Category: Weekly Memes

Top Ten Tuesdays #78: Not My Usual Book

Posted February 23, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 20 Comments

Five Out-of-My-Norm Books I Recently Enjoyed + Five I Plan to Read Soon Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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. This week’s topic involves the ten books I enjoyed recently (within the last year or so) that are generally out of my comfort zone, not my typical kinds of books, or not one of my favorite genres. I find that a lot of hyped books I end up reading don’t meet my expectations when they’re out of my comfort zone. I get “peer pressured” into reading certain books that wouldn’t usually be on my TBR, and I don’t like them. Sometimes it’s better to trust your gut, but some not-my-usual books end up being great pleasant surprises! I split this one up to include five I’ve read and five I plan to read. A Madness So Discreet by Mindy McGinnis • We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson • I’ll Meet You There by Heather Demetrios • Magnolia by Kristi Cook • Nowhere But Home by Liza Palmer /// I never thought I would enjoy Southern books for some strange reason (too Northern?!), but I’m happy to report that this is no longer the case! The other books (generally creepy, involving aliens, or having military/PTSD themes) are just not my cup of tea – but these were fantastic! Gone […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #77: Music

Posted February 16, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 22 Comments

Ten Tropes & Plot Devices as Songs Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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 am LOVING these open-ended topics! This week is about music and books. Some suggested topics included books you’d give theme songs to and love songs you wish were books. I am generally terrible about making book playlists, so here’s my own spin on the topic. I wrote about my least favorite and favorite book tropes a while back and that helped me with reference for this, so thanks past Lauren! I also had some ideas because of songs I was listening to. Just so you know, I tried to write this post two other times with different idea before this one came to me. I thought about the different romance-related tropes and plot points and related them to songs that I happen to love. Enjoy the Spotify widgets and some lyrics too, in case you aren’t familiar with the songs.

Top Ten Tuesdays #76: Valentine’s Day

Posted February 9, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 23 Comments

Valentine’s Day: Recently Added Ships & Favorite Love Quote Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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 love these somewhat open-ended TTT topics! This week’s said “Valentine’s Day is next week…let’s do a Valentine’s Day themed freebie! Top Ten Books That Would Make Great Valentine’s Day Reads (or anti-Valentine’s day reads), Top Ten OTPs, Top 10 fictional crushes, top ten great love declarations in fiction, swoony quotes from books etc. Get creative!” SO here I am with my topic: my recently added ships from books I’ve read in the last few months, and my favorite love quote from a book. This one is from This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen: I don’t ship every relationship in every book I read. I’ve been picky about romance lately for some reason, so the ships below are very excellent ships that must be read and appreciated by everyone. Don’t read the answers below unless you want to know for sure who the love interest is in the books below. I don’t think they’re spoilers because you can generally tell from all of the summaries, but it’s your call! Here are my new shiiiiips: Henry & Diego | We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson Ah man, these two were great. They also made it onto my just-kiss-already Goodreads shelf because, let […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #75: Historical Fiction

Posted February 2, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 15 Comments

Top Historical Time Periods I’m Interested in (and the Historical Fiction Books I Plan to Read!) Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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. This week’s topic can be widely defined as books in the past or future (Top Ten Historical Settings You Love/ Ten Historical Settings You’d Love To See or Top Futuristic Books You Love/ Ten Futuristic Societies I’d Love To Read in Books). I’m not really clever enough to think of futuristic things/time periods and am not a history buff. Because of this, I decided to put my own spin on this topic. I’ll be sharing the top ten historical fiction books I plan to read, and the time periods they happen during. I hope you’ve read some of these so you can tell me what to read first! I’ve only read a handful of historical fiction books, and most of them involve some kind of magical or fantasy elements. I’m not sure why I haven’t read more, to be honest. I am generally interested in some parts of history and think these books could be super interesting. This list will hopefully be a nice jumping off point for me to get going on my history lessons. I started to compile this list by thinking of the time periods that […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #74: Freebie

Posted January 26, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 33 Comments

FREEBIE: Top Backlist Books I Own and Plan to Read Soon Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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. So I definitely am making it a point to read more backlist books this year, as well as focus on shrinking my physical TBR. I signed up for two challenges to target this goal and thought it would make a fun TTT topic to combine them. Today’s freebie has become the top ten backlist books I own and plan to read sometime very soon. I buy a decent amount of newer releases, but find that I have a LOT of older books sitting around that deserve to be read. This can also serve the purpose of a little TBR list for my challenges. I decided to go with books published any time before 2014, and a couple that were put out in 2014. I wanted to focus on some of the much earlier titles instead, because books that came out the first year I started blogging (2014) don’t feel super backlist-y to me! I think it’s just because I can’t believe its 2016 or something. Regardless, here are some of the books I currently own and will hopefully read sometime in the near future!Megan Meade’s Guide to the McGowan Boys by Kate Brian […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #73: Recently Added

