8 reasons to read Lucy Parker

Hi Virtually Readers! I have been a really slack blogger lately, and I’m very sorry. But I’m on almost-holiday now and hopefully I will be able to write lots of posts and pull my life together. There are many many ideas in my head…I just need to write the posts! Anyway, today the post is Eight Reasons to Read Lucy Parker, in case you didn’t guess from the title….or the picture…haha. Lucy Parker is my new favourite (and only favourite so far) romance novelist. I’d heard vaguely of Lucy parker, who writes romantic contemporary fiction, but Ella (from Novelly Ella) was raving about ‘Act Like It’ and it was at the library and I was in a bit of a book slump and her books were just what I needed and I had Ella (and now Lara) to fangirl with which was great. Lucy is from New Zealand which earns her SO MANY bonus points.

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talking to other bookish people

You are on a bus, and you see that someone a few seats ahead of you is reading a book. You peer around, looking for the cover. It’s a book you’ve read! Someone else is discovering words you love right now, and you’re witnessing it. What a glorious sight. But then the question comes: should you talk to them? what do you say?

Review: Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now

Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now is an incredibly complex novel, and one that fits a lot into it’s short timeframe of seven days. I loved Tiffany Sly and I love all the pieces of her that Dana L. Davis uses for her story. It’s a story about figuring stuff out, and how the process is more important than any potential answers.

Starry Eyes Blog Tour-Review

So, I have a bit of a reputation for talking about light pollution. Like, a lot. Like, start a conversation with me about anything apart from university, and withing three minutes we’ll be onto a) books, b) light pollution, or c) GDPR (In other news, I’m a delight at parties and make everyon want to be my friend). And one of the things I talk about when I talk about light pollution is about how the places without light pollution are out in the wilds; the places I go tramping (or ‘hiking’ if you’re American) to. The sky is a place of perpetual wilderness, but too often we can’t see that because we are immersed in the small lights of our own creation. (that was deep). So, I loved that this book talked a lot about the value of wildeneress and stars. It also had excellent character development and lots of complexity. I’m participating in the blog tour for this book today, which I’m really excited about, thanks to Simon and Schuster Australia , who gave me a copy of the book.

Curses for the Booklover

Sometimes I wish I was magical and could lay curses on people. Not, like, deadly curses. But just enough ones so that it’s really annoying. (this was a feature in a book I read in the last five months but I CANNOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS BUT IF YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT PLEASE TELL ME THE TITLE). Anyway, if the person who you want to curse is a reader, here are some gentle suggestions. And if anything like this has happened to you recently, you might want to think about who would have a reason to curse you.

• The Book Slump Curse

This is a pretty basic one. Chant ‘you won’t finish any books/and no new ones will take your fancy/the book slump has its hooks in you’ five times while balancing a book on your head and sitting in a library.

• The Character Names Sound the Same and You Won’t Remember Who is Who Curse

Make a broth of ink and willow tree leaves, and pour a ladle of it out at all of the cardinal directions around where the reader lives, starting with East, then North, and so on. They won’t remember the character names and will be confused and it will seriously detract from their experience of the book. Mwahahaha.

• The Stress Induced by Getting Too Many Books From the Library and/or Publishers

Rip up a calendar and write YOU HAVE TO READ OR ELSE YOU WILL LET EVERYONE DOWN on the scraps of paper. Then find the readers TBR (or e-reader case) and slip the paper in between the pages. Guaranteed 100% success rate.

• The Wait Is This a Sequel Curse

Open goodreads on your device of choice, then shake your device gently, humming the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song and pausing every three minutes to mutter you can’t tell if it’s a sequel or not. After fifteen minutes, the information about whether the book in question is a sequel or not will disappear from Goodreads. Note: it will disappear for both you and the person you’re trying to curse, so make sure that you don’t get hurt by the curse. Note 2: You must be friends (on Goodreads) with the cursee for this to work.

• the There Are A Lot of Books in the World curse

This curse works by overwhelming the reader with how many books they’ll never be able to read. This is most effectively caused by leading them to a library, or a bookshop, but can also be achived by recommending them books in oblique ways. I recommend writing book titles in the sky with a plane, leaving slips of paper with authors written on them in the bookworms shoes, or writing a ‘found this awesome publisher/imprint with books you’d like’ text on the hour. This is a very kind curse, but remember that the agony of indecision will cause the cursed person to writhe in agony on the floor. The curse will only be effective if you run your finger along your bookshelves (or scroll the ebooks on your e-reading device) while humming their favourite song.

• the reading is not enough curse

do you really want to inflict some next level punishment on someone, what you need to do is find a book that has heavy fandom attached to it (six of crows, Simon vs., SJMaas, Illuminae, whatever you can think of), and get them to read it, then slowly–ever so slowly–lower them into the seething pot of fandom. Send screenshots of fan posts to them! mention the book in every conversation! Find fanart and buy it and give it to them. whatever you can think of (it is easiest to do this if you are also obsessed so that someone can share the intensity of your suffering) to pull them into the whirlpool of fandom. Chances are that they will stagger out three to five years later, emotionally bruised but forever your frenemy.

What are some bookworm curses that you’ve had to face? and have you encountered these ones? tell me about it in the comments!

 

 

Book Review: You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone

Here are some facts about me:

• • I’m eighteen
  • I am from two different countries
  • I’m a fraternal twin with a sister
  • I’m a violist
  • I’m religious
  • I’m fairly happy
  • I was rejected by some prestigious American universities
    All but one of these things (guess which one!) I have in common with one or the other of the sisters in You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone. And this book is so much. It’s not perfect, but it does what it does really well.

Just Visiting: the friendship story you need

I was feeling sort of book slumpy last week (mostly because I had been separated from all the physical books I wanted to read (by airline baggage limits and four hundred kilometres, can you believe?), and checked out a lot of books from the library to . Just Visiting finally got me back into reading. The story is as filled with sunlight as the cover promises. Anyway, I loved the depiction of strong friendship and the complex exploration of what it means to leave home for education.

The Responsibility to Promote Reading?

Hi Virtually Readers! Today I thought I’d talk about something which I’ve been thinking about lately (as opposed to talking about something which I haven’t been thinking about lately lolol), which is: what responsibility to we have as readers? and more specifically, as bloggers. Because here’s the thing: I love reading. I think reading is important, and I want more people to read. Should I be trying to get more books into people’s hands?

Beautiful People: Favourites

hahaha I thought I was gonna revise Lighter Places in April. That has not happened, alas (though I guess April isn’t all over yet and I have holiday rn so we’ll see). However I do have a good idea of how to change the plot to make it way way less cliched and therefore much much better so, in honour of that I’m joining in with Beautiful People. And it’s the last Beautiful People, unfortunately.Beautiful is hosted by Cait, of Paper Fury and Sky, of Further Up and Further in.

I Was Born For This

Hi Virtually Readers! I like to escape to other places, though I’m not good at doing it. I like books and cake and essays and blogging. I have never gotten deep into a fandom—I think you need a tumblr account for that—but I would still call myself a fan of many things. And I Was Born for This is a book about fandom. While I don’t see myself in the obsessive fandom that Angel has for The Ark, I still loved how Oseman writes about obsession and immersion in other people’s lives. After all, that’s why I read. (a copy of this book was provided for review by Harper Collins New Zealand, which was nice of them, but it has not impacted my thoughts because I knew I was gonna love it)