Top Ten Tuesday: Series I’ve Been Meaning to Start but Haven’t

Hey all! I’ve fallen into a blogging (and reading) slump of sorts hence why I haven’t been that active on here these past few weeks, but I hope that you all are doing well and having a swell June so far. Anyway, today I thought I’d make a brief comeback by posting a Top Ten Tuesday post because I find that bookish memes are perfect remedies for blogging slumps. Plus, the last time I participated in a Top Ten Tuesday feature was… back in October 2016.

And in case you haven’t heard of Top Ten Tuesday before, it’s a weekly feature created by the team at The Broke and the Bookish where book bloggers can share a list of books that pertain to a theme or prompt. This week’s topic is “Top Ten Series I’ve Been Meaning to Start but Haven’t.” But because my TBR pile is sky high I’ll actually be including more than 10 series in mine… Don’t judge. XD

Chaos Walking trilogy

I haven’t read any Patrick Ness but of all the sci-fi series on my TBR list the Chaos Walking trilogy is my most anticipated one to read since the reviews on Goodreads promise that this series is nothing short of superb. I’ve also heard that it induces a rollercoaster of feels for readers, too.

The Dark Artifices trilogy

To my great shock, I still haven’t started my copy of Lady Midnight. I preordered it back when it first came out in early 2016, but, unfortunately, I never made time for it. This is a big surprise to me since The Infernal Devices trilogy is my ALL TIME FAVORITE YA fantasy series. (Jem Carstairs is my bae.) And I loved The Mortal Instruments series when I read it as a teenager. (Believe it or not, I was Clary’s age then. Gee, time sure flies.) Anyway, I don’t plan to prolong returning to the shadowhunter world for much longer though. Lady Midnight is in my TBR pile for this summer!

Throne of Glass series

I didn’t exactly love A Court of Thorns and Roses and I found A Court of Mist and Fury problematic but way more enjoyable than book 1 all the sex scenes aside. (You guys know that I’m quite a prude and can’t appreciate NA or graphic sex in books… Those explicit, mature romances just aren’t for me apparently.) I know that the Throne of Glass series is Sarah J. Maas’ YA fantasy series so I believe there should be a more mild romance with. Despite the polarizing opinions I’ve seen surfacing around the blogosphere about this series, I’m looking forward to reading it sometime soon.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Read That Were Recommended by Fellow Bloggers

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

I usually have a lab on Tuesdays, so normally I wouldn’t be able to join in the fun… but because I don’t this week (because we have our fall break starting this Thursday-despite all the Hurricane Matthew madness), I thought I would create this post today!

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday feature is Ten Books I’ve Read Because Of Another Blogger.

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. It was created to allow the book community to share ten books every week in response to a chosen theme.

Even without lab, it probably wasn’t the best idea for me to begin drafting this from scratch today since I have a chemistry exam tomorrow (on metabolites and metabolism), but I think I’ll manage! Plus, I really wanted to join in this week’s topic just because I knew I had plenty of material I could share and discuss. ^.^

Anyway, let’s get on with the actual post, shall we?

Below are all the books that I actually have read after recommendations. (I know right?! I’m pretty impressed with myself. pat on the back) I’m quite a slow reader which means that my main focus has been with ARCs, but when I do decide to pick up a book that I purchased… I want to make sure I’m reading one that is worthwhile and that I’ll hopefully like. And that’s when recommendations by my most trusted fellow book bloggers come in! 😉

For each book, I’ll include a link to Goodreads, my review, and the blogs (of the bloggers that recommended me the book). Also, I’m almost certain that under each book there are more folks that recommended me the title… primarily because my challenge question on Goodreads is actually something like, “Recommend me your favorite book.” But, of  course, I couldn’t remember everyone. Honestly, I’m pretty impressed that I could keep track of these many people. XD

A Darker Shade of Magic | A Little Life | Me Before You | More Happy Than Not | Sanctuary Bay (ebook, not pictured) | Shadow and Bone | Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda | Six of Crows | The Summer of Chasing Mermaids | The Winner’s Curse | The Wrath and the Dawn | Unteachable (ebook, not pictured)

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Plan to Read on the Beach (or This Summer)

Dreamology | When We Collided | Some of the Parts | Not If I See You First | The Serpent King | Fangirl | The Wrath and the Dawn | The Rose and the Dagger | Divergent | My Life Next Door

Happy Tuesday, everyone!

