Shaina Reads

I think my feelings about August can best be summarized by a recent tweet: The closer we get to September, the more I feel my motivation returning. I swear, there's an August demon that feeds on productivity. — Shaina (@shainareads) August 27, 2015 Stress and anxiety ruