Vacation Time!

Well, I finally get to take a real vacation for the first time since this time last year.  I am so excited to be going back up to Illinois for my family reunion again!  We will be staying at a camp ground so it is unlikely that I will be getting on here very much since there won’t be any wifi and I have to watch my data usage, but I do have my posts scheduled and I will still be announcing the winners of the giveaway tomorrow.  Don’t let that stop you from commenting though!  I promise to answer them back as soon as I can when I get back in town.  Hope you all have a wonderful 4th of July!!

Cover Crush (31)

  Cover Crush is my new meme here at On The Shelf where beautiful and eye-catching covers are spotlighted!  Any cover can be showcased whether it be old or new, read or still sitting in your TBR stack.  Please join in, link up and enjoy some beautiful covers!

My Cover:

Isadora’s family is seriously screwed up.

Of course, as the human daughter of Egyptian gods, that pretty much comes with the territory. She’s also stuck with parents who barely notice her, and a house full of relatives who can’t be bothered to remember her name. After all, they are going to be around forever—and she’s a mere mortal.

Isadora’s sick of living a life where she’s only worthy of a passing glance, and when she has the chance to move to San Diego with her brother, she jumps on it. But Isadora’s quickly finding that a “normal” life comes with plenty of its own epic complications—and that there’s no such thing as a clean break when it comes to family. Much as she wants to leave her past behind, she can’t shake the ominous dreams that foretell destruction for her entire family. When it turns out there may be truth in her nightmares, Isadora has to decide whether she can abandon her divine heritage after all.

Why I’m Crushing:

The cover is simple, but it really stands out!  I love the deep blue with the gold title and swirls across it.  The font and flourishes are very elegant and showy without being too much.  And the speckles of stars in the background are not bright enough to take away from the title.  What do you guys think of this one?  Please share your Crushes 🙂

Super Sweet Blogging Award

I was nominated for the Super Sweet Blogging Award by Jennifer at Young At Heart!

The rules for nominees are:

A. Thank the blogger that nominated you:

Big thanks for the nomination Jennifer!!! 🙂

B. Answer  super sweet questions:

1. Cookies or Cake? Both? : Definitely cookies (I’m not big on frosting).  Chocolate chip is my favorite!

2.Chocolate or Vanilla?    :  Chocolate!

3.Favorite Sweet Treat?   :  Hmm…kind of depends.  I love York peppermint patties, gummi savers and banana split ice cream.

4.When Do You Crave Sweet Things The Most? :  After I eat lunch and dinner.  I always have to have something sweet afterward.

5.Sweet Nick Name?:  Hmm….don’t think I have ever had a sweets kind of nickname, it has been Tinkerbell for so long I can’t remember any other nickname!

C.  Include the Super Sweet Blogging Award in your blog post.
Done!!

D. Nominate a baker’s dozen (13) other deserving bloggers.

1. Books, Etc.

2. Read My Breath Away

3. Books Live Forever

4. The Book Addict’s Guide

5. Nose Graze

6. YAdult Review

7. The Reading Date

8. Music, Books and Tea

9. My Not So Real Life

10. Two Chicks on Books

11. Book Soulmates

12. Lili’s Reflections

13. YA’s the Word

Thanks again for the nomination!  I had fun answering these questions 🙂

Waiting on Wednesday (38)

 Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine that spotlights upcoming releases that we’re eagerly anticipating.

This week I am waiting on:

 Of Beast and Beauty
Stacey Jay 

Release 7-23-13

 In the beginning was the darkness, and in the darkness was a girl, and in the girl was a secret…

In the domed city of Yuan, the blind Princess Isra, a Smooth Skin, is raised to be a human sacrifice whose death will ensure her city’s vitality. In the desert outside Yuan, Gem, a mutant beast, fights to save his people, the Monstrous, from starvation. Neither dreams that together, they could return balance to both their worlds.

Isra wants to help the city’s Banished people, second-class citizens despised for possessing Monstrous traits. But after she enlists the aid of her prisoner, Gem, who has been captured while trying to steal Yuan’s enchanted roses, she begins to care for him, and to question everything she has been brought up to believe.

As secrets are revealed and Isra’s sight, which vanished during her childhood, returned, Isra will have to choose between duty to her people and the beast she has come to love.

Why I am Waiting:

This sounds like an interesting new take on the Beauty and the Beast tale.  I have only read one beauty and the beast retelling and was sadly disappointed in it, so I think this one could be one I would be more pleased with.  What are you guys waiting on this week?

