Friday, April 1, 2016

Previously on WLABB: October 2015 - March 2016

Previously on We Live and Breathe Books is an end of the month wrap up post. Previously allows us to recap all our posts from the past month and discuss what's going on in our lives, including what books we're reading, any fun things we've been doing, and a TBR for the next month. Our inspiration for this meme comes from Midnight Madness Newsletters created by Melanie at YA Midnight Reads.

Previously on We Live and Breathe Books all the bloggers died and disappeared. (I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate a joke about it being last season, but I'm just not that funny.) The last time we did a Previously post was for September 2015. A lot of time has passed since then, with all of us taking some time away from the blog, but now that we're back (well, Kiersten and Noor for now), I figured we might as well get back into these Previously posts!

Posts from October 2015 - March 2016

October:
ARC Review: A Step Toward Falling - Cammie McGovern
ARC Review: Black Widow: Forever Red - Margaret Stohl
Top Ten Tuesday: Author Duos You'd LOVE to See Write a Book Together
Stuffed Animal Saturday: Illuminae - Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff
Top Ten Tuesday: Wishes I'd Ask the Book Genie to Grant Me
Review: The Sword of Summer - Rick Riordan

November:
Top Ten Tuesday: Debut Authors Who Have Me Looking Forward to Their Sophomore Novel
Top Five Tuesday: Books I'm Thankful For

December: We all died.

January: Still dead.

February: Was that a finger twitch? Oh, nope. Still dead.

March: WAIT - I THINK I SEE LIFE!
Review: The Blood of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Stuffed Animal Saturday: Tell Me Three Things - Julie Buxbaum
Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven't Talked About Enough / In A While
Review: Persuasion - Martina Boone
Review: Not That Easy - Radhika Sanghani
Double Review: A Thousand Nights - E.K. Johnston
Top Ten Tuesday: Most Recent 5 Star Reads
Review: The Dark Artifices - Cassandra Clare

Keeping Up with the WLABBers 

Kiersten

Happy April, everyone! I promise nothing in my section is an April Fool's Day joke.


Wow, this year has been crazy. For real. Now that the show I was designing and my dance show are over, the rest of this semester should be smooth sailing. I'm taking a lot of statistics classes right now for my applied statistics minor, and I've found that these classes are actually a lot less time consuming than my design classes. I love that I can finally get back to reading and blogging! I didn't realize how much I missed it until I started again over spring break.

March absolutely flew by. The first weekend was my dance show, and I also got to meet Fall Out Boy and see them in concert!


After that was spring break and that's about it. Things have been pretty chill since then, just doing my work, reading, and blogging. I sprained my ankle last week, which was pretty lame.  I kind of looked like this cat for a while:


In other news, if you missed it in my latest Stuffed Animal Sunday post, Sloth has a new friend! His name is French Fry, and he is a nice little sloth!


I have no idea why this was a geofilter on Snapchat, but Sloth liked it because sloths and rainbows are his favorite.

AND in the most exciting bit of news, the Syracuse University women's and men's basketball teams both made it to the Final Four (which is a big deal if you don't know college sports)! Campus is so much fun right now with all the excitement. I don't know what the outcome will be on Saturday, but it's honestly pretty crazy that we've made it this far (especially for the men's team being the first 10 seed to ever make it to the Final Four). It's going to be an exciting, and hopefully successful, day!

March 2016 aka the start of me reading again! I finally finished Queen of Shadows, which I had started during winter break but had to stop half way through to do school work (sads). I also finally finished The Heroes of Olympus series, which was bittersweet. Tell Me Three Things is now one of my favorite books of all time (check it out when it comes out on the 5th), and The Darkest Corners was also incredible! Unfortunately, A Thousand Nights taints this amazing month of reading, being the first book I've abandoned that wasn't assigned reading.


This April TBR might be somewhat ambitious but it's not like it actually matters if I read all the books I say I want to read this month. I've actually already started Into the Dim, and I'm really enjoying it so far! Illuminae is an ARC I got at BEA last year but never got the chance to read, so I really want to prioritize it this month. To be honest, I really only decided to add The Wrath & the Dawn when I saw that Noor was planning to read it this month because ~potential double review fun times~ and it just so happens that I got it not that long ago. Playlist for the Dead has been on my radar for a while, and I just think I'm really in the mood for that one right now. Last but not least, I am so overdue for reading Shadow and Bone - I actually own the entire series and Six of Crows, so I really need to get on that.


Noor

You know how on Snapchat if you make a video you can speed it up or you can super speed it up? I feel like someone took the last few months of time and stuck them in the super-speed filter and made them too fast for me to decipher what was really going on but it's April and I don't know how that happened but we're here and we're just gonna go with it. Also, I too can relate to Kiersten's first image. I don't need jokes because I'm the joke.

