Top Ten Tuesday #266: Faves of 2019

Today's Topic:  Favorite Books I Read In 2019 Happy New Year's Eve! I'm finally back for another Top Ten Tuesday after being absent for a couple weeks. For this topic I couldn't pick just ten so instead I'm sharing my top 15 of the past year. I highly, highly recommend any and all of these if you're a fantasy fan!  Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. ...

2020 Challenges and Resolutions

Hi everyone! Can you believe 2020 is only a couple days away? This year has seriously flown by even faster than the last one. I think it's because I was SO busy. I'm hoping I can take more time to relax next year. Today I'm sharing the reading challenges I'm participating in for 2020 as well as my non-bookish resolutions. READING CHALLENGES RETELLINGS CHALLENGE It's back! I brought the Retellings Challenge back for 2019 and, while it didn't go as smoothly as I might have liked, I still had a great time hosting and participating! My goal for this year is going to be High Fae, which is 16-20 retellings. Top 3 TBR: Bright Raven Skies,...

2019 Reading Challenges Final Update

Happy Saturday, everyone! YES I'm still alive! Things have been hectic with the holidays but today I'm sharing my 2019 reading challenges final update and looking back at what I've managed to accomplish this year. This year I brought back the Retellings Challenge and signed up for a few more. I met most of my goals, thankfully! AUDIOBOOK CHALLENGE I love this challenge so much! I've been participating for years and every year I'm so excited when I surpass my goal. This year I committed to 30+ books and surpassed that by 9! THE BEST: The Bear and the Nightingale Ash Princess Truly Devious THE WORST: A Head Full of Ghosts After The...

2019 End Of Year Survey

2018 READING STATS Number Of Books You Read: 82 (so far) Number of Re-Reads: 4 Genre You Read The Most From: YA Fantasy 1. Best Book You Read In 2018? The City of Brass or Ninth House. I can't choose. 2. Book You Were Excited About & Thought You Were Going To Love More But Didn’t? Finale by Stephanie Garber. It just wasn't up to par with the rest of the series. 3. Most surprising (in a good way or bad way) book you read? The Queen of Nothing by Holly Black. The characters all did complete 180s and the big twist was bizarrely out of left field. 4. Book You “Pushed” The Most People To Read (And They Did)? Maybe...

Top Ten Tuesday #265: Winter TBR

Today's Topic:  Winter TBR Happy Tuesday! YAY! Finally an easy topic. I've skipped a couple weeks because I honestly didn't have the mental capacity to think up freebie topics. TBR lists I can do, even if I never stick to them... All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban Be Not Far From Me by Mindy McGinnis Blood Countess by Lana Popovic Crescent City (Apparently the title is House of Earth and Blood?) by Sarah J. Maas Ember Queen by Laura Sebastian Havenfall by Sara Holland The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski Seven Endless Forests by April Genevieve Tucholke The Shadows Between Us by Tricia Levenseller The...

Weekly Recap: 12/8 - 12/14

HAPPENINGS OFF THE BLOG Hi everyone! This week has been busy, to no one's surprise. I've been scrambling trying to get ready for my family to visit for Christmas and it has been wild! I've finished redecorating my office and our guest room. Photos of the office coming soon, I promise! I also finally finished The Bear and the Nightingale - hurray! I've definitely found myself getting more into adult fantasy lately, which is odd. Some of my favorites are still YA series, but I'm certainly branching out a bit more. Do you find that your reading preferences change with age? NEW BOOKS THIS WEEK    THIS WEEK I READ IN...

Audiobook Review: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

Title: The Bear and the Nightingale Author: Katherine Arden Publication Date: January 10, 2017Publisher: Del Rey Pages: 323 Add to Goodreads At the edge of the Russian wilderness, winter lasts most of the year and the snowdrifts grow taller than houses. But Vasilisa doesn't mind—she spends the winter nights huddled around the embers of a fire with her beloved siblings, listening to her nurse's fairy tales. Above all, she loves the chilling story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon, who appears in the frigid night to claim unwary souls. Wise Russians fear him, her nurse says, and honor the spirits of house and yard and forest that protect...

5 Goodreads recs I actually want to read

Every now and then I browse the Goodreads recommendations pages. Most of the time they're books I know about and know I don't care to read. Sometimes they're books I already have on my physical TBR but haven't added on GR yet. Other times I'll see books I haven't heard of but sound awful. For example, Goodreads is determined that I am obsessed with zombie books for some reason. Last night I dug through the recommendations tabs and found five new-to-me books that actually sounded really good! I'm hoping to get to some of them in 2020! When the Earth's rotation slowed to a crawl mankind was plunged into a harsh world of burning hot days...

2020 Retellings Reading Challenge

Hi everyone! The Retellings Reading Challenge is back for another year and I'm so excited to be doing this all again! Last year the challenge pushed participants to read retellings they may never have discovered and this year we're back with an all new BINGO card full of new prompts! THE GUIDELINES This challenge will run from January 1, 2020 - December 31, 2020. Books must be read and reviewed in 2020. (You don't have to review books to count towards your goal, but you do have to review them if you want them to count as giveaway entries.) Audiobooks, e-books, re-reads, short stories, novellas, and graphic novels all count, and you can...

Weekly Recap: 12/1 - 12/7

HAPPENINGS OFF THE BLOG Hi everyone! This week I finally took a couple days off of candle making to do a bit of nothing. I desperately needed some mental health days and they were absolutely wonderful! Now it's back to full time madness as I get the rest of my current orders ready to go and prepare for my family to visit at Christmas. We're trying to get the guest room redecorated in time so we'll see how it goes! This week I also finished City of Brass and, hurray, I have a new obsession. So, yay me! I have to collect all the editions. Anyone else have a serious problem with needing to collect your faves? NEW BOOKS THIS WEEK    THIS...

Book Review: The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

Title: The City of Brass (The Daevabad Trilogy #1) Author: S.A. Chakraborty Publication Date: November 14, 2017Publisher: Harper VoyagerPages: 533Add to Goodreads Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of 18th century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trade she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, healings—are all tricks, sleights of hand, learned skills; a means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles. But when Nahri accidentally summons an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced...

How long is too long between books?

Since 2014 I've read YA books almost exclusively, although I do venture into adult fantasy and horror more often now. Something I've come to depend on is that my favorite series will release books every year. Any longer than that and readers start to wonder how they'll ever wait for the next book. One series that has defied this multiple times is An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir. The publication date for book two (and now book three) was pushed back multiple times. There were two years between A Torch Against the Night and A Reaper at the gates, which was pushed back from one. I still remember how people cried about the delay and then...