Reading Habits Book Tag!

Yay! Another book tag! These are so fun! The Reading Habits Book Tag was created by the BookTuber TheBookJazz. Follow the link to her channel!

1. Do you have a certain place at home for reading?

When I read during the day I usually read on the couch and when I read before I go to bed I read in my bed. I would eventually like to have a reading room with a nice comfortable arms chair with a side table that can hold a lamp and coffee or tea and read surrounded by my books. Oh, the dream!

2. Bookmark or random piece of paper?

I usually use a bookmark.  I have a large shoe box full of bookmarks to choose from but I use the same bookmark until I lose it and then find another bookmark to use.  If you ever to go ALA or BEA, they are great places to get a bunch of bookmarks to use for years.

3. Can you just stop reading or do you have to stop after a chapter/ a certain amount of pages?

I always prefer to stop at the end of a chapter.  But if I'm falling asleep and I absolutely can't keep my eyes open then I'll try to stop at a natural breaking point but I'll never stop in the middle of the paragraph.

4. Do you eat or drink while reading?

Since I'm not very good at multitasking I usually don't eat while I read.  But I do like to drink hot coffee or tea.

5. Multitasking: Music or TV while reading?

Haha. Multitasking.  I definitely cannot watch watch TV while I read.  The only music I can listen to while I read is instrumental like Explosions in the Sky.  They're pretty good and I don't have to concentrate on the music which makes it really easy to listen to while I read.

6. One book at a time or several at once?

I usually have several going on at once.  I'll be reading at least one physical copy of a book and then another one on my Nook/iPhone so that I can read at work.  Then I also have a few really really long books (A Storm of Swords, Outlander) that I have off to the side that I'll pick up every now and then and read a few chapters.

7. Reading at home or everywhere?

Oh I'll read anywhere.  I always take a book with me wherever I go.  I won't buy a purse unless it's big enough to fit at least one hardcover.

8. Reading out lout or silently in your head?

I don't think I've ever read out loud.  That would definitely feel really weird.  The only time I've ever done it was when I was trying to nail down Hagrid's accent and I couldn't get it right in my head.

9. Do you read ahead or even skip pages?

I never read ahead or skip pages.  I don't want to spoil myself so I just don't do it.

10. Breaking the spine or keeping it like new?

I prefer to keep my books looking like new. Really long mass market paperbacks are really hard to read without breaking the spine so I don't worry it.

11. Do you write in your books?

I've only ever written in my textbooks.

Book Haul: Recent E-Galleys

Hey there! Welcome to this week's Stacking the Shelves! This awesome meme is hosted by Tynga's Reviews and we get to show each other the books we acquired this week whether bought, from the library or for review!

I received some pretty awesome ARC's for review over the past month and I can't wait to read them!

From NetGalley:

Pawn by Aimee Carter

Witch Finder by Ruth Warburton

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaira

From Edelweiss: 

Her Dark Curiosity by Megan Shepard

Life by Committee by Corey Ann Haydu

Prisoner of Night and Fog by Anne Blankman

The Shadow Prince by Bree Despain

The Taking by Kimberly Derting

Talker 25 by Joshua McCune

Follow Friday (33)

Follow Friday is a really fun way to network your blog and meet some other really cool bloggers in the process! This weekly event is hosted at Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read.  This week's featured blogger is The Storybook Kingdom.

This week's question:

Pick a book in your favorite genre that you would recommend to a reluctant reader.

Well, lately my favorite genre has been fantasy and I just can't seem to get my hands on enough fantasy novels.  I love it so much because the worlds are so completely different than anything we live in right now. And fantasy also shows how creative and unique authors can be. I also love dystopia but there's just something special about fantasy.

I only recently read Throne of Glass like a month ago and it was just so good! There's so many different elements going on and it makes me excited that it's going to be a long series! 

Thanks for visiting my blog and for following! 

Review: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Title: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
Author: Robin Sloan
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Girous
Source: Purchased
Find it Here: Goodreads, Amazon

Global conspiracy, complex code-breaking, young love, and the secret to eternal life — mostly set in a hole-in-the-wall San Francisco bookstore. The Great Recession shuffles Clay Jannon from his web-design drone job to night shift at Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Curiously, few customers come in repeatedly and never buy. Analysis reveals astonishing secrets ...

My thoughts:

I heard about this book a little while ago and ever since I read the synopsis I knew I wanted to choose Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore for book club.  An independent bookstore that never closes, some kind of conspiracy going on with the patrons who only borrow books and never buy and a mystery that I was convinced would have me on the edge of my seat.  

