Stacking The Shelves is hosted by Team Tynga's Reviews and Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits, and Tea. For more information, check out their blogs!
This last week, the books have been sparse, which is good. I have so many books to read! Nonetheless, I received one book. (Link leads to Goodreads.)
Bought:
Daisy Whitney: When You Were Here
What did you add to your TBR shelves last week? Did you write a blog post? Then leave a message. If you didn't, please comment!
Stacking The Shelves is hosted by Team Tynga's Reviews and Showcase Sunday is hosted by Books, Biscuits, and Tea. For more information, check out their blogs!
This is the product of two weeks' worth of books entering my home...
Bought:
For those of you who don't know yet, ArmchairBEA is a way for those book bloggers who cannot attend Book Expo America in Person to get together and meet great people.
I am so happy I got to participate in this year’s Armchair BEA. It was a fun experience and I will most likely spend the next 2 weeks still in order to meet new bloggers and to see who else participated. It has been a fun experience I would not want to have missed. It got me thinking about genres, blogging and aspects of blogging I wasn’t even really aware of.
All this makes Armchair BEA an amazing event to join in on. You get a lot of positive things out of it from your own cozy armchair, desk or wherever else you blog from.
I have been thinking about this for the past few days and I could not possibly tell you what I liked more – attending BEA in NYC or participating in Armchair BEA. I just do not know and if in doubt, I would probably want to participate in both? Sounds crazy, huh?
What I missed out on for Armchair BEA this year were the Twitter chats. I never was awake for them, be it because I was already in bed or because I was still in bed. But in the end, I need my sleep, especially now that I am kind of working on sleeping up front, before kiddo is going to keep me awake at odd hours.
One of the genres I would have loved to see talked about by the Armchair BEA participants, in part to get more points of view on it, is fantasy, especially urban fantasy. This certainly has to do with my very own beloved nerd (think Leonard of The Big Bang Theory fame and you basically know the basics about my wonderful mister!).
I had Jim Butcher’s first two Harry Dresden novels on my Mt. TBR for the longest time, and when he came around, I read them right away and read the next few books as well. I am still working my way through the series, which is easy because he has them all, so I can just grab them. I have to admit though, that I haven’t read one in a while, much to his chagrin. One of my reasons is that I cannot fathom finishing the series. I have always been odd like that and I usually have the (for now) last one in a series sitting around on Mt. TBR until the next one is out or until I urgently need a fix of a favorite series. Maybe I will use maternity leave to read one or two more. After all, I will then have two extra days off!
Another series he wants me to read is the Game of Thrones books, by the way, and those are chunksters, let me tell you that much! I am glad he has them on his e-reader. I will just have to grab that off his nightstand. I’m sure he won’t mind as long as he can read on my e-reader instead.
What are some urban fantasy series you can recommend? The mister and I are always looking for some good urban fantasy. (Yes, he’s a reader, am I lucky or what?)
For those of you who don't know yet, ArmchairBEA is a way for those book bloggers who cannot attend Book Expo America in Person to get together and meet great people.
I have been thinking about that saying all day yesterday and all day today and I am still not sure if I actually fully grasp the meaning. Let me try it anyway...
I have been blogging for many years now and it has mostly been about books here, but that is not everything I can and want to share with you. I mention it here and there - I love playing with makeup, my cat is a source of joy and WTF-ery in my life, and the mister and my pregnancy is no secret, which you can see in my Instagram feed on a regular basis. I am still trying to figure out how to best incorporate this in my blog without moving the emphasis from book blogging. Maybe not only by mentioning it here and there in a side note. To me, when I hear about Keeping it real, I think of not faking it, being yourself and being honest in what you say and do.
If you have any advice on how to incorporate other aspects on a blog, feel free to leave your suggestions and ideas in the comments!
I am probably not telling you anything new when I say that YA is one of the main age groups in literature I read. At least if you know this blog a bit. But what about children's literature?
I will soon have to stock up on picture books for kiddo, so I have been thinking about those books for a while now. Apart from the Doctor Seuss books, the mister will definitely have us stock up on (and actually, we already have one thanks to Lenore and her husband Daniel, we will add The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The question is, what other books we should add. I assure you, I will keep you up to date on kiddo's very first library!
As an older kid, I loved Enid Blyton's novels. They always taught the reader something without being too preachy, and I could not get enough of them. They are mostly girl-y books, so we will have to see what we can get kiddo when he is (quite a few years) older. Aside from the usual fare of books geared towards 8-12 year old girls, I would also read plenty of Agatha Christie's mysteries. I never viewed them as too brutal or bloody, and I enjoyed (and still do) the thrill of trying to figure out what exactly happened, why and of course the whodunnit!
Nowadays, I am an adult, obviously, but I still go back to reading YA most of the time. On one hand, it is an escapist behavior. I have to read plenty of classics and other rather dense literature for university. When I read YA I concentrate less on images the author might want to create, or on underlying messages. With young adult novels, I still have some issues that are being handled.
On the other hand, I can go back to a time in life when things were on one hand easier (no tax reports! no bills!), but also difficult for me as a bookaholic, an avid reader. You may or may not know that reading is not commonly perceived as "cool" when you're a teenager. The books I read are a nice mixture of nerdy people and how they experience their teenage years and books with cool kids and their issues. It's this mix in YA that makes it especially appealing to me.
Are there any books you can recommend, both in picture books and children's books? Are there YA books you think I should read?
I am again participating in the Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) hosted by the lovely ladies from Book Soulmates! It's a fun and nice way to interact with other book lovers and a chance to maybe fulfill a wish of theirs - and have a wish of yours fulfilled. You can find the rules on their website (the basics: have a wishlist or create one, sign up and send off books - and get some in return).
Last month, I sent out:
If I Should Die by Amy Plum to Mariska of me and my books
And I received:
With a TBR "stack" like mine, it is incredibly overwhelming to pick my next read. Thus, I have recently started to make monthly short lists. That way, when I am not absolutely certain I want to read that one particular book, I am not overwhelmed standing in front of my shelves of unread books. Instead, I simply look at a small stack and go based off of that.
It is nice to spend a while in front of my bookshelves at the end of each month to look at all the goodies and to shop my stacks. Deciding which books I want to add to my stack for the upcoming month is never easy, I never know how many books I should add. But it is also fun to try to pick a variety of books I still feel like reading.
Of course, not all the books are random. I also add books I intend to read for a certain occasion or because I intend to read them for a challenge maybe - or for educational purposes (for university, because I feel I should read them at least once etc).
For June, I picked the following books for my monthly stack:
The first few books were on the stack last month already. I did not read a lot in May, unfortunately.
Tahereh Mafi: Shatter Me
Mira Grant: Feed
Abby Grahame: Wentworth Hall
Suzanne Young: The Program (I received this ARC from Lenore of Presenting Lenore after she read it. Thanks again!!)
Harvey Karp: The Happiest Baby on the Block
Cassandra Clare: City of Ashes
Rick Yancey: The 5th Wave
Ashley Elston: The Rules for Disappearing
And ebooks on my stack are:
Kiera Cass: The Elite
Kim Barnouin: Skinny Bitch in Love
Mary Louise Kelly: Anonymous Sources
S.K. Falls: Secret for a Song
Do you create monthly reading stacks? What does your TBR stack look like?
