Month: February 2020

March TBR

Posted February 28, 2020 / Book Lists, Features, TBR Lists / 4 Comments

My monthly TBR feature here shows my progress based on last month’s TBR, my plans for this month, and anything else I might be thinking about from a reading perspective. Sometimes I feature a little poll at the bottom so you guys can help me figure out a certain title I should read from a group of books. Last month’s progress: I got so bogged down trying to read KING OF CROWS (which is fine because it was wonderful) that I got super behind on my reading. I wish I was able to finish a book before KoC was published, because then I would have gotten on track. I spent the rest of the month constantly two books behind schedule and trying to catch up. I snuck in a short non-TBR book, which helped during my car rides, but overall it was a weird reading month. I was unmotivated to read for the majority of the month, so some TBR picks will carry over into this month. Review Copies I’ll be reading THE JUNE BOYS for the pub month and then ALL YOUR TWISTED SECRETS and SUPER ADJACENT for blog tours. My backlist choice is MARRIAGE ON MADISON AVENUE and my freebie is UNDERCOVER BROMANCE since it comes out this month too. I also was just added to another blog tour for the end of the month for THE SEA GLASS COTTAGE (not pictured but below). Required Reading Book Clubs We picked GHOSTED for my adult book club because one of the […]

Review Round Up | The King of Crows, Starting Over at Blueberry Creek, and All Eyes on Us

Posted February 27, 2020 / Book Reviews, Review Roundup / 0 Comments

In an effort to cut down on posts and burnout, my Review Roundups will feature 2-4 books I’ve read or listened to recently. Sometimes they’re newer releases and sometimes they’re all backlist titles. My ARC reviews usually get the solo treatment. Enjoy the mini reviews! Spoilers for the previous books and tiny early-book spoilers for this book. HO BOY. I can’t believe this series is over! As sad as I am that I didn’t start way back when it first came out, I’m glad I had the experience of the Diviners Readalong to keep me going and break up these huge books. I did a little refresher before diving into the final installment though, since I read the third book back in November. I really liked how the beginning/middle of the book went, with all of the Diviners split up and trying to get to the same place. The groupings were wild and entertaining: Henry, Memphis, and Bill near the flooded Mississippi River and on trains; Theta, Evie, *someone*, and Isiah with the circus; and Ling and Jericho traveling with a band. It created some fun dynamics and new friendships/alliances among everyone while journeying across the country. The King of Crows, the Shadow Men, Roy, and Jake Marlowe fucked with them every step of the way. I don’t want to get into spoiler territory but let me say there were a few parts of this that totally broke my heart! I am truthfully really happy with how the book ended though and […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #276: Social Media

Posted February 25, 2020 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 4 Comments

Characters I’d Follow On Social Media Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review. I was a little nervous about this topic at first but it ended up being really fun to think about! There are a lot of characters and books that made me laugh out loud while reading, so those people would definitely make the list. Otherwise, there were plenty of characters who I’d love to keep up with after finishing the book!

Far, Far Away Books I Literally Cannot Stop Thinking About II

Posted February 24, 2020 / Book Lists, Features / 7 Comments

There have been plenty of posts where I talk about unreleased, upcoming books I’m excited about. (If my TBR keeps growing, yours needs to as well!) I usually only do books with covers because reading an entire post about books without a *single* cover image is not my favorite thing, personally. HOWEVER there are so many books that are too far away to have covers that I can genuinely not stop thinking about. I’m going to include some kind of related and/or excited GIF (gotta make up for the lack of covers somehow, no?) for each book and what we know about it so far. // I posted the first round of this in 2019 and am here for another! Mary series by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, Jodi Meadows (2021-3) My Contrary Mary (2021): About Mary, Queen of Scots. My Atomic Mary (2022): About Marie Curie. My Typhoid Mary (2023): About Mary Mallon. I’ve been a huge fan of the My Lady Janies and their companion series so far: retellings of famous Janes from history. I was super pumped a while back to see that they would be continuing with these fun stories with a new round set in the same world, but this time about famous Marys (or Marie, in one case). The original series about Janes has taken a few years in between each book so I’m delighted to see that this next round will have one each year instead! Doomed by Laura Pohl (2021) The story of […]

