Month: March 2021

April TBR

Posted March 31, 2021 / Book Lists, Features, TBR Lists / 0 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. April TBR I was horrible with reading yet again in March, but I did largely stick to my TBR! Still a ton of owned books to read and now the library holds keep rolling in too. I feel good about my April reading life because I have two cookbooks coming that will catch me up on my currently-behind Goodreads challenge. Owned Books/Audiobooks to Read Yep, these three guys are still here. I do hope to read them sometime in 2021 haha. MAJSETY, SEX AND VANITY, and INSTANT KARMA are all available to me by hard copy and audiobook, so hopefully I can at least read ONE in April?! I’m also moving ACOSF up here because I am still freaking reading it. It’s huge! And other books keep calling my name! Hopefully I can crank through and finish soon. Review Copies I read four of the six review copies I featured here last month, and focused on the three publishing within the month! *pats self on back* I’m leaving THE SUMMER COTTAGE (May pub) and OF PRINCES AND PROMISES (June pub) because I hope to keep getting ahead on review copies as […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #333: Places to Live

Posted March 30, 2021 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 2 Comments

Places in Books I’d Love to Live 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 have some Goodreads shelves for books set in Maine (one of my favorite places and I lived there for a year) and Connecticut (where I grew up and currently live) so I can track these close-to-home favorite settings. I wish I was even more in-depth with my setting tracking because places like Cape Cod, Charlotte/North Carolina, and other New England states are also appealing to me. In any case, here are some books set in Maine and other places I love – places I would love to live too! (Some are on my TBR and some I’ve already read.) Small Town Hearts by Lillie Vale // Read, set in small town coastal Maine Wild Blue Wonder by Carlie Sorosiak // TBR, set in a Maine summer camp Chasing Lucky by Jenn Bennett // Read, set in a Rhode Island bookstore The Second Home by Christina Clancy // TBR, set on Cape Cod Mystic Summer by Hanna McKinnon // Read, set in Mystic, CT The Cousins by Karen M. McManus // Read, set on a MA island like Nantucket/Martha’s Vineyard Black Dog Bay series by Beth Kendrick // Read, set in a fictional […]

Listening Lately

Posted March 26, 2021 / Current Favorites, Media, Personal / Information / Etc. / 2 Comments

I’ve always done podcast roundups on here but I thought it would be fun to share alllll of the things I’ve been listening to lately in 2021. I’ve done a decent mix of podcasts and audiobooks, compared to my usual all-or-nothing philosophy. Music is generally on the back burner but there are some key playlists or radio stations I pop on when cleaning and cooking on weekend mornings. Podcasts Someone Knows Something (S2, S5, S6) // I’ve had this podcast on my radar forever because it’s known as one of the OGs in the true crime community. I slept on it for a long time and randomly decided to listen to the most recent season. Each season is about a new case and S6 had just wrapped up posting. It was really good and addicting, so I went backwards to Season 5 and then Season 2 based on my interest in the case they covered. I’ll probably listen to Seasons 1, 3, and 4 at some point too. Tom Brown’s Body // I was alone with the pup one day when Chris went snowboarding and I listened to this podcast from start to finish all day. I absolutely was addicted and highly recommend it to anyone looking for a single story/case throughout the season. I still cannot figure out what the hell happened to Tom Brown. This is Important // I’m a huge fan of these four guys from Workaholics, stand-up, and literally anything else they’ve been in over the years. This […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #332: Funny Titles

Posted March 23, 2021 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 0 Comments

Funny & Punny Book Titles 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 always find books with super long names to be really funny but it’s even better when a title has a pun in it. I thought including funny and punny titles would be a good time here this week. Books I’ve Read IT’S KIND OF A CHEESY LOVE STORY may not have the funniest name, but I really enjoy how it plays into the pizza parlor setting and main focus of the book. It’s honestly not cheesy at all, compared to some romances, but I enjoy it 😉 A PHO LOVE STORY is a great pun despite the classic stretch of having “pho” sound like “faux” instead of “fuh” like it’s actually pronounced! IN A HOLIDAZE was one of my favorites last year, holiday or otherwise, and I enjoy the “holidaze” play on words (since she’s in some kind of weird Groundhog Day time loop daze). TWEET CUTE is arguably one of the best punny book titles ever, combining “meet cute” and tweet, since the two kind of meet/argue on Twitter as they fall for each other. On My TBR FINLAY DONOVAN IS KILLING IT is about a suspense novelist […]

What I’ve Been Watching

Posted March 19, 2021 / Media, Personal / Information / Etc. / 4 Comments

I was really in the mood to get back into some normal TV shows and movies once the holiday season passed. I usually am ONLY watching Hallmark or other holiday movies for like 2-3 months! I need to find a better way to balance that next year haha. In any case, turning the page to 2021 means a fresh slate of shows to work on or movies to see. Recently Finished The Undoing I feel like I’m in the minority here but I didn’t love this. It was pretty addicting because I kept getting kind of hooked at the end of each episode or at the “cliffhanger” moment. I just wanted more from the ending? I don’t want to give anything away but I feel a big ol’ MEH about this one. (I finished this months ago but this post has been in my drafts forever haha.) Night Stalker I’ve mentioned this on here before, I think, but this was pretty good. It was sort of background noise for me because I’ve already heard about this case on a million podcasts. The last episode was really powerful though because the way this case “ends” is insane. The Boys I’ve been obsessed with Chace Crawford since Gossip Girl so when Chris randomly mentioned this show, I was in. He’s a shitbag (like many other characters in this show… literally all of them basically???) but it’s fine because I get to see his face. This was really interesting overall – we lost […]

