Top 5 Saturday: Books with Diverse Characters

April 3, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads20 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: books with diverse characters.

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.

#WWWWednesday: 31 March

March 31, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads19 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?

I had a lot of reading that I should’ve done this past week but I… Really did none of that 😂 I ended up reading one book that I needed to read for tomorrow’s blog tour and that’s basically it out of the 5 books I finished. I can definitely say it has been a weird month for reading and I’m not feeling the weird vibes!

Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3) by Martha Wells ★★★★½
It felt so good to be back with Murderbot in this book 😍 At this point I would pretty much read anything to do with them? Even though I missed ART’s company in this book, I really liked all the new characters we meet and this is every bit as action packed as the previous books. The ending sets up really nicely for the next one and I can’t wait to find out what happens! Series RTC when Leslie and I finish the books!

Devil’s Playground Duology: The Devil & The Devil’s Advocate by Ashley Jade ★★★ (average)
I don’t even know how I stumbled across these books but I ended up bingeing the duology in less than two days. I’m gonna start by saying this was completely different to any kind of romance/erotica that I’ve ever read, not only in terms of the ‘sex play’ but also the characters. To put it simply, the steaminess was off-the-charts and if you’re looking for a book that keeps it high, this is it! 🥵😂 That said, the characters are all semi- and even full-on psychotic? Plus, there’s a lot of traumatic and completely fcked up situations/relationships, physical and mental abuse, taboo relationships, and plenty of betrayals and twists. Also, angst. A lot of angst! Basically, there’s plenty of hot mess in this book and it’s probably the darkest erotica I’ve ever read (it honestly makes 50 Shades look like child’s play) but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it!

#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!

Goodreads Monday – Small Favors by Erin A. Craig

March 29, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads17 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 Small Favors by Erin A. Craig. This is actually an anticipated 2021 YA historical fantasy release. It apparently has horror, supernatural, magical realism and retelling elements to it? It’s scheduled to be published 27 July 2021! 😍

Top 5 Saturday: Books Set in the Desert

March 27, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads23 Comments

I’ve missed a couple Saturday posts but last week’s topic was love triangles and I would’ve struggled hard to have come up with any books cos love triangles are not my jam. It is one of my most hated tropes because the angst is so real and I’m not for that. But I digress! I’m glad be back and posting for today’s desert prompt. All of these are on my TBR although I’ve heard great things about the books and am looking forward to checking them out. They’re all (unsurprisingly) of the fantasy genre and surprisingly, none of them are retellings of the one thousand and one nights (at least I don’t think so but please let me know in the comments if I’m wrong)! I’m not particularly fussed about desert settings–I don’t seek out books with this setting but I also don’t mind reading stories set in the desert. Admittedly, I can actually only recall one desert fantasy and that’s The Kinder Poison (which is awesome and I would highly recommend btw)! On that note, here are five books with desert settings that I’d love to read (soonish):

The Spring Cleaning Book Tag

March 25, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads22 Comments

Happy Thursday, friends! We’re so close to the weekend (although my weekend has personally already started since I work part time) and yet I’m still doing things at the last minute! I wasn’t sure what tag that I wanted to do today (not that I have a shortage in my back log) but I saw Alexis @ The Reading Addict post the Spring Cleaning Book Tag and it looked like fun so I decided to give it a go today! Yay! 😆

The creator of the Spring Cleaning Book Tag is Amanda @ Between the Shelves.

The Rules

Link back to the original post
Tag as many friends as you want
Have fun!

1. Getting started: A book series you’ve been wanting to read

Ooh, there are *so* many but I’ll go with the Blood and Ash books. This series is literally everywhere and it seems to be so well loved that I’m honestly surprised I never even heard about it before the second book came out last year (and now I can’t stop seeing it everywhere)! 😂 I’ve never read a book by Armentrout before so I’m definitely curious to see if it’ll work for me!

#WWWWednesday: 24 March

March 24, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads19 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?

It has been another weird reading week and I still feel like I’ve not read anything but I finished five books? Good news is I’ve found my favourite of the month and a contender for one of my faves of the year! 🥳 Also, if you can’t tell by all the “RTCs” below, although I’ve been reading some I haven’t been doing my best when it comes to writing reviews… 🙈

The Hunter (Boston Belles #1) by L.J. Shen ★★★★☆
After reading my first Shen romance last week I went ahead and picked up another one of her books (as they’re all available on Kindle Unlimited) and sped through this one. I can understand when people say Shen’s books are formulaic as the H/H are almost carbon copies of the previous book I read of hers? That said, I liked Hunter and Sailor! Hunter was intensely douchey at the start but I enjoyed his ‘growing up’ and I loved how ‘take no shit’ Sailor was and how she stood up for Hunter against his shady ass family. There were definitely some corny and cliche moments but they were cute together!

The Villain (Boston Belles #2) by L.J. Shen ★★½
I thought I’d love this one the most since Cillian was the kind of broody/rude that intrigued me. In the end, Persy was the big surprise here–still a good girl, still ‘pure’ but she has a backbone! That said, there was such a lack of communication between them that it was unreal. I get Cillian’s reasons for being as he is and though his history was upsetting/sad I also thought that it was too much and not a great representation of someone with his condition (based on personal experience anyway). No spoilers though, so I won’t go on about it but ultimately, this didn’t end up working for me. I also don’t think I’ll continue with the story because these alpha-holes are getting too next level for my liking 😂 Series RTC.

#TopTenTuesday: I Liked It… But I Can’t Remember Much About It…

March 23, 2021August 12, 2022 Dini @ dinipandareads21 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 Really Liked but Can’t Remember Anything/Much About

Today’s topic is actually books with funny titles but I wasn’t feeling it so I’ve decided to go rogue and do prompt #374 (just for reference today’s prompt is somewhere in the 540s!) from 2018.

I go on about how my memory really fails me a lot and well, it’s true. Prior to writing reviews and having a book blog, I read a lot of popular titles that I remember loving at the time but that I cannot for the life of me remember much about now. There are books I read maybe 5-6 years ago? I mean, you’d think that since I loved them so much, enough to rate them 4-5 stars, I’d remember more about them right? So very wrong. 😂 I’d probably be able to tell you the gist of what happens and maybe even something of what I loved about the book but if you ask me about plot or character specifics, it’s very likely I’ll draw a blank! There are maybe one or two titles on here that I remember more bits about but I think if I were to pick any of these up again it might almost be like reading them for the first time (maybe, almost, likely)! On that note… Here are the books!

#5OnMyTBR: Green Covers

March 23, 2021June 23, 2021 Dini @ dinipandareads9 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!