Month: September 2014

WWW Wednesdays #10

Posted September 24, 2014 / Weekly Memes, WWW Wednesdays / 4 Comments

I received Trial By Fire in the form of a physical ARC from the publisher and have been reading it in between all of my other reading committments. I am definitely enjoying it and wish I could devote all of my time to it, but it hasn’t been possible given the ARC tour scheduling and the reading I need to finish for a guest post (stay tuned!). Just Like Fate is great so far! I’ve been absolutely cranking through it because it’s so good (and because I need to finish reading it before Friday :)). My current audiobook is Big Little Lies, which is interesting so far. I’m not very far along yet but its nice to throw in some adult fiction every once in a while…especially because I love Liane Moriarty. Well I’ve been making up for lost time, finally! I finished Second Chance Summer, which completely exceeded my expectations. I received Damsel Distressed from On the Same Page ARC Tours and had to make sure I finished it within the week. I really liked it, but it was definitely darker than I expected. That Summer, once I realized it was in my library’s audiobook files, was an impromptu choice. I was a little disappointed in it because not much happened plot-wise and the characters were too selfish. Again, thanks to On the Same Page ARC Tours, I will be starting Famous in Love as soon as it arrives on my doorstep! I’m excited to have the ability to read […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #8: Fall TBR

Posted September 23, 2014 / TBR Lists, Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 12 Comments

Top Ten Books on my Fall TBR List As you can tell, most of these are oldies or ones that have already been released. I don’t have my eye on too many actual fall releases, but these are some of the books I’ve been looking forward to reading within the next few weeks!

Review: Second Chance Summer

Posted September 22, 2014 / Book Reviews / 10 Comments

Okay I finished this book less than two minutes ago and am making sure to write this review immeditely. Holy shit. Morgan Matson. Why and how are you so good? I don’t think I can express how much I loved this story. It was so many different things, all amazing and sad and happy at the same time. This is most likely not going to be a very long review because I kind of just only want to sit here and cry. Very few books have actually made me cry out loud, but this book was one of them. OKAY so Taylor and her family head to their lake house, where they haven’t been in five years, because their father only has a few months left to live. Their relationships at the beginning of the book are so strained and everyone is totally separate from one another. Watching their family grow and develop over the summer was just so perfect. Instead of a nice slow burn romance, this was a slow burn family-rekindling. Meanwhile, Taylor is faced with all of the people she left behind five summers earlier. This included her best friend Lucy and boyfriend Henry. Taylor has to make amends for what she did to them when she left. It was nice to see that those aspects were vital to the story, but still felt more in the background. Above everything else, this book was about family. I’m tempted to text my dad that I love him right […]

Musing Mondays #8

Posted September 22, 2014 / Musing Mondays, Weekly Memes / 5 Comments

Describe one of your reading habits. This has been a BUSY reading month for me. I don’t mean that I read a lot of books, but I mean that I have a lot of books that I NEED to read within a certain timeframe. I don’t often deal with deadlines when I read, except for when I’m behind on scheduling reviews and know I need to finish my current book by a certain day to keep up with my review schedule. Right now, I have multiple books with deadlines: an ARC that needs to travel to the next person in line by the end of the week, library books that are due in a week, a physical ARC that was released a week ago that deserves a review quickly, and a book I need to finish for a guest post by the end of the week…. EEK. How can I get this done when I normally only read one book at a time?? I’m not sure about other bloggers, but I feel like most people out there read more than one book at a time. I normally can’t do this. The most I can handle is listening to one audiobook while reading one regular book. Sometimes the stories confuse me, if they’re both in the same genre or have similar generic contemporary romance-related plots, but most of the time I just don’t want to read more than one. What’s the point? It’s just as fast to read one book at a […]

Top 10 Books that Hooked Me on the Genre

Posted September 21, 2014 / Book Lists, Features / 10 Comments

I’ve always been a reader and have enjoyed reading books of essentially any genre. There are, of course, genres or topics that I generally don’t read as much (historical fiction and non-fiction) – but really any topic is fair game for me! I’m a mood reader and I tend to read clusters of books within a certain genre, one after another, until I get “bored” with it for the time being and move on to the next general topic. Lately I’ve been on a contemporary binge, so I’ve switched over into some paranormal/parallel universe/time travel books over the coming weeks. Here’s a list of the ten books that got me hooked on a certain genre or topic. [You can assume that all of these fall under the Young Adult umbrella, too!] The books that really got me started into my tried-and-true favorite genre, Contemporary YA (normally Romance) were those by Sarah Dessen. She’s definitely still an auto-buy author for me. I’m so excited she a new book coming out within the next year! I read more of these books than any other genre by a long shot. I’m hoping to change that up sometime in the near future though. The next book I’ll be reading is Just Like the Movies by Kelly Fiore. I checked it out from the library and will be including it in Swoony September, once I finish with my ARCs.

