Friday, July 1, 2016

Previously on WLABB: June 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 June 2016

Review: Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here - Anna Breslaw
Stuffed Animal Saturday: And I Darken - Kiersten White
Review: Museum of Heartbreak - Meg Leder
Waiting on Wednesday: Change Places with Me - Lois Metzger
Review: A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas
Review: The Loose Ends List - Carrie Firestone
Review: The King Slayer - Virginia Boecker
Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Releases for the Second Half of 2016
Review: Not If I See You First - Eric Lindstrom
Review: The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
Stuffed Animal Saturday: Vanishing Girls - Lauren Oliver
Top Ten Tuesday: 2016 Releases We Promise to Read Soon
Waiting on Wednesday: You Know Me Well - Nina LaCour & David Levithan
Recap: BEA + BookCon 2016
Review: Did I Mention I Love You - Estelle Maskame
Recap: B-Fest 2016 / Ivory and Bone Launch
Top Ten Tuesday: Kiersten's Powerpoint Slides
Review: And I Darken - Kiersten White
Triple Review: Illuminae - Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

Keeping Up with the WLABBers 

Kiersten

June has been a very calm month! I've spent most of my time relaxing, reading, and working on some costume design things for a show I'm working on in the fall. Other than that, I went to B-Fest and I also got to see Dashboard Confessional in concert again!

Oh, I also started bullet journaling! I really like it. I'm kind of neurotic so it's another thing I can obsess over for no particular reason. I don't really have anything to keep track of during the summer, but I'm hoping I'll keep up with it during the school year even when things get crazy.

I'd also just like to add in here that if you haven't read the Top Ten Tuesday post about my Powerpoint slides, it's a good laugh and you should read it. I'm not sure how people who don't know us feel about it when they read it; I really want to know.

Starting next month, I'll be taking part in the Summer Blog Promo Tour hosted by The Book Bratz. Basically, every Sunday for the rest of the summer, there will be a blogger from a different blog doing a guest post or collaborative post with me here on We Live and Breathe Books. It's a fun way to get to know other bloggers as a blogger, but also to share some other awesome blogs with readers!

I'll also be taking the GRE in a few days, so that'll be fun.

June was off to a rough start when it comes to reading. I attempted to read The Loose Ends List but decided that the concept just wasn't for me after about 20 pages. Then, I tried The Girls, which I was really excited about. Unfortunately, I just wasn't feeling the writing style. I think I'll try to read it again eventually, but I just wasn't in the mood for it. Next, I attempted to read And I Darken. I had such high hopes for this book, especially given all the good buzz around it, but I found it very slow and tedious, so I stopped a third of the way through.

Fortunately, the rest of the books I read this month were successes! I started off with the final book in the Grisha Trilogy, Ruin and Rising, and I absolutely loved it! It was such a great finale, and definitely my favorite book in the trilogy. After that, I read Little Black Dresses, Little White Lies, which was adorable. Next, I read The Sword of Summer, which I knew I would enjoy because Uncle Rick never lets me down. Magnus Chase made me want falafel even more than usual. And then, I decided to crush all my Feels with A Court of Mist and Fury, and I honestly can't get over how much I absolutely loved it. I also read Six of Crows this month, and now I'm dying to find out what happens in the next one because it was so good!


While I kind of want to abandon every other book I own to just reread A Court of Mist and Fury forever, I'll try to move on to other books. I got Fairest and Winter from the elibrary a few days ago, so those are a priority for my July TBR. As for ARCs this month, How to Hang a Witch and Ghost Talkers are the physical ones I want to tackle, in addition to Nevernight as an eARC. If I have more time, I might also tackle Thieving Weasels and/or Magonia. Hopefully this month's TBR will be more successful than last month!

Noor

Even though I took the past year off and I'm not on a school schedule, now that it's June it feels so much like ~~summer vacation~~. I think it's partially because my friends are summering now too so I'm picking up their vibes and partially because a lot of the major things that were stressing me out and gnawing a hole of anxiety inside me started to resolve. It was like a domino effect, one thing effecting one change effecting another. One of the things that happened this month is that I committed to a college to transfer into this fall: NC State University. The transfer process is annoying and weird and you don't hear back from schools until literally June and I tend to panic whenever someone asks me about my life so now I have Concrete Life Updates to give and not panic about. Look how cute and well-adjusted I look in this photo of myself after my advising appointment (picking classes was another stress because people already registered and therefore many classes were full but I persevered).

Another kinda big thing that happened this month was that I was admitted into the hospital for brain mapping. Basically, I was hooked up to electrodes for a week and my seizure medication was taken away so the doctors could measure where exactly in my brain my seizures come from, to see if medication is the best option for me or if I should consider surgery. It kinda sucked but on the second to last day, they intravenously gave me an antianxiety and mild sedative, and it felt like such a nice haze. I told my mom I wanted more and she told me that's how drug addictions start. I don't have any pictures from the hospital where I'm not hijabless but rest assured, I look adorable in a hospital gown.

Other than college and hospitalization, my month has been normal. I've been fasting for Ramadan but I couldn't do so in the hospital and right after release so I only really got to fast 10 days. I also had to go to my brother's high school graduation, no matter how hard I tried to get out of it. I did some shopping post-hospital and for the first time I magically found the perfect items without having to have three mental breakdowns first. I think the best thing that happened to me this month though was that I ordered Colourpop's Ultra Metallic Lipsticks and they were waiting for me when I came back from the hospital.
Okay, I think I've sufficiently rambled on about my life, so let's get down to business and talk about the books I've read this month.