Top Ten Tuesday (38)

 Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted at The Broke and The Bookish.  Each week a new top ten list is posted, and to participate all you have to do is fill in YOUR top ten for the list.

This week the topic is:

Top Ten Books I’ve Read So Far This Year

1. Scarlet – I LOVED Cinder, and Scarlet was definitely not a disappointment!  There are some really great new characters in this installment, including the swoon worthy Wolf.

2. The Fault in Our Stars – This was a very beautiful story and very moving and heartbreaking but wonderful.  I will remember this book always.

3. Days of Blood and Starlight – I loved seeing the chimaera so much in this one and Ziri is a favorite new character for this series.

4. Lola and the Boy Next Door – Lola is great and Cricket is just too cute.  Stephanie Perkins writes some wonderful and quirky characters.

5. On The Jellicoe Road – Another story that is going to be with me forever.  This was such a wonderful read and I had a book hangover after this one.

6. Asunder – The cover of Incarnate is what originally drew me in to read this series, and I am glad I let the cover decide on that for me.  Asunder was a fantastic follow up for the second installment of this trilogy.

7. Dear Teen Me – This was a very short and quick read, but it was so great!  I loved reading the letters authors wrote themselves and thought they were very inspiring.

8. Black Heart – This was a great finish to the Curse Workers series and it was the most suspenseful book of the trilogy.

9. The Battle of the Labyrinth – I just love the Percy Jackson series and the mythological world in it.

10. Catching Fire – I really enjoyed this one, especially since we really got to see Katniss and Peeta’s relationship build more here that we didn’t get to see in The Hunger Games.

I plan on reading a bunch more great books, but these are the best ones so far.  What are the top reads for you so far this year?

Cover Crush (30)

 Cover Crush is my new meme here at On The Shelf where beautiful and eye-catching covers are spotlighted!  Any cover can be showcased whether it be old or new, read or still sitting in your TBR stack.  Please join in, link up and enjoy some beautiful covers!

My Cover:

Sorry no synopsis yet!

Why I’m Crushing:

This is a gorgeous cover and I like the color scheme.  All of the covers are great for this series, but this one really makes me say wow.  I love how the dress is swirling in with the smoke and it looks like I could touch the cover and feel the texture of the dress fabric.  And the fact that the dress is darker than the surrounding smoke really makes it pop.  What is your Cover Crush this week?

Blogoversary Countdown – Day 1

Day 1

Comparing year 1 and 2

I think it is funny when I think about now in comparison to my first year of blogging.  I had no clue what I was doing when I first started my blog and it began as a simple black background, then blue, then an ocean header, but eventually I finally settled into my current set up.  I had to learn a lot of stuff on my own like how to make buttons and html tags (which I now have memorized).  I found things to learn and research through other blogs I follow and seeing the cool things on their blogs made me say – hey, I want to know how to do that, so thanks to all the awesome bloggers I follow that helped me make my blog better!

My first year, I only had a few pages up and now I have added a review archive, meme and giveaway pages, separate challenge pages and I have a blog specifically for my giveaways since Rafflecopter doesn’t work on wordpress.  I started out my giveaways in the google documents, and I am glad I don’t have to do it that way anymore because hand typing that many entries into the randomizer on Random.org would be a pain!  I love Rafflecopter!  Thanks to Brittany at The Book Addict’s Guide, who I stole the idea from to host my giveaways on a separate blog.

I’m always on the lookout for new ways to improve my blog and if anybody sees anything that needs to be fixed or improved I am not against suggestions 🙂  I have also been debating on changing to self hosted and knocking off the wordpress.com part of my website.  This may not be for a bit since I am strapped for cash.  This past year was also my first year as a home owner, so it is a huge difference from having rommates and splitting bills on everything.

There are still things I am learning, too, like better ways to try to be more organized and I still haven’t mastered scheduling and planning ahead for posts since I am such a procrastinator.  We will see what year 3 brings 🙂

*Review* The Awakening – L.J. Smith

 The Awakening (Vampire Diaries #1)

L.J. Smith

276 pages

ISBN: 9780061020001

Read 6-6-13

Format: Audiobook

Source: Library

Add it on Goodreads!

A Love Triangle of Unspeakable Horror… 

Elena: Searching for the ultimate thrill, she vowed to have Stefan.

Stefan: Haunted by his tragic past, he struggled to resist her passion.

Damon: Driven by revenge, he hunted the brother who betrayed him.

The terrifying story of two vampire brothers and the beautiful girl torn between them.