Posted January 19, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 27 Comments

Top Books I’ve Recently Added To My TBR Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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. This week we’re talking about the top ten books that we recently added to our TBRs. I think the term “TBR” can have a lot of different meanings. Some refer to it as all the books you OWN and need to read, while others just use it as an all-inclusive terms for books to read at some point. I’m the latter; I refer to my TBR as the general list of books I would like. I split my TBR into two different Goodreads shelves: to-read and tbr-unreleased. Having one shelf confused me because I would always be like OH I want to read that next, then get sad when I noticed it wasn’t released yet. I decided to pull from both shelves for this particular TTT because it’s more fun that way. I also didn’t do it exactly with the last 10 books, because some were novellas and books I finally added on Goodreads that I’ve owned for year. Now, after that unnecessary explanation, here’s this week’s ten books! The Hook Up by Kristen Callihan | One of my real-life reader friends and I kept going back and forth about New Adult books the other day, and […]

Five on Fridays #18

Posted January 15, 2016 / Five on Fridays, Weekly Memes / 8 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. Previous posts can be found here! As usual, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve had anything worthy of sharing for Five on Friday. I’ve also been on a big blogging kick lately where I have so many posts and nowhere to put them. I don’t even give myself a chance to fit in a Five on Friday! I’m hoping to start combining review posts a little better to free up my weeks, because I have a lot of more fun ideas. ANYWAYS, here’s what’s been going on in my life!YES. The biggest reason for this post is that I had the pleasure of heading to ALA Midwinter up in Boston last weekend. Because I live only about an hour and a half away from the city, I was able to take a quick day trip to meet up with everyone there. It was a lot of fun. The day started at 9:00 when I got into the city and to the convention center. I met up with Brittany, Amy, and Alyssa and we killed it on the exhibit floor for about an hour and a half. We got so many books in a very short time period! We were hot and exhausted so we sat outside for a bit, then hung around in their hotel room. We went down […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #72: Didn’t Get To

Posted January 12, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 25 Comments

Top 2015 Releases I Meant To Get To But Didn’t Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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. Before I get started, let me plug my link-up “challenge” that directly applies here… I shared recently that there are so many books I’m super excited to read before they’re published, and then I don’t read them right away when they come out. I wanted to make a list of these books and resolve to read them. When I saw a lot of others agree with me on Twitter, I decided to make a little challenge for it. I’ve been calling it a link-up instead because that’s really all you need to do to join in! You simply make a list of the books you didn’t get to in 2015, and then try to read them! It doesn’t have monthly check-ins or mini-challenges; it will probably just be checking in with ourselves at the 6 month mark and at the end of the year. This TTT topic could be a perfect post to link up if you feel like joining Must Read 2016, so it requires no extra effort on your part 😉 Check it out here! I already made my own list of books I hope to finally read in 2016, but I did feature […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #71: 2016 Resolutions

Posted January 5, 2016 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 28 Comments

Bookish and Personal Resolutions for 2016 Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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 not a huge fan of celebrating New Years and making resolutions. I like staying up and spending time with friends, but the idea of a new year as a fresh start just doesn’t resonate with me. Maybe I’m just cynical or something, but it’s just how I feel! I’m not knocking it if you put stock in it – believe me! I like the idea of setting goals in January because it gives you a concrete timeline of when to finish them. So with that in mind, here are some things I hope to do or maintain in 2016! Check back tomorrow to see some reading challenge-related goals! Read less… and give myself time to focus on other hobbies /// Not a lot of people have “read less” as a goal for the upcoming year, but I do. I would love to read the same amount because I WANT to read, and because I feel a balance between my other hobbies and reading. I know that if I make the same goal as 2015 (which was 175 books, and I got to 180), I’ll feel the same pressure to read nonstop. I set my goal […]

Top Ten Tuesdays #70: 2016 Releases

Posted December 29, 2015 / Top 10 Tuesdays, Weekly Memes / 13 Comments

Most Anticipated Releases For The First Half of 2016 Top Ten Tuesdays are hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, 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 actually impressed I got this down to twelve books, because I ended up cutting out most of the debuts that I’ve already featured. I chose six books from authors I’ve previously read and six books from authors that are new to me (debut or non-debut). This was a hard list because my TBR-unreleased shelf on Goodreads is getting crazy. Stars Above by Marissa Meyer | February | DUH I NEED THAT EPILOGUE RIGHT NOW. Who gets married?! It could reasonably any of them, but I’ll be hyped it if it’s Cinder and Kai. Not sure why, but I feel like they need to do it first. When We Collided by Emery Lord | April | If I’m being totally honest, this is the number one book on this list. I just reaaaally need another Emery Lord book in my life right away. As usual I’ve heard nothing but wonderful things so far! The Epidemic by Suzanne Young | April | That cliffhanger from the previous book definitely has me anxious for this one. I’m excited and nervous to see what happens next! A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas | May | I know that […]