Every month, Rukky from Eternity Books shares weekly bookish discussion topics for her awesome Let’s Talk Bookish feature. I always look forward to the discussions and am finally participating in today’s: The Hype Train! Rukky provided some great guide questions, so I’ll keep this intro short 💃:
I found myself in the mood for some ~ mystery ~ last week and settled on listening to Sadie by Courtney Summers and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson. Instead of reviewing them in two separate posts, I thought I’d just do it in one ✨. Both books were popular YA mysteries, and while their plots and formats had similarities, other elements like their subject matters weren’t as comparable 💃:
Book Twitter is an expansive micro-community within Twitter composed of book junkies—from authors, publishers, book-related media companies to formal and casual readers like librarians, bloggers, booktubers, and instagrammers.
We love it.
Caitlin from Caitlin Althea recently tagged me to do this Women’s History Book Tag created by Margaret from Weird Zeal! (Thank you for tagging me, Caitlin!) If you don’t know Caitlin, you should hop on over to her blog because she is a literal rock-star 💃.
Continue reading “The Women’s History Book Tag // fantastic women-authored stories (and beyoncé?)”
Title: Frankly In Love
Author: David Yoon
Published: September 10, 2019
Pages: 432
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Amazon / Barnes & Nobles / Book Depository / Goodreads
A total nerd, he spent his sweet, suburban Californian days studying for advanced placement tests, playing dungeons and dragons with his equally geeky friends, and helping his dad at their grocery store on the weekends. When a girl finally revealed that she liked him, Frank Li frankly couldn’t be any happier—except for one thing: his traditional Korean parents would never approve of his relationship with someone who wasn’t Korean.
Rather than be open with his parents and make them see reason, Frank pretended to date his fellow Korean American family friend, Joy Song, while he hid his European American girlfriend, and Joy hid her Chinese American boyfriend from her parents. What ensued was not a cliche contemporary about fake dating, but a complicated story of love, family, and identity.
Continue reading “Book Review: Frankly In Love by David Yoon // a hilariously heart-warming story about fake-dating and cultural limbo”Of everything that goes into book publications, book covers seem to get the bulk of exposure. They receive constant praise for their beautiful art, are chided for misrepresenting their story’s content (1|2), and may be judged for any other detail bookworms can pick at. That’s what they get for being all out in the open—easy targets 😈🎯.
Behind the book covers, tucked safely before or after the main story, author’s notes exist inconspicuously and don’t drive book sales for obvious reasons. However, even once readers finish a book, author’s notes are rarely referenced asides from the quick nod in a book review or the infrequent discussion they inspire.
Maybe there’s truly not much to say about them, which is fine, but it’s also a bit of a shame considering the thought authors put into writing them and determining where they fit according to the format of a book.
So, here’s my official Author’sNotesAppreciationPost✔️ where I consolidate all the reasons I like Author’s Notes, discuss how they affect book ratings, and question when they should be read. Let them not be in vain 💃🏽!
Continue reading “Appreciating Author’s Notes // why I like them, their affect on ratings, and when should they be read”
Title: The Wedding Party
Author: Jasmine Guillory
Published: July 16, 2019
Pages: 351
Genre: Romance, Fiction, Contemporary
Amazon / Barnes & Nobles / Book Depository / Goodreads
Maddie loved her best friend Alexa, but she could not stand Alexa’s other best friend Theo. She thought he was an arrogant career man who only knew how to talk about himself, while Theo thought that Maddie was self-absorbed and materialistic. After a fluke hookup between the two rivals, they swore that it would never happen again and that, more importantly, Alexa could never know. However, when Alexa announced that she would be getting married and that her two best friends would both be in the wedding party, Maddie and Theo knew that whatever was changing between them would be hard to keep secret.
Continue reading “Book Review: The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory // a short and sweet hate-to-love contemporary”
Title: Sleeping Giants
Author: Sylvain Neuvel
Published: April 26, 2016
Pages: 320
Genre: Science Fiction
Amazon / Barnes & Nobles / Book Depository / Goodreads
Goodreads Description: A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square-shaped hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.
Seventeen years later, the mystery of the bizarre artifact remains unsolved – the object’s origins, architects, and purpose unknown.
But some can never stop searching for answers.
Rose Franklin is now a highly trained physicist leading a top-secret team to crack the hand’s code. And along with her colleagues, she is being interviewed by a nameless interrogator whose power and purview are as enigmatic as the relic they seek. What’s clear is that Rose and her compatriots are on the edge of unravelling history’s most perplexing discovery-and finally figuring out what it portends for humanity. But once the pieces of the puzzle are in place, will the result be an instrument of lasting peace or a weapon of mass destruction?
Sleeping Giants was the first book in Themis Files, a sci-fi series by Sylvain Neuvel. Through a chronicle of interviews and documents, the reader learned about the discovery of an ancient artifact and the tantalizing story that transpired.
I’ll leave the summary to one sentence because I believe this is one novel that is best to dive into blind.
Continue reading “Book Review: Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel // mysterious ancient technology and world politics”For those of you who don’t what the heck I’m talking about:
In summary, Neopets is an online gaming site where you can adopt virtual creatures and collect points, usually by playing mini-games, to buy items to take care of them. Because it is online, users can also interact with other players across the world through various channels on the site, such as chat boards, guilds, and auctions.
Never watching TV again, quitting our jobs, and devoting all our time to reading books won’t put an end to our never-ending TBRs. (Don’t go rushing to your boss with your two weeks just yet, pal.) There’s always a hot, new book we need to get to or an old classic that we’ve neglected.
Honestly, it’s a fortunate problem to have, to be able to read and have too much to read. But still, with all problems, no matter how negligible they seem, we search for ways to mitigate them.
Some people are naturally quick readers—they have the awesome (and scary) ability to hulk-smash dozens of books off their bookshelves every week. Others are auto-didactic and spend years training their eyes and brain to scan pages of stories so that they can finish them faster and faster. Still, there are the laboring bookworms who haven’t and can’t hone the craft of speed-reading for one reason or another.
I’m a part of the laboring class of bookworms 🙋, aka the slow readers, and here’s my take on this topic:
Continue reading “Are You A Speed-Reader? // and why I am a slow reader”
Belle Can Read 