Cover Love

Posted September 20, 2014 / Book Lists, Features / 10 Comments

As everyone knows by now, I love book covers. Pretty ones with gorgeous typography, scenery, colors, and overall design are my favorites. I made a Goodreads shelf called “Cover Love” for this reason! I’m a firm believer in judging a book by its cover; the cover should successfully convey the book’s story and grab the reader’s attention. If covers didn’t matter, they wouldn’t have such unique designs! Without further ado, here’s a compilation of all 64 covers currently on my Cover Love shelf (in no particular order)!

Friday Finds #9

Posted September 19, 2014 / Friday Finds, Weekly Memes / 2 Comments

Here are the books I’ve added to my to-read shelf in the past week. Not released yet Books I’ve seen everywhere and am feeling peer pressured to add Books I own but am just now officially adding to my TBR Already released but new to my TBR

Review: Breathe, Annie, Breathe

Posted September 18, 2014 / Book Reviews / 8 Comments

Wow. This book was just so much better than I was expecting. So many bloggers were talking about this one a few months ago when it came out and I was pretty uninterested. I’m not sure why, really – maybe just because I fucking hate running? If anything, this book motivated me to take up running and finally get my ass in shape. Breathe, Annie, Breathe was a multidimensional story that really didn’t fall short in any areas for me. Annie loses her boyfriend Kyle about a year before the book takes place and she decides to run the Country Music Marathon in his place. She starts a rigorous training routine and finds herself spending a lot of time with her trainer’s brother. The book takes place over the course of a few months and the romance was a glorious slow burn. I really enjoyed watching the relationship with Jeremiah and Annie develop over time. She was trying to get over Kyle and accept that she needed to move on with her life, while he was coming to understand that his feelings for Annie were different than his usual short relationships. They were constantly teasing each other, having fun, and being competitive; it was a relationship that built from friendship and it felt so natural. It was much more interesting to me than the typical SUPER romantic kinds of stories I normally see in contemporary YA. Aside from the romantic elements, this book was really about Annie working on getting in […]

WWW Wednesdays #9

Posted September 17, 2014 / Weekly Memes, WWW Wednesdays / 2 Comments

I’m still working on Second Chance Summer by Morgan Maston. It’s a long book that I’m really enjoying, but I just haven’t had enough time to read. I’m about 2/3 of the way through. I am definitely planning on finishing by the weekend! This book is really great so far. I absolutely love the characters, learning about their lives, and seeing Taylor get back into her routine with friends and family. I do have a feeling it’s going to make me cry, though… I am not sure what audiobook I’m going to work on next, because I just finished Breathe, Annie, Breathe by Miranda Kenneally literally twenty minutes ago. So as of right now, I’m not listening to anything! Since last week, I’ve only finished two audiobooks. The only time I’ve really been able to “read” is while getting ready in the morning or driving to work. I loved both of these ones! I highly recommend them. Open Road Summer was a great debut from Emery Lord. Breathe, Annie, Breathe was a book I wasn’t really interested in reading when I saw it come out. Everyone had written glowing reviews and saw it on sale on Audible, so I decided to give it a shot. So, so glad I did! I have two ARCs I need to get done ASAP! I’m a part of the Damsel Distressed (by Kelsey Macke) ARC tour, so I have a week to read it once I receive it. It should be arriving today or tomorrow […]

Review: Eleanor & Park

Posted September 16, 2014 / Book Reviews / 14 Comments

So I read this book right before I decided to start my book blog. As I said up there in the basics section, I saw the book at the store and passed it by countless times. The concept didn’t sound overly interesting to me so I never bothered. I had just lent my John Green books to a friend of mine, who then passed on Eleanor & Park to me. She highly recommended it so I decided to finally give it a go. The story was simultaneously an adorable tale about first love and a story that will break your heart. The love between Park and Eleanor was slowly developed perfectly. Pretty much think of the opposite of insta-love. The two were fascinated with each other at first but they both were mostly just curious. It all started when Park finally tipped his comic book so she could read along with him on the bus. Rainbow Rowell does such an amazing job of bringing the reader into their world and making you really feel for them. You remember all the first love jitters like they happened yesterday. Their story is more than just first love, though, as Eleanor struggles with her home life and Park is unsure if and how he can help. It’s just so heartbreaking. Eleanor & Park follows the two characters as they build their relationship, struggle with issues at home, and navigate high school. The end of the book was fitting but definitely left me wanting more. […]