Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Previously on WLABB: April & May 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.

Posts from April & May 2016

Review: Tell Me Three Things - Julie Buxbaum
Waiting on Wednesday: Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here - Anna Breslaw
Review: I'll Give You the Sun - Jandy Nelson
Waiting on Wednesday: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, & John Tiffany
3rd Blogiversary Giveaway (Open through June 8th)
Review: The Unexpected Everything - Morgan Matson
Review: Into the Dim - Janet B. Taylor

Keeping Up with the WLABBers 

Kiersten

My April was pretty crazy given all the end of the school year work and assisting lighting design on a show - I kind of stopped being a person for a while. But May was a lot more fun and relaxing!

One of the biggest highlights of May was attending BookExpo America and BookCon in Chicago! I was pretty exhausted since I was still finishing up a final paper during my first days at BEA, but it was a lot of fun! I'll be doing a recap of my time there soon.

Since then, I've been relaxing, catching up on some TV, and reading! I'm excited to read a lot this summer, especially with all the awesome books I got at BEA, and I'll also be working on making costumes for a show I'm working on in September.

Because of all the school work, I had to take some time off from reading in April. I still got to read some awesome books though! I started out April by finishing Into the Dim, which I reviewed yesterday. I really enjoyed the time travel aspect in that book! I FINALLY read Illuminae, which was so incredible, and then after BEA, I read Gemina, which was ALSO INCREDIBLE. I'm dying to read book three even though it's a long ways away (insert sadface here). I also finally started the Grisha trilogy, and I've finished Shadow and Bone and Siege and Storm thus far. I cannot believe I waited so long to read this series - it's so good! My final read of May was Museum of Heartbreak, which I just finished and absolutely loved. It was kind of heartbreaking (as implied by the title) but also super sweet. I'll be reviewing that soon!


For June, I want to balance out my TBR with some BEA books as well as some ebooks I have. For BEA books, I have The Loose Ends List, The Girls, and And I Darken. I have eARCs of The King Slayer, which I'm really excited for since I loved The Witch Hunter (review here), and Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies. Lastly, I want to finish the Grisha trilogy with Ruin and Rising.


Noor

I lowkey don't even remember what I did the past two months because I'm so bad at placing time frames on events in my life (I can usually remember years, but months is way too specific). I feel like I went to the doctor a lot in April, not because I was sick like in the coughing sense, but because my brain is highkey tryna ruin my life and I gotta work on it so I saw a few doctors, got an MRI, scheduled some more doctor time, and lied to my sister about the bruises from my blown veins and told her I got in a fight. The usual.

In May I ate a lot of ice cream because my brother started working at Coldstone and he didn't have his own car at first so we'd pick him up and buy ice cream while we waited but then he bought a car so I don't swing by around there as much. Also I got to play with really cute cat at my friend's grad party which was probably the highlight of my year.

I mostly spent the month writing quotes from Hamilton with a quill and ink into a leather journal (really sloppily because if you think my handwriting is bad with a normal pen, try reading it with a quill) because my friend sent me said quill and ink as a birthday present five months after my actual birthday (December 23rd if u wanna hmu with gifts) and it was really exciting for me.









I couldn't go to BEA & Bookcon because my mom thought I wasn't medically sound enough so that was kinda sad but this past weekend I did go to Baltimore and met up with my best friends for this convention. It was such a wonderful weekend and honestly was not enough time with my Best Friends, but we made the most of it, going to brunch a few times. Baltimore's Inner Harbor area has the best cute, aesthetically pleasing, food spots. It was like heaven for us and we spent more time photographing our food and each other and cute angles than we did eating our food -- which was hella delicious too -- because of how nice it was. I even put my plate on a pile of rocks at one place for the aesthetic and I refuse to be ashamed. I think wearing heels the whole weekend was a bad idea in retrospect but also I think I will wear heels the whole weekend again next year because of who I am as a person. Also, I think I probably should have slept more than negative five hours the whole weekend, but again, I am a flawed person. Also, the second night, I would have slept significantly more if we all hadn't been woken up by the loud peal of an alarm telling the entire Hyatt to evacuate because of a fire at 5am (it was okay, it wasn't a real fire, but we still had to leave and the elevators were obviously not gonna work, and we were on the 12th floor). I always ramble a lot in these so I'm gonna cut myself off here but I wanna show you guys some pictures from Baltimore. I actually have a lot of really cute pictures but I'm planning to slowly Instagram them so I can't just post them here and ruin the surprise but here are a few that I either don't think I will Instagram or don't mind posting here as well in their unfiltered glory.

         
Follow me on Instagram (@looonylovegood) to see which pics were so cute I couldn't even post them here. Also, I cut all my hair off into a tapered bob and dyed it purple. Moving on for realsies. 