Even though it was good and it was fun to read, it just wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be.  After reading the synopsis, I really thought that the patrons were going to be spies and that they were passing secret messages back and forth in the books they were borrowing.  But as it turns out, these mysterious patrons are trying to solve the secrets of the universe a.k.a. the secret to physical immortality.  These people in this cult are literally scrambling around, decoding all these books in the hopes that they will find some kind of code or recipe for a concoction that will grant them immortality.  

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is an adventure that was pretty fun to read.  Clay, the main character, and his quirky group of misfit friends set off to help Mr. Penumbra uncover what he has been searching for for many years.  Conveniently they have unlimited resources that allow them to travel to New York City at a moments notice and also allows them to get their hands on all the technology that they need.  By the end, when he happened to have connections to a librarian that got him what he needed, I felt that he was a little too lucky.  I liked the characters but I felt their only purpose was to help out Clay and Mr. Penumbra. They didn't have any depth and they were very static throughout the whole novel.  

Overall, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore was a fun book to read and very appropriate for the book club. And hey! The cover of the paperback is pretty cool! It glows in the dark! I give Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan 3.5 stars for being entertaining and fun.

Waiting on Wednesday (101)

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine that spotlights upcoming releases that we are eagerly anticipating. This is one of my favorite memes because not only is my TBR pile so much bigger at the end of the night but also the covers are always amazing!

Title: The Inventor's Secret
Author: Andrea Cremer
Hitting the Shelves: April 22, 2014

Sixteen-year-old Charlotte and her fellow refugees have scraped out an existence on the edge of Britain’s industrial empire. Though they live by the skin of their teeth they have their health (at least when they can find enough food and avoid the Imperial Labor Gatherers) and each other. When a new exile with no memory of his escape from the coastal cities or even his own name seeks shelter in their camp he brings new dangers with him and secrets about the terrible future that awaits all those who have struggled has to live free of the bonds of the empire’s Machineworks.

The Inventor’s Secret is the first book of a YA steampunk series set in an alternate nineteenth-century North America where the Revolutionary War never took place and the British Empire has expanded into a global juggernaut propelled by marvelous and horrible machinery.

Why I want this: They just changed the cover for this and I really like the old one better. Oh well, at least they decided to change it before it came out.  The Inventor's Secret sounds awesome and it seems like an exciting series to start! 

Book Blitz: Heartbeat by Elizabeth Scott

Hi and welcome to today's stop on the Heartbeat blog tour! Today's book blitz is brought to you by Kizmet Book Touring and me, Elegantly Bound Books! This book sounds awesome and I can't wait to read it!

Emma would give anything to talk to her mother one last time. Tell her about her slipping grades, her anger with her stepfather, and the boy with the bad reputation who might be the only one Emma can be herself with.

But Emma can’t tell her mother anything. Because her mother is brain-dead and being kept alive by machines for the baby growing inside her.

Meeting bad-boy Caleb Harrison wouldn’t have interested Old Emma. But New Emma—the one who exists in a fog of grief, who no longer cares about school, whose only social outlet is her best friend Olivia—New Emma is startled by the connection she and Caleb forge. Feeling her own heart beat again wakes Emma from the grief that has grayed her existence. Is there hope for life after death—and maybe, for love? 

About Heartbeat: Goodreads, Amazon, B&N, IndieBound

Praise for Heartbeat:

“An intense examination of a family coping with grief, this absorbing character study easily keeps pages turning.”

-Kirkus on Heartbeat

About Elizabeth Scott: Website, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr

ELIZABETH SCOTT grew up in a town so small it didn't even have a post office, though it did boast an impressive cattle population. She’s sold hardware and pantyhose and had a memorable three-day stint in the dot-com industry, where she learned that she really didn't want a career burning CDs. She lives just outside Washington, D.C., with her husband, and firmly believes you can never own too many books.

November Book Haul!

Hey there! Welcome to this week's Stacking the Shelves! This awesome meme is hosted by Tynga's Reviews and we get to show each other the books we acquired this week whether bought, from the library or for review!

I know this is really late but I wanted to get it up anyway because my December book haul is most likely going to be huge because of Christmas.  So I didn't want to have to include these too.

Books:

Wildwood by Colin Meloy

Shadowcry by Jenna Burtenshaw

Horde by Ann Aguirre

Revelations by JA Souders

Arclight by Josin L. McQuein

Slated by Teri Terry

Unbreakable by Elizabeth Norris

Slide Jilly Hathaway

Imposter by Jill Hathaway

Cross My Heart, Hope to Die by Sara Shephard

Pretty Girl-13 by Liz Coley

Karma for Beginners by Jessica Blank

Unremembered by Jessica Brody

The Blood Keeper by Tessa Gratton

Winter Wonderland Book Tag!!

