of this week (or otherwise until further notice). I’ve really come to appreciate this community so much and the constant stream of support you all have to give, so I hope you’ll stick around until I get back but I totally understand if you don’t 💞

Until next time, I hope you all stay safe, healthy and happy 🐼

April Monthly Wrap Up!

May 5, 2020May 4, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads11 Comments

To say that April was a bit of a wretched month for reading would be a bit of an understatement. Echoing the sentiment that many fellow bloggers have been saying in their wrap ups, while March felt like it crawled by, April was pretty much gone in a blink. I’m honestly not mad about it though. I’d ideally like to have a do-over of this shite month, but it is what it is. By now we all know that my reading took a huge nosedive this month is mainly because of Animal Crossing New Horizons… I had no idea how dangerous this game would be for me as I let my sister convince me to finally buy it–not that it was very difficult, mind you.

So here we are today… With the first exams I’ve ever failed in my life (O.W.L.s), a seemingly unscalable (e)ARC Mountain still to climb, and a total of seven books read this month. At least I have a nice (in game) island though, right? 😅

#5OnMyTBR: Contemporaries

May 4, 2020May 4, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads11 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: Contemporary.

War and Speech Blog Tour: Review and Favourite Quotes

May 2, 2020May 2, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads10 Comments

Hello, friends! I’m back with another The Fantastic Flying Book Club blog tour today for the hilarious YA contemporary: War and Speech by Don Zolidis! Every time I get picked to be part of any FFBC blog tour I die a little bit inside out of pure happiness because it’s always such a privilege 🥰 Huge thanks to FFBC for organising these amazing tours and to the authors as well for making the eARCs available to us.

Be sure to click on the banner above to see the other bloggers on tour! 😊

War and Speech
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Release date: 05 May 2020
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary, Realistic Fiction

Panda Rating:

Not everyone can be a winner…
Sydney Williams knows this better than anyone. After her white-collar- criminal dad is sent to prison, Sydney fails almost all of her classes and moves into a dingy apartment with her mom, who can barely support them with her minimum-wage job at the mall. A new school promises a fresh start. Except Eaganville isn’t exactly like other high schools. It’s ruled with an iron fist by a speech team that embodies the most extreme winner-takes-all philosophy. Sydney is befriended by a group of fellow misfits, each of whom has been personally victimized by the speech team. It turns out Sydney is the perfect plant to take down the speech team from within. With the help of her co-conspirators, Sydney throws herself into making Nationals in speech, where she will be poised to topple the corrupt regime. But what happens when Sydney realizes she actually has a shot at . . . winning? Sydney lost everything because of her dad’s obsession with being on top. Winning at speech might just be her ticket out of a life of loserdom. Can she really walk away from that?

Amazon (US) | Book Depository | Barnes & Noble | Google Books

First Lines Friday -01 May

May 1, 2020May 1, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads19 Comments

Happy Friday book lovers and happy May Day!! 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:

“It was raining the day Suki came to the Palace of the Sun, and it was raining the night that she died.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

Incendiary Blog Tour: Review and Favourite Quotes

April 30, 2020April 30, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads26 Comments

Hello, friends! I’m back with another The Fantastic Flying Book Club blog tour today for the amazing Incendiary by Zoraida Cordova! Every time I get picked to be part of any FFBC blog tour I die a little bit inside out of pure happiness because it’s always such a privilege 🥰 Huge thanks to FFBC for organising these amazing tours and to the authors as well for making the eARCs available to us.

Be sure to click on the banner above to see the other bloggers on tour! 😊

Incendiary (Hollow Crown #1)
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Release date: 28 April 2020
Genre: Young Adult Fantasy

Panda Rating:

I am Renata Convida.
I have lived a hundred stolen lives.
Now I live my own.

Renata Convida was only a child when she was kidnapped by the King’s Justice and brought to the luxurious palace of Andalucia. As a Robari, the rarest and most feared of the magical Moria, Renata’s ability to steal memories from royal enemies enabled the King’s Wrath, a siege that resulted in the deaths of thousands of her own people.

Now Renata is one of the Whispers, rebel spies working against the crown and helping the remaining Moria escape the kingdom bent on their destruction. The Whispers may have rescued Renata from the palace years ago, but she cannot escape their mistrust and hatred–or the overpowering memories of the hundreds of souls she turned “hollow” during her time in the palace.

When Dez, the commander of her unit, is taken captive by the notorious Sangrado Prince, Renata will do anything to save the boy whose love makes her place among the Whispers bearable. But a disastrous rescue attempt means Renata must return to the palace under cover and complete Dez’s top secret mission. Can Renata convince her former captors that she remains loyal, even as she burns for vengeance against the brutal, enigmatic prince? Her life and the fate of the Moria depend on it.

But returning to the palace stirs childhood memories long locked away. As Renata grows more deeply embedded in the politics of the royal court, she uncovers a secret in her past that could change the entire fate of the kingdom–and end the war that has cost her everything.

#WWWWednesday: 29 April

April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads27 Comments

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?

Well, we’re back to my reading taking a hit thanks to Animal Crossing (yes, still)! It’s the second to last day of April and let me just tell you… April was a bit of a failed month for me! Since last Wednesday I’ve still only managed to finish one book and it was a book that I felt went on FOREVER and it was definitely not in a good way!

Ruthless Gods (Something Dark and Holy #2) by Emily A. Duncan ★★★☆☆
This book had me hitting struggle town hard and I don’t know whether I’m at 2.5 stars or 3. I still haven’t learned how to DNF a book so I pushed onward with it but I just… I don’t even know how I feel. No, I do. I’m annoyed because Nadya was so awful in this book and she completely ruined it for me. I wanted more Gods! More back story to these monsters that people worshipped but instead we got a very frustrating “romance” and a lot of pining. I still need to write my review but… Yeah. No. It just didn’t work for me.

#TopTenTuesday: Books I want to re-read as an adult!

April 28, 2020 Dini @ dinipandareads54 Comments

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 wish I read as a child. But I don’t know.. I’m not really feeling that prompt right now. So I’m going to twist it up a bit and look at books I read as a child (kid/tween/teen) that I want to read again as an adult!

I read quite a bit as a kid in elementary school, really enjoyed my humanities classes in middle school and basically almost moved into the library in high school. The sad thing is though, I don’t really remember a lot about the books I read. I remember which ones I enjoyed but if you asked me what they were about… Well, I’d be (mostly) hard pressed to tell you 😂 So I’d love to try re-reading some of these and seeing what I’d think of them now as an adult!