Five on Fridays [5]

Posted February 21, 2020 / Five on Fridays, Weekly Memes / 4 Comments

Five on Friday displays the the top five things that have been on my mind this week! It could be book-related, but it may be music, movies, TV, personal life, food, etc. I’ll generally be posting these biweekly and linking up with Friday Favorites (hosted by A Little Bit of Everything, Grace and Love, and Momfessionals). Previous posts can be found here! Health/Fitness – Gym and Apps I know I keep coming around and recommending random apps for ~healthy eating~ but yes I’m here to do it again. I go through these waves of “dieting” and I’m tired of that concept, honestly. I just want to be healthier overall and feel better. I got a gym membership recently, which I’ll get to, but want to get back to calorie counting on Lose It. While WW is a well-rounded system that helped me quite a bit, I found that I would not be eating enough calories each day and just feeling overall not great about my habits? I would drink a Diet Coke just because it was zero points, even though it’s not necessarily the healthier option. I would only have the plain nonfat Greek yogurt and never spend points on yogurt that I actually enjoy (even healthy ones!) with flavors. I always bought 99% fat free ground turkey for ALL recipes that required ground turkey or beef, even though it would compromise the flavor, because it was zero points. Same wit chicken breasts all the time (zero) even though thighs […]

Spotlight: Berkley

Posted February 20, 2020 / Uncategorized / 5 Comments

My new Spotlight feature highlights anything within the bookish world that I feel deserves a spotlight for a few minutes – publishers (or more specifically, imprints!), new or old favorite authors, bookish people/bloggers, covers or cover trends, topics/genres within books, and anything else that should be on your radar. Berkley Publishing / Romance I’ve covered a lot of different things for these Spotlight posts, but this is only the second publisher/imprint I’ve featured. It was one of the first ideas I had for this series though! I’ve loved expanding further into romance and contemporary novels featuring adults instead of young adults and Berkley (along with Forever) have been some of my favorites to read. Now’s the time to feature some of my favorite books, covers, and any other things you should keep an eye on! Favorite Berkley Romance Books So Far I’ve read a number of their books so far and really enjoyed the VAST majority of them! Here are some of my favorites that I’ve read and rated somewhere above 3.5 stars: A companion series I’ve been loving by them is the Playbook series by Alexa Martin. Each book features a girl dating a different member of the Denver Mustangs (lol!) football team. They all had really unique stories and romance situations that I enjoyed. My favorite trope – second chance romance – happens in the first two books. Illustrated Cover OGs Whenever I think of illustrated book covers, Berkley comes to mind as some of the originators of […]

February Grocery Challenge: Rules & Weeks 1-2

Posted February 19, 2020 / Food & Drink, Goals & Planning, Personal / Information / Etc. / 2 Comments

I spoke a while back about how randomly I got obsessed with Jordan Page’s videos. She’s a specialist in being frugal, budgeting, paying off debt, scheduling, productivity… all that good stuff. While I’ve heard some so-so things about her since (just google it), a lot of her videos and blog posts have inspired me in my house and life. The main ones here related to the #Shelftember and #Stocktober challenges. You limit grocery spending in September to $25/week and eat from your pantry, fridge, and freezer as much as you possibly can. In October, you stock back up on the essentials. I realized in January how I spend SO much money on groceries. I only grocery shop during my lunch break because I’m in a town with way more options (Trader Joe’s!) than the town I live in. I tend to buy smaller bits of groceries throughout the week but sometimes find myself going WAY over budget because of so many small trips to different stores. Can’t get Velveeta for the Superbowl at Trader Joe’s? Guess I’ll also stop at Stop & Shop and oh wait they have all these other things I may need sometime soonish! – me all the damn time. Believe me, it’s good for my computer-facing eyeballs to leave the office at lunch (and during the warm weather I love to just read a book outside!), but I don’t need to go to a STORE multiple times each week. Enough was enough – we have an expensive […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #275: Book Hangover