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. It was created to allow the book community to share ten books every week in response to a chosen theme.

I had to participate in this week’s topic because I love summer related Top Ten Tuesday themes. 😉 In fact, I did last year’s equivalent to “beach reads”/”summer TBR” last summer. And the hilarious thing is that I didn’t read a single book from that supposed TBR pile. I’m not really surprised since I’m a big mood reader. That’s why I never make monthly or seasonal TBRs; I never would follow through, haha. However, I have a feeling I’ll work through this one closely because most of these titles are planned buddy reads and/or books I just have been dying to read for some time now.

Top Ten Tuesday: My BBFs (Best Blogger Friends)

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday (a weekly bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish) topic, Ten Bookish People You Should Follow on Twitter/Instagram/Youtube/Snapchat/Facebook, was too unique to not do. So here I am, back in the blogosphere when I should be on my break. 😛

So my version of this topic is my best friends in the book blogging community!

It may not exactly be mutual because these people are popular and have a lot of friends within the blogosphere, but I would still consider them to be my best blogger friends. Only because they know so much about me (I think?) outside of book reviews and blogging. We’ve probably talked about different foods, animals, purchasing habits, etc. Our friendship may have even started out with me unloading a bunch of summer bombs on their blog and therefore creating endless threads of conversations. I don’t know, when I meet a special blogger where I know I’ll click very well with I do that sometimes. 😅

And a quirk that many of you probably don’t know about me is that I have a fear of commitment-big ones and small. I don’t follow a lot of blogs compared to most (~50) because I like to keep up with the content of those I do as frequently as I can. But I follow all the people on this list so that is saying a lot, in my opinion. I can promise that each of the bloggers I’ll mention are my favorites for their content, honesty, and creativity.

And the order is not by favoritism. It was hard enough to choose bloggers for this feature let alone order them as my “favorites.” That’s like ordering your kids by how much you like them instead of age-no can do, I can’t do that! So alphabetical it is!

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I Really Love but Feel Like I Haven’t Talked About Enough

Hello, friends! As I was checking my WP reader’s feed this morning, I noticed this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme curated by The Broke and the Bookish. I thought I’d join in since I think the topic will allow me to share some different book recommendations that I haven’t spotlighted enough on Xingsings. Plus, it’s been a while and I sort of miss doing these posts. 😛

Oh and a lot of these books will probably be ones from my pre-teen and early teenage years. I read way faster and more when I was younger. Coupled with the fact that I wasn’t working and making money then, I didn’t buy most of my books like I do now. I went to the library instead. Therefore the photo below doesn’t have a lot of the books I’ll talk about shown since I don’t have them as part of my current book collection. Also, this list is in no particular order. And I’ll be linking Goodreads links to all the books I mention, so feel free to use them if you’d like!

Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Books I’m Thankful For

Hello friends! I hope you all have had a wonderful November so far. In case you missed it, this post explains my absence from the blogosphere pretty well. Even though finals are creeping up soon, I finally got back into bookish things (in other words, I’ve been reading again) and hopefully will have some book reviews up.

Anyways, in honor of Thanksgiving holiday and break, I wanted to share my list of Top Ten Books I’m Thankful For or special books that have some meaning to me or a period of my life. This week’s T10T, a bookish meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, was actually an open interpretation to allow readers to get creative but I just decided to share this simple list. It’s been months since I’ve participated in this meme. As some of you may know, I used to be pretty religious with keeping up T10T posts when I first started blogging  and I’ll direct you to this post as to why I stopped doing that. Anyhow, I wanted to join in this week’s fun since I thought I could add a variety of books I don’t usually talk about on Xingsings. I’m sure there’ll be a couple on here that will be a surprise for some.

(All links to Goodreads are under the photo.)

Tuck Everlasting | The Glass Castle | Half the Sky | City of Bones | The Truth About Forever | Twilight | Maximum Ride Forever | Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows | Unbroken | A Little Life

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Authors I’ve Read The Most Books From

Hello! I recently reorganized my bookshelves… again (hopefully this new arrangement will last until 2016, because the spontaneous experimentation makes my arms sore and needs to stop), and I hope to write a Summer Says post about a topic that involves that soon-or at least before school begins.

Anyway, it’s Tuesday and with the new layout I felt inspired to participate in this week’s Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme by The Broke and the Bookish, feature: Top Ten Authors I’ve Read the Most Books From. This was an easy topic since I already had my books laid out in front of me (actually, I was wading through the sea of books; why I bring that upon myself I will never understand) and was able to visualize which authors I owned the most books of and hence which ones I’ve read the most books from.

