Although I don’t read a whole lot of YA anymore, when I was approached to read this book by Allen & Unwin, I had to say yes. It’s about games? It’s from an Asian-Australian author? It ticked so many boxes and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book. Thank you to Allen & Unwin Australia for kindly providing me with a physical copy to review. I meant to publish this review on the publication date but life got a little away from me! Book’s Blurb: Funny and romantic, an upbeat YA novel about gaming, goals and getting even from a fresh new voice in contemporary fiction. How…
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark Book Review
So I was recently gifted a new Kindle Paperwhite by my partner (thank you <3) and with it, Amazon gave me 3 months of Kindle unlimited! I’ve never had kindle unlimited before so this was a fun way to explore books I was curious about and give them a read. One that’s been on my radar and highly recommended by a few people was Boy Parts. I didn’t know much about this book – only that it had a lot of funny cultural comments and name-drops that were relevant to the last few years as it was published in 2020. I did not realise how dark, how violent, depraved and…
Highly Anticipated Books of 2023
Despite the ‘book buying bans’ I’ve tried to instil in myself in previous years, there are always highly anticipated books that I will buy sooner rather than later as I’m so excited to read them. So far in 2023, my list is quite short but I thought I’d talk about it anyway! Happy Place by Emily Henry I was one of the few that loved Book Lovers so I’m super excited to get her latest release and see what it’s like! You’ll find that I tend to do into standalone books blind so I don’t know what this one is about but it should hopefully be the cute romance I…
My Bookish Bullet Journal / Reading Journal for 2023
It is with much sadness that I declare: gone are the days of an elaborate bullet journal that I struggle to keep up with and labour with my time and effort for little return. I’m back on the minimalist and practical book tracking baby! My reading journal has definitely changed a bit – last year was already a more minimalist version of what I used to do and this year, I evaluated how I used it in 2022 and culled a few more spreads that weren’t really sparking joy. Here are my new pages for 2023 (in the same notebook, to save paper): Similarly to last year, my second page…
1 Sentence Reviews – All the Books I Read in 2022 Part 2
Happy New Year everyone! It’s crazy that we’re already in 2023, but I’m honestly so happy about it. Although I had many positives in 2022, I also had some lows that I’d love to forget! I really enjoyed doing the 1 sentence reviews in September when I came back to blogging and it’s actually crazy that I read more in the last 4 months than I did when I last wrote that blog post. I’m super happy to have ended with 55 books read in 2022. Without much further ado, here are the rest of the books I read last year, summed up and reviewed in one sentence. NOTE: I…
Books I Want to Read & Reread Before 2023
It’s that time of the year, when I’m cramming to read as many books as possible before we tick over to January 1st. Although I have completed my Goodreads Reading Challenge of 30 books (yay!), I want to get my TBR down as much as possible, especially since I need to read so much more for work now (the publishing life!). I don’t have any holidays planned and I’ll have 10 days for the holiday season, so I’m ready to read the following new books and old favourites before 2023. New Books Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson I loved the first two books of the Skyward series and it’s a bit…
Some Recent 5 Star Reads | Mini Reviews
It’s crazy how much I’ve read in the last 3 months alone, especially since I started working in publishing (and have mostly forgone any gaming or streaming for reading as it’s been bringing my heart the most joy). It’s been so fun acquiring and reading more books and I’ve found a few 5-star reads that are definitely worth mentioning. Disclaimer: I am currently working at Hachette Australia, so some of these books, which I received through work will likely be a bit more biased, but I still loved these books regardless! The Invisible Life of Addie Larue by V.E. Schwab I read this book during the Breath of the Wildathon…
Babel by R.F. Kuang Book Review
R.F Kuang has been a very popular author in the book community for years now since she wrote The Poppy War trilogy – many friends have read it and absolutely loved it. Although The Poppy War wasn’t a book I wanted to pick up, Babel quickly took the community by storm the second it was announced and I couldn’t escape this book myself because of the hype. I tried really hard to keep my expectations neutral – I knew little about the book going in other than it was a dark academic fantasy read and that it involved languages. I’m not impartial to the dark academia trend and I’ve had…
My Breath of the Wildathon/October TBR
This October, I’m looking forward to participating again in the Breath of the Wildathon Readathon! In case you haven’t heard of it, this readathon is one based on the Breath of the Wild Nintendo game that’s been vastly popular and was created by Little Book Owl to bring together her love of the game and her love for reading. The last time I participated, was actually the very first instance of the readathon (called The Great Plateau) but this time, I’ll be participating in the upcoming Vah Rudania Quest 2.0 which starts on October 1st and ends on October 31th. There are 4 teams that you can become a part…
Is Reading Popular Again? BookTok and Its Impact
I feel like I’ve lived under a rock because I don’t actually have TikTok and only see glimpses of the world of TikTok through Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, but I can’t go into any bookstore now without seeing the massive ’BookTok’ sections that have massive stacks of popular romances I’ve been seeing rave about on all platforms in the last year at least. It’s so cool to see so many books flourishing in an industry that many people were saying was on the verge on dying a few years ago. It’s true that the pandemic has largely helped some industries including publishing do incredibly well as people turned to…