Five Star ARC Reviews: It’s Kind of a Cheesy Love Story and Float Plan

Posted March 18, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

Thanks to Morgan, I read MEANT TO BE years ago. She thought I would like it based on my questionnaire for Secret Santa (I think?) and sent it my way, and she was totally right. I have completely slept on her other books since then though and clearly that’s a damn shame. IT’S KIND OF A CHEESY LOVE STORY obviously caught my eye because I love pizza more than most things in the world. A girl is born in a pizza parlor’s bathroom and she’s given free pizza for life AND a job when she turns sixteen. Begrudgingly, she accepts both, and spends her Friday night in Hot N’ Crusty instead of with her group of ~popular~ friends that she doesn’t necessarily fit in with anymore (did she ever?). I truly adored this book – it had all of the elements I’m looking for in a YA romance. Beck is trying to figure out what to do with her life but not in the traditional ways within the genre. Sure, she’s not sure yet about college or future jobs, but she’s trying to find herself among her friends and new work group. She has a secret obsession with a sci-fi show and a few other pieces of herself that she’s hiding from her friends, which is creating a wedge between them that only grows when she finds common interests with her HNC pals. It was lovely to watch her grow closer to Julianne and the others through movie nights and […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #331: Spring TBR

Posted March 16, 2021 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 2 Comments

Spring TBR (Apr-Jun) 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’m always a fan of the TBR prompts for TTT because it reminds me of what I should focus on reading in the upcoming months, different from my individual monthly TBRs. I always do them by month, so my winter TBR was for January, February, and March reading. Here are the books I hope to focus on between April, May, and June. I’m going to ignore books I have review copies for, since there are too many to list! You can find the majority of them here. I literally could do a top-ten for May releases alone! April May June

A Day in the Life // Work From Home (3/10/21)

Posted March 12, 2021 / Currently, Lifestyle, Personal / Information / Etc. / 2 Comments

Another round of a quarantined work day in my life! This is my first installment with the pup, since we got Miller about a month after posting my last one in May 2020. Here we go. My work-from-home routine during the pandemic has definitely evolved and changed since March 2020, a year ago this month (!). I used to be in my pajamas until noon, shower during my lunch break, and have an easy day on the couch. 3 months into it, we got a puppy – and my whole day changed! Luckily my boss is flexible and realistically as long as I can make meetings/interviews happen when needed and get everything else done in time, I can spend time during the day with Miller when needed. I wish I did one of these around early fall to just show how different my routine is now. Oh well – here’s how my day went on March 10th! Miller used to sleep until after 8am but lately he’s been waking up and wanting to go downstairs somewhere in the 7:00 hour. This morning he was definitely up closer to 7am so we headed down to get the day going. We go out to the bathroom first and foremost. I made my coffee and had a bagel thin with veggie cream cheese for breakfast. Miller gets his Greenie for his dental health to start the day. I took a shower (please enjoy our duckie shower curtain), brushed my teeth and hair, and […]

ARC Reviews: The Switch and Accidentally Engaged

Posted March 10, 2021 / Book Reviews / 0 Comments

THE FLATSHARE was an interesting reading experience for me, as it was for many others. The chapters from Leon’s POV were super hard to get used to because he basically spoke in sentence fragments. I thought about quitting the book so many dang times but I kept feeling like I would miss out if I did. I ended up giving it 4.5 stars because it was SO CUTE by the end and I had kind of gotten used to his chapters. I was nervous to read THE SWITCH for some of these reasons. Well, THE SWITCH had all of the cuteness and none of the adjustment period. I saw some people say that it was a little slow-moving for them but I was kind of addicted. I read most of it in one sitting, sneaking it in as my last read for February on the final day of the month. I also had a review copy of the audiobook, which was pretty good. I saw other reviewers also complain about some mouth noises and they didn’t enjoy the narration, but I didn’t notice. I always listen on 1.5x speed or higher so it was completely masked for me if it existed. I liked the audio overall and always appreciate multiple narrators for more than one POV. This is the kind of book where I read other people’s reviews and was immediately confused by any negatively. This truly was near-flawless for me and such a cute reading experience. Reading about Eileen, […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #330: Spring Cleaning

Posted March 9, 2021 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 4 Comments

Spring Cleaning: TBR Cart 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 been saying for a while that I need to clean off my shelves and donate or sell books I no longer think I’ll read. I used to do a lot of bargain book shopping so many of the books I own are super old backlist titles I barely planned read even though I bought them. I decided that a post where I talk about random old books I plan on getting rid of wouldn’t be fun. Instead, I’m going to show all of the unread books on my TBR cart that I hope to read sometime soon! Most of these have legit been on the cart for a year or more. A Week of Mondays by Jessica Brody | I’ve been meaning to read this forever. I’ve enjoyed some of her other books but the Groundhog Day concept in books is one of my favorites. I think the size of this one has been intimidating, for a “contemporary.” Deadly Obsession and Lethal Redemption by April Hunt | I haven’t read books in the thriller/romance combo genre but these are Forever Romance books – I’ll probably love them. I wanted to read all three books […]