Lately I've been dealing with transfer applications and residency applications and a lot of things that give me headaches and because I'm a firm believer in not talking about things until they're already dealt with I'm just going to tell you about my trip to Texas during March instead. My cousins had their spring break the week of March 14th so I flew to Houston from the 10th to the 19th and learned that 1. the Cincinnati airport is in Kentucky and 2. if you are planning to run across 20 airport gates, probably do not wear heels. Anyway, the day after I got there we left to go stay in a cabin in the woods in Oklahoma with some family from my uncle's side for the weekend which was really fun except for a great tragedy that I will tell you about after I show you these pictures of me looking totally cute and camping-ready:


Wondering why all my pictures are clearly from the same day save for one when I mentioned I stayed for a whole weekend? Because, my dear reader, on the second day of camping (the third day of my nine day long trip) we decided to go boating. Now, I've been boating before. I've even brought my DSLR with me while canoeing and got some great shots. So naturally, I thought it was no big deal when I brought my iPhone and my Polaroid camera with me on the boat. Now, our group of people was a solid 30 people so a bunch of boats were already out, including my cousin and his cousin. And of course, this is the boat that comes heading our way not 30 seconds after we (my aunt, uncle, and I) head out into the water. As the boys were on a peddleboat, which is easier to steer and manuever, and we were on a canoe, which requires coordination and cooperation, we told them to turn away, but I guess they thought it would be amusing to hit us, because the next thing I know, we are flipped over into the freezing cold water (I cannot stress enough how cold the water was) and my phone is six feet under. (Okay, like five and a half feet under) Shoutout to my aunt, who I kept telling that my phone was a lost cause and to get out of the water, but who insisted on trying to find it, because after 10 minutes in the ice cold water, we DID find it. However, the water damage was significant and it stopped working by the time we drove back to the cabin to change (also, my really cute outfit was left undocumented). Anyway, I couldn't really deal with the phone situation until I got home (it's remedied now, I'm back in 2016) so I was stuck taking my ootd's on other people's phones and scavenging for chances to log into Snapchat and using the dreaded Instagram website. I have a few photos on Messenger I have to sort through and decide if they're worth posting but much of my trip sadly went undocumented and I can confidently say that those people who are all like "experience with your eyes not your camera!!!!!" are total liars because photographed experiences are so much fun. The rest of the films on my Polaroid got messed up from the water too so I only got two out of the trip but I think they were two good ones so let's appreciate the cute:


Anyway, sorry about the huge chunk of text about my phone up there. The rest of my trip was pretty rad. I ate really good burgers which I was supremely grateful for because there was a really good burger place here that closed down and I've been craving a phenomenal burger ever since and I was not disappointed. Also I rode around the mall on those large fuzzy animal robot things for kids. And I ate a lot of s'mores and explored in the woods and ate deer for the first time but those are all pretty much givens and definitely not as important as the burgers and the fuzzy kids rides.

Anyway, before I move on to March Reads, I just want to say that it's April, which means it's National Poetry Month! Woo! I'm going to try to write a poem a day -- starting with a poem about Paris Geller from Gilmore Girls -- because honestly I haven't written in a long time and this is a good excuse to go back, so if any of you want to join me, let's have fun writing times together, shall we?

Whereas Kiersten started reading again in March, it's been a slow decline for me, with only three books. But hey, it's better than none, right? I just posted my Lady Midnight review so if you're keeping up you should know that I'm just utterly and truly in love with it. Honestly, Cassandra Clare can keep writing Shadowhunter books until her dying day and I will keep buying them and soaking them in. I mentioned in our last Top Ten Tuesday that I'll Give You the Sun was a five star read and I want to review it soon and tell you all why because it was truly one of the best contemporary books I've read in a while and I'm so grateful I finally read it. My most recent read of this month was Persepolis, which is a memoir written in comic form and while it's not a YA book, it tells the story of the early teen years of the author's life in Iran and because of the way it's written and the way the author tells her story, I think a lot of YA fans would enjoy her graphic novel memoir.


I didn't want to aim too high and put like seven books and then only read one but I didn't want to admit defeat by only putting like two so I figured I would aim to read one more book than I did last month. Okay, so I didn't even know Kindred Spirits existed until like last week, at which point I knew I needed to read it because, hello, it's Rainbow Rowell. It's apparently a short story (96 pages) she wrote for World Book Day and I can't wait to get my hands on it. Moving on, when I first heard of Salt to the Sea I wanted to read it solely because it had a pretty name and cover, and then I wasn't sure because it's a historical fiction set in 1945 and I wasn't sure if it would be my cup of tea but then I kept seeing so many positive reviews that my curiosity is getting the better of me and now I really want to read it again. Red Queen has been on my to-read list for ages but the second book came out in February and now I feel obligated to read it soon because if I don't the series will pile up and become intimidating and I won't ever read it. So Kiersten touched upon the disappointment of A Thousand Nights and because I don't want to give up hope that a gripping 1001 Nights retelling is out there and I think that if I read that one I should read The Wrath and the Dawn and now that the sequel for it is out I don't want the scenario I mentioned with Red Queen to happen and also people just keep mentioning how good it is so I hope to read it this month.


I hope you all have a beautiful April! *insert lots of kissy face emojis*

What have you been up to last month?
Let us know in the comments!
Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)