I have a confession to make.  I've been totally obsessed with Booktube lately and I have to say that I really like it. It's refreshing to be able to see the enthusiasm on their faces and see them jumping up and down for joy when they really love a book!! So anyway, they create these things called book tags that are themed with a bunch of questions.  And then at the end they are supposed to tag three of their friends to the tag continually gets spread throughout Booktube.  So I want to do one of the tags even though I only have a blog.  Since it has been really cold here in Southern California I decided to take a swing at the Winter Wonderland Book Tag. This book tag was created by JackEatsBooks!

1. What book is so happy and sweet that it warms your heart?

I don't read very many happy and sweet book so I'm going to cheat a little on this one and say the Summer Series by Jenny Han which consists of The Summer I Turned Pretty, It's Not Summer Without You and We'll Always Have Summer. Even though this series has a lot of sadness in it, the ending of the series was so happy and it really warmed me heart!

2. What is your favorite book with a white cover?

I don't even need to think about this. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. It's just so good and one of the best contemporaries I've read.

3. You're sitting in a nice comfy chair, wearing a onesie, with a lovely warm hot chocolate but what MONSTER read are you reading?

This sounds like my perfect day off work! I actually have a onesie (not currently wearing it) and I am currently reading a monster of a book! It's Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. It's about a time traveler and I am just loving it. Oh and it's around 900 pages long!

4. It started snowing so you decided to have a snowball fight! What fictional character would you love to have the snowball fight with?

I don't know who I would want to have a snowball fight against, but I would definitely want Rose Hathaway from Vampire Academy on my team.  She seems competitive enough to want to win but also knows how to have a good time and make it fun.

5. Sadly, your fire is beginning to go out. So what book would you tear the last few chapters out to throw into the fire?

When it comes to the endings of books I'm usually pretty satisfied with what the author writes. But there are plenty of books that I just did not like at all that I would throw in the fire.  The Iron Thorn by Caitlin Kittredge and Harbinger by Sara Wilson Etienne. They were both awful!

6. What book is so close to your heart that you would gift to someone this Christmas who hasn't read before but wants to get into reading?

It's no surprise here that I'm going to say Harry Potter.  It not only got me into reading way back in the day but it also got a lot of other people into reading.  Such a great story and an easy read!

And I'm going to tag: Thuy @ Nite Lite Reviews, Nicole @ The Reader's Antidote and Kimberly @ The Windy Pages! Have afu

Waiting on Wednesday (100)

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine that spotlights upcoming releases that we are eagerly anticipating. This is one of my favorite memes because not only is my TBR pile so much bigger at the end of the night but also the covers are always amazing!

Title: Silver Shadows
Author: Richelle Mead
Series: Bloodlines #5
Hitting the Shelves: July 29, 2014

Sydney Sage is an Alchemist, one of a group of humans who dabble in magic and serve to bridge the worlds of humans and vampires. They protect vampire secrets—and human lives.

In The Fiery Heart, Sydney risked everything to follow her gut, walking a dangerous line to keep her feelings hidden from the Alchemists.

Now in the aftermath of an event that ripped their world apart, Sydney and Adrian struggle to pick up the pieces and find their way back to each other. But first, they have to survive.

For Sydney, trapped and surrounded by adversaries, life becomes a daily struggle to hold on to her identity and the memories of those she loves. Meanwhile, Adrian clings to hope in the face of those who tell him Sydney is a lost cause, but the battle proves daunting as old demons and new temptations begin to seize hold of him. . . .

Their worst fears now a chilling reality, Sydney and Adrian face their darkest hour in this heart-pounding fifth installment in the New York Times bestselling Bloodlines series, where all bets are off.

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten on my Winter TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish and it's a meme of lists.

This winter I'm going to try to read the books that I already own and mostly books that I've owned for a while now.  And finish off a couple of the series that I've started.

10. Horde by Ann Aguirre

9. Allegiant by Veronica Roth

8. The Bitter Kingdom by Rae Carson

7. The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

6. Slated by Teri Terry

5. Unraveling by Elizabeth Norris

4. Fire with Fire by Jenny Han

3. Unremembered by Jessica Brody

2. Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo

1. Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas

Bonus: The ARC I'm most excited to read this winter is!!!!:

The Taking by Kimberly Derting