Well, this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it to be.  I watched the first 3 seasons before I read this book.  I love the TV series, but I wasn’t in love with the book.  At least not this first one.  It is quite different from the show!

Elena was very different between the book and the show.  In the show she is a caring person who puts others before herself, but in the book she was the queen bee at school and manipulated people to get whatever she wanted.  I just didn’t like her very much.

And this book was the worst I have read on insta-love.  It was unreal how fast the insta-love was.  There was no real connection between Elena and Stefan for me.  I understand why Stefan would want Elena, but I don’t know why she wants Stefan other than she feels the need to take whatever she wants.  There was no relationship development.

Stefan on the other hand I actually did like.  He is very mysterious and wants to protect Elena.  We get a good history on him and he is a deeper character than Elena and has a better attitude.

There was soooo many things that were different between this book and the show, I really wouldn’t know where to start with it.  There are characters in the book not in the show and vice versa, characters who have totally different personalities and names where changed and mixed around.  Gotta say I like the TV show better than what I have read so far.  I will keep reading however because I want to see more of Damon (I’m Team Damon all the way) and hopefully I won’t be so annoyed with Elena past the first book.

Annoying main female character, good writing, major insta-love, enjoyed the TV show better.

 

Blogoversary Countdown – Day 2

Day 2

Blogging tools

So, in the past year I have found some thing that have helped me in blogging.  A lot of you probably already know about them, but I am going to mention them anyway because they are awesome!

Bloglovin

I have tried a couple of different blog readers, but Bloglovin is by far the best one I have come across.  It  is easy to use and has a nice simple layout.  Links popup in a second window so you don’t have to worry about going back and forth or losing your place in your post queue.  Bloglovin also has an app you can download for your phone, so no worries about not being at your computer since it is mobile!

WordPress App

I got the wordpress app on my phone sometime later last year, but I couldn’t get it to work correctly for me.  I don’t know if it was because the app wasn’t working like it should or if it was because my phone sucked, but once I got my new phone and updated my apps, it worked wonderfully.  I use it to write up drafts of my posts, but I don’t actually post them because, the one downside I can find, is that I can not access my media gallery from the app.  So if I am making a post for one of my memes like Waiting on Wednesday, I can’t go in and get the WoW image I always use from the gallery.  So, I just make draft posts and go back and add my images in and format how I want it later.  This is really helpful to me since before when I wanted to make a draft, but wasn’t around my computer, I just wrote them down, which was a pain to go back and type up.

Pinterest

Pinterest is cool because I can pin all of my reviews and memes and such to pin boards to share with my followers.  Click the pin and it takes you to my website!  It also helps me since I tend to be forgetful and I am doing a meme like Waiting on Wednesday or Cover Crush and I can’t remember if I already posted a certain book for it.  I can just look at my board and see which covers have been pinned.  Also, if you like to not only read books, but write them, you can do pin boards for character inspirations and such, and they can be secret pin boards, too, so only you and people you invite can see those boards (I have one myself).  I just added my pinterest follow button, so follow me on pinterest if you like 🙂

These are some very useful tools when doing stuff for book blogging!  If anyone knows of any other newer tools that can be helpful, please let me know!  I am always on the lookout for more things that are helpful for blogging 🙂

Don’t forget to check out my giveaway!

Blogoversary Countdown – Day 3

Day 3

Awesome bookish experience

I had an awesome experience this past year, and it wasn’t just the most awesome experience this past year of blogging, but during my whole time blogging in general.  I was able to go to YALLFEST this past November and it was incredible!  It was my first big author event and there were a ton of great authors there.  I took my cousin with me who was dorking out like I was and we had such a blast.  It was in Charleston SC which is about a 3 hour drive from where I live.  So we got up at 6 am hopped in the car and drove down to Charleston, parked and immediately got in line for the keynote speakers (Clarissa Clare and Holly Black).  We walked around the block so many times back and forth watching awesome panels, standing in autograph lines, and even watching sneak peak behind the scene stuff for the City of Bones movie!  I got books signed by Clarissa Clare, Holly Black, Gayle Forman, Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl and Stephanie Perkins.  Afterward, there was a really funny YA Smackdown where the authors improvised skits and genres competed against one another.  Absolutely hilarious!  It was a truly amazing experience.  Once things were done, we drove 3 hours back and we were beyond exhausted, my feet hurt and were blistered from my shoes and walking so much, but it was worth it!  I can’t wait to go back again this November.  There are around 50 great authors that will be coming, so I highly suggest a trip to anyone who can make it!  It is only a day, but it is an awesome day.

Me and Stephanie Perkins