So okay, with no further ado let’s get started!

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A random “representation” of these authors. Sorry, having authors’ faces on my blog is a little too weird for me. Oh and blue is my favorite color! 😉

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Feature Characters of Asian Descent

Hello! I wasn’t planning on participating in Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme by The Broke and the Bookish, this week because I don’t read a lot of diverse books (I hope to change that though). But after grabbing some Chinese takeout and reading some other bloggers’ posts, I’m like why not?

I tweaked this week’s topic a bit. It was originally “Ten Books That Celebrate Diversity/Diverse Characters” (examples: features minority/religious minority, socioeconomic diversity, disabled MC, neurotypical character, LGBTQ, etc.) and I decided to make this a narrower focus by sharing some books that feature characters of Asian descent since I’m Vietnamese-American and find these characters’ perspectives interesting-especially if the author isn’t Asian himself/herself. (And I have to admit, there was some literal food for thought involved in this. Chinese food is always a good idea; it definitely helped with the inspiration for this post today!)

And I don’t own a bunch of the books I’m about to mention and I’m starting this post really late in the day, so using google images will have to suffice this time. Hope you guys don’t mind! Actually, for once, it may actually look uniform, haha. And I’m not going to go through each one explaining who the Asian characters and what their nationalities are… Instead I have all the titles linked to GR, so you can read these titles if they interest you!

Okay, let’s get to it!

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Girl in Translation
by Jean Kwok

I’ve been wanting to read this title for years now because the majority of my GR friends have loved it and it’s won several awards as a debut novel. Really looking forward to it.

SPACE. Ugh I must have these in place sometimes for the format to work.

Top Ten Tuesday: Last Ten Books That Came Into My Possession

Hi! So it’s been a little over a month since I’ve done a Top Ten Tuesday post and I thought this week’s topic would be fun since I don’t do book hauls that often. Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and it’s a great way to see what other readers have on their shelves.

As you guys have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with a lot of the pictures and banners in my posts. I’m not sure what I like yet. Today was really nice outside albeit a bit gloomy (you can’t really see the cloudy skies in this but it looked like it was going to rain any minute) so I brought my books outside.

Top Ten Tuesday: Great Beach Reads (Dessen Edition) and Books I Plan to Have in My Beach Bag This Summer

Hi! So I took a break from posting Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme by The Broke and the Bookish, for the past month but I’m back because I couldn’t pass up talking about this week’s feature: “Ten Books I Think Make Great Beach Reads or Ten Books I Plan to Have in My Beach Bag This Summer.”

I’ve been in a Sarah Dessen mood ever since reading Saint Anything the beginning of this month so I thought I’d make a mini-list of Great Beach Reads, Sarah Dessen style. I also included 10 Books I Plan to Have in My Beach Bag This Summer (basically, a peek of my summer TBR).

Okay, let’s do this!

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5 Great Beach Reads (Sarah Dessen Edition)

As you guys know, I’m a huge Sarah Dessen fan and I think her books would make perfect summer reads.

My favorite is, obviously, The Truth About Forever but Just Listen and This Lullaby both come as close favorites. Along For the Ride and Saint Anything didn’t make me as awestruck with the story but they both still showcased Dessen’s beautiful and lyrical writing and proved that they were enjoyable when I read them.

As for the other titles, it’s been at least 5+ years since I’ve read them so I can’t exactly recommend them since I can’t remember. And I still haven’t read Dreamland or The Moon and More yet.

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10 Books I Plan to Have in My Beach Bag This Summer

• Adult
  • Where’d You Go, Bernadette
  • Me Talk Pretty One Day
  • Naked

• Young Adult
  • If I Stay (Reread)
  • Where She Went
  • The Summer I Turned Pretty (Reread)
  • It’s Not Summer Without You (Reread)
  • We’ll Always Have Summer (Reread)
  • Eleanor & Park
  • Fangirl

So most of the books on my summer TBR are pretty much fun, light contemporary reads. There’s even some humor in the adult ones.

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I made this week’s list much shorter and less detailed than I normally do with T10T posts mainly because I feel like I overwrite and sound repetitive in my older ones. So I’m working on being more pithy and concise. I hope you guys don’t mind this new format!

And what do you guys plan to read this summer? I’d love to know! 😀

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