Posted February 18, 2020 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 8 Comments

Last Books that Gave Me a Book Hangover Top Ten Tuesdays were started by The Broke and the Bookish and are now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, where we make lists of our top ten books (or something else!) based on that week’s prompt. The topics are provided ahead of time and can be found here. Book links bring you to Goodreads or my review. I’ve honestly been REALLY lucky with this lately. I haven’t had a lot of book hangovers in recent memory! I used to have this problem a lot more haha. I feel like it’s because I’ve somehow been able to get MORE excited to read a new book after finishing a great book, if that makes sense. The only exception is the following, and that wasn’t even a book hangover: Here are five books from this year (and a bit last year, sorry) that gave me some kind of book hangover – the book could have fucked me up emotionally so I wasn’t able to move on, or it took me a while to read and made it hard for me to read more afterward, or it was just so damn good I didn’t want to leave the world. King of Crows by Libba Bray // You Were There Too by Colleen Oakley // Girls with Razor Hearts by Suzanne Young // Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater // The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black

Ranking Books by Favorite Authors | Sandhya Menon

Posted February 17, 2020 / Book Lists, Features / 3 Comments

Taking some inspiration from the late great Grace at Rebel Mommy Book Blog, I’ve decided to participate in a fun post she used to share from time to time! I’ve been meaning to for AGES and she’s been on my mind lately so I thought I would give it a go. My gut told me to go with Sandhya Menon because she has so many wonderful books and it’d be a real challenge 😉 Ranking Published Books When Dimple Met Rishi is my favorite book still, I think – and it was her first! I just adored these characters SO much and vividly remember rushing to finish reading it at work before my boss got into the office 😉 I love the adorable cover and how it makes me crave an iced coffee every damn time. Just the cutest! There’s Something About Sweetie is clearly a close second. I honestly think depending on my mood these two could switch! I will say that it was a bit hard to read at times with how challenging and frustrating her mother was. Even though I gave this book 5 stars still, that was the one thing I didn’t enjoy about it. Ashish is my FAVE. The Grand Ishq Adventure inside the Hungry Hearts anthology is my third-favorite. There was a lot going on in this little story and I remember that it was a welcome happy tale after a few darker/heavier ones. It involved the classic “advice columnist can’t take their own advice” trope and I adored […]

Lauren Lately | February 2020

Posted February 14, 2020 / Features, Lauren Lately, Wrap-Ups / 4 Comments

You can read my monthly Bookmark Lit Bulletin wrap-ups to learn about the bookish and blog-related things I’ve accomplished. Lauren Lately was created to highlight all of the personal happenings in my life: events, activities, shows I’m addicted to, things I’m obsessing over, recipes I’ve loved, and goals. What I’ve Been Up To In mid-January, we continued to tour wedding venues… and ended up picking one this month! We’re really excited about it – it’s the one place we both genuinely loved and could see us getting married at. While out and about that day, we stopped at Hogan’s Cider Mill for some cider tasting! I always find that most ciders are too wine-like for me and I hate that taste, so we really enjoyed 1-2 of them only haha. There were some nice days of reading in the car while Chris skated for a bit! I don’t know why it was so dang warm in January. I attended a surprise party for my friend’s birthday, which was amazing for the most part… it was in the middle of the worst snowstorm we’ve had so far so I had to take Chris’s Subaru and drive in smart timeframes. Woof. We got our new TV to watch the Royal Rumble on AND we hosted Chris’s family for a Superbowl party the following weekend. I took on a grocery/food-related project that involved inventorying all of my food. More to come on that at the end of the month! On Sunday we went to this place for brunch with Chris’s sister – they […]