June was such a good book month for me. I started the month with A Court of Thorns and Roses and ended it with its sequel, A Court of Mist and Fury. I absolutely loved ACOTAR, getting sucked into the world of the fae (which I've definitely mentioned before are my favorite kind of fantasy creature) and the interesting characters. While I still have a bit of ACOMAF left to go I can say pretty safely that I love it even more than ACOTAR. I highly recommend both books in this series and look out for a double review of ACOMAF soon. After ACOTAR, I read Illuminae and I legitimately woke up thinking about it the days after I finished reading. We just posted a triple review yesterday and all three of us gave it five stars, and I think it deserved every one of those 15 stars because it was wild in the best way. I needed something more contemporary after ACOTAR and Illuminae so I read Vanishing Girls. I really liked the book and I feel like Lauren Oliver refines her writing style more and more with every book, which I appreciate. I can't wait until her new book Replica comes out and I can read that too. Last on my list is And I Darken, and even though Kiersten stopped reading after the 1/3 mark, I thought it was a great book. I know I gave it 3.5 stars, which sounds a little on-the-fence, but I definitely enjoyed it and hope the sequel is even better.
Like last time, I intend to read more than three books but I'm awful at making decisions ahead of time (or at all) so these are just ones I definitely want to read. I can't believe I still haven't read You Know Me Well to be honest. David Levithan is one of my favorite authors and in my head we are casual homies who text each other about our problems (not in a weird obsessive way, just in an I-admire-your-work-and-think-you-are-a-rad-person way) so anything he's a part of is automatically high priority for me. This is Where it Ends was on my TBR last month and I figure when I go to B&N to buy You Know Me Well, I'll pick this up. It just sounds cool and I hear good things about it. Kiersten got me an ARC of The Sun is Also a Star from BEA and I just want to jump right in. I loved Everything, Everything so much that I've been waiting for Nicola Yoon's next novel and now that I have it, I want to read it ASAP.



Since I always subject you to long, rambling paragraphs about everything, let me know your own ramble-worthy summer shenanigans! Peace out cub scouts :* 

Amrutha

Noor and Kiersten seem to have a lot of fun life updates but because I am boring and my life is boring, I do not. June passed by real quickly with me just chilling. I started taking these kickboxing classes in an attempt to be slightly healthier and theres no update yet on whether or not its working, but if one day I magically sprout a celery stick on top of my head or something, I'll be sure to post a cute pic like Noor has done above.

Also, for those of you lucky souls who don't know me IRL, pretty much every month since September of my freshman year of high school (6 years ago because I am old and my bones are basically fossilizing as I type this), I've done like a lil personal learning project. I've done really ambitious things like learning morse code and some chill things like how to do my eyeliner without crying. Basically I'll spend all my free time (like whilst on busses or waiting for things or when ads are playing on youtube) dedicated to learning about whatever that month's project was. I've missed a couple months here and there (mostly because college is a struggle and a half) but I'm pretty good with it. June has really been all about cooking big girl adult foods -- I'm going to have my own apartment with no roommates or anything because I'll be working for ResLife at my school, so somehow I'm going to have to salvage some food for myself. I can follow directions as well as the next person and many summers ago, one of my projects was "learning to cook" in which I taught myself basically how to cook mac n' cheese from a box and oreo truffles. This June has been about /real/ food and not having to reference a recipe the next time I make it. My July project is going to be how to build crafts and such out of wood (?) I've been afraid of using drills for too long so I've been watching lots of DIY videos to prep. Some ideas do flop though, so if you have any ideas for July, or worst case August, let me know in the comments!

I've typed a lot for someone who did effectively nothing cool this month. On to the books.

Yo. So all of the books I read this month either someone here at WLABB has reviewed or I have reviewed or I will review really shortly. First of all, our review of Illuminae was posted yesterday and we all LIKE ALL OF US, gave it a 5/5. What a damn good book. Review hereeee. On a roll with me agreeing with Noor and Kiersten, I read both Scarlett Epstein Hates it Here and The Museum of Heartbreak after seeing the reviews posted here. Let me just say, Noor & Kiersten were SPOT ON with their reviews of those. The former made me want to die because I hated the protagonist so much (as touched upon by Noor here), and the latter made me want to die because it was SO GOOD. I'm basically known for disagreeing with books Kiersten thinks are amazing but I just couldn't disagree with her 5/5 for The Museum of Heartbreak (review here). DIMILY was interesting and questionable all at the same time, but to be fair even though I wasn't a huge fan I'm 100% going to read the next book in the series. The Loose Ends List wasn't that great and wasn't my style at all so I probably won't be reading another book like that for a long while. I'm like in the middle of Goodbye Stranger now so we'll see how that goes, but This Raging Light was seriously awesome and there is a review to come!

Half the books on here are books from last months TBR. Can you say I'm bad at this? Yes. But I'll try!!! I have 3/4 of these books currently in my possession so fingers crossed. Tell us about your summers! Tell us what books we should read! Give us guidance because I think we here at WLABB could use it.


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

  1. Samantha@WLABBJuly 2, 2016 at 8:57 AM

    Fun recap, as always. You ladies crack me up. I loved Gemina and You Know Me Well was really cute. PS (for Amrutha) That monthly project thing is awesome!

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