So I've been preoccupied by my general anxiety and hopes that I'll get sucked into the void and all that that stuff so it's been a slow time for reading. I read the Hamiltome when it came out and just died over it. I have a journal where I just have various lists and so I have about five billion pages of notes to myself about which annotations I'll want to look back on for future reference. I read The Night Circus right after because quite a few people recommended it to me a few years ago and I bought it but never read it so it was about time, and that was it for April. I started off May with Morgan Matson's The Unexpected Everything, which I reviewed very positively, so you can find my expanded ravings on that. After that, I read So Sad Today, which is actually a collection of personal essays, which might not sound like some people's cup of tea, but honestly it was so good and raw and well written. If you don't already follow the Twitter account @sosadtoday, the author runs the account, and the book reads like the tone of the tweets, so I was into it, and some of you could be too. Moving on, I didn't actually finish Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here yet so I don't wanna say anything because sometimes you like a book at first and then by the end totally hate it, but I brought it as my car book for Baltimore but didn't read it because I get a little carsick when I read but I still wanted to read it so I started when I got home and couldn't sleep because I slept in the car.


I only put three books because I'm really bad at planning what I want to read ahead of time so it's not that I only want to read three things all of June, but that these are the three books I'm surest I want to read, other than that it's up in the air. With A Court of Thorns and Roses and Illuminae, it's the same deal: the books came out a while ago, everyone raved about them, I kept planning to read them and I own them and everything, but still didn't, and now everyone is reading the second books, so I figure it's time to finally read the first before I get too far behind. In contrast, I only just head about This is Where it Ends when I saw a post about top recently released YA books and I was intrigued by the premise (and cover and title) so I hope I can read it this month.

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer! xoxo, gossip girl

Amrutha

So I haven't posted in like basically forever because I am the worst. Sophomore year of college was so much more work and stress and a general struggle than anything else and I barely got time to read, much less write about what I did. I missed BEA & BookCon because I was moving out and taking finals and generally living my sophomore slump life, but next year it'll be back in New York and I'll be able to go without a plane ride. To be honest the last year kind of flew by and I don't have any major life updates other than that I decided to double major in Comparative Literature because reading makes me so happy and I might as well study that while I can. In other news, I'm supposed to get a puppy soon so if that happens expect that me and pup will review something together! Otherwise, I am still the potato that I once was back when I posted fourteen years ago. I'll be posting more over the summer so hopefully I can redeem myself a little bit! Hope everyone's summer has been fab so far or that school and jobs and things are going well. Drop your life update in the comments so we can talk about being potatoes together or I can be inspired by your lifestyle choices.


Yo, Not if I See You First was the bomb. Expect a review on that soon because genuinely, one of the best books I have read in a long time. It was not only diverse without being too obvious that it was diverse but also was written SO WELL. I reread Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between, which I originally gave a 5 star rating here. When I reviewed it I guess I was being a bit sappy, but when I reread it I didn't even recall having read it the first time. Seriously, I forgot that I read it, so maybe the fact that it wasn't that memorable takes away from the 5. I think when I first read it I was at a point in my life where I was so full of sap and saw that within the book and empathized so deeply with it, but now upon reading it I was like "THIS IS SO MUCH FLUFF STOP." Looking back, its one of those books that you need to read at the right time. One Man Guy was okay as books go -- it had some interesting points but to be honest, the main character kind of annoyed me so I was never too into it (I'm usually not someone who gets bothered by how characters act unlike our girl Kiersten, but for some reason with this book it really bothered me). P.S. I Still Love You was, in my opinion, weak in comparison to the first book in the set, To All the Boys I Loved Before -- Jenny Han has been one of my favorites since she came out with Shug years and years ago, so this book was still good to me. The last book of Cammie McGovern's that I read, Say What You Will (reviewed here) was written well, but I hated how the book ended in terms of plot. I liked this one a lot more, but again, it just felt like something was missing at the end in terms of plot, not really sure why -- you can see Noor's review of A Step Toward Falling here! I finally finished Dumplin' which I started literally in like September, and I loved it even more than Noor and Marlon did. Finally got to read a bit more in the last couple months so I appreciate that a lot, and I can't wait for the summer!



I only really put four books here even though I'm sure I'll read more, as I always read more over the summer. The reason for that is because these are the books that I want to read literally now -- tbr's are hard for me because I don't really follow them, I just pick books and read them when I /feel/ I should read them. Quick anecdote: someone gave me a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns (WHICH IS AMAZING GUYS) in May a couple years ago. All summer they asked me if I had read it yet and eventually asked for the book back because I hadn't read it. I finally decided to sit down and read it a couple months later, and it made a more profound impact on me because I feel like I waited until the right time to read it. In my opinion, like with Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between, a lot of books are meant to be experienced at the right time for you specifically, and if I can tell that about a book, I'll wait until I am overcome with the desire to read it. I'm really excited about these books though, I just started Illuminae and the hype surrounding it seems true so far. I'm also really excited for Walk the Edge, because I really enjoyed the first book in Katie McGarry's Thunder Road series. Also, ya'll know my JLA obsession so of course, I have that on here too.


What have you been up to last month?
Let us know in the comments!
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1 comment:

  1. UnknownJune 7, 2016 at 9:51 PM

    Happy third blogoversary!!! That's so exciting!!! Congrats :D Also, it was so nice seeing you again at BEA! I apologize for totally forgetting we've met- I was so distracted by everything *shakes head sadly* Oooooh I've read The Loose Ends List and And I Darken! I can't wait to hear your thoughts on them!

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