What I Read for @AsianReadathon

Hello readers!

May is over, and with it, so is the Asian Readathon, sadly. I am happy to have participated and picked up a bunch of amazing books by Asian authors and seen what everyone has been reading! I talked about my TBR for this readathon at the beginning of the month, and here is how it actually went down:

I started with A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh, which was a bit of a wildcard in the mix, because I am not really into romantic suspense and I wasn’t sure what to expect. In the end I could not finish reading this because it was really not my kind of book – the characters were not much more than stereotypes, the plot was super predictable and the writing was a stilted, too descriptive and slow. It’s possible that after a while the book becomes very twisty and romantic and interesting, but I could not wait to see and honestly, I don’t think it will. I DNF-ed it at 22%. So I needed a book to substitute this one!

What I Read During My Staycation

Hello readers!

I ended up reading 6 (or rather, a bit over 5) out of the 7 books I set out initially to read on my post TBR for my Honeymoon-Turned-Staycation-Because-Oh-Well, which is pretty good! And in addition I read a few more books. Basically my staycation turned into a 2-week readathon! Not too bad 🙂

My TBR for the @AsianReadathon + Recommendations by Genre #representasian

Hello readers!

As many of you know, on May there are a bunch of readathons, and I don’t normally participate because I don’t normally own all the books needed to fulfill the prompts, so I just drool wistfully from afar. But this year, the rules for the Asian Readathon (created by Cindy) are so easy even I can participate! *crowd cheers*

In addition to the challenges below, I added a personal one: I could not buy new books to participate, so all the books listed are books I own! Which is great! My backlisted books are quite thankful.

CHALLENGES

1) Read any book by an Asian author.

This is a fantasy/sci-fi book that sounds lovely, by a Japanese author!

Women’s Prize for Fiction SQUAD Presents: Book Bloggers Take Over the 2020 Longlist

Hello readers!

As you might have seen already this week, Callum, Emily, Hannah, Marija, Rachel, Sarah, Steph and I got together after ranting more or less forever about the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlist (underwhelming) and came up with a whole new list of what books we think would have made a far more exciting list!

Obviously this is based on our personal tastes, some books we’re really excited for and some we really loved and thought were truly powerful reads. We followed the same rules as the original prize, so that this list is quite comparable to what the WP could have been, if we’d been the judges (hint, hint). This is just for fun and was decided quite spontaneously, so obviously the list isn’t perfect and neither is this all very serious. We all love the Women’s Prize for Fiction and love finding new books every year with it!

The squad has some posts talking about our longlist:

Emily: 2020 Women’s Prize Take 2: Blogger Edition

Callum: What If? | Women’s Prize [Squad] Longlist

Sarah: The 2020 Women’s Prize Squad Longlist

They’re all fantastic and really, you should follow all of us and see what happens! Maybe we’ll have some flops, for sure we won’t love all of them, but AT LEAST there’s no Greek retelling this year and maybe only a limited amount of books about how motherhood sucks! Instead, we got murder, dark academia and even YA, which is really exciting for me.

If you wanna follow us on Twitter while we read and talk about the longlist, you can use #womensprizesquad.

• Bunny by Mona Awad / Goodreads
• The Body Lies by Jo Baker / Goodreads
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo / Goodreads

#FFFeb TBR and Recommendations

Hello readers!

Charlotte from Moonraker & Read Rainbows posted about the #FFFeb challenge and I decided to (attempt to) participate! To learn more about it, go check out her post 🙂 oh and don’t forget to follow her, she gives amazing recommendations and I love the aesthetic.

i got impatient and posted this two days early (oops) but. looking to sort your tbr for #FFFeb? i got you covered https://t.co/o9CWx48OLd

— charlotte 🐑 🐏 #FFFeb (📌) (@darashirazi) December 31, 2019

My TBR

Because I am also trying to keep up with the ARCs and backlist books I already own, I will try to adhere to those books for my TBR as much as possible. So I’ve divided my FFFeb TBR into priority 1 and 2, since I’m confident I can read prio 1 books (also I already own them) and then if the month goes really well reading-wise, I’ll pick up prio 2 books as well!

Click on the covers to go to their respective Goodreads pages. Priority 1 books:

 

What I read for #Tropeathon (Mini-Reviews)

Hello book lovers!

As you know, I participated on Tropeathon this week, hosted by Misty and Chelle! There are nine prompts, which I managed to cover with the three books below. So in the end I read exactly what I’d planned, plus finished an audiobook from last week. The Bride Test I got finished on day 2 of the readathon, so I felt pretty confident and considered adding another book to it, but then my life got crazy busy and I only got some time here and there to read – so I finished The Wicked King by Saturday night and devoured Binti on Sunday!

I started with The Bride Test, by Helen Hoang! I’ll be posting a full review of this, since it’s an eARC, but to sum up: this was a sweet, quick read and oh my gosh, completely adorable. ★★★★☆

I then picked up The Wicked King, by Holly Black for an exciting, fast-paced fantasy and boy, did it scratch that itch. This was twisty and dark and delicious to read. I can barely wait for book 3! ★★★★☆

Finally, on Sunday I picked up Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor and… did not like it so much. I loved the world, the concept of the book, the story… but not the writing. I could not connect to the character so well and found it a bit too dry and too fast paced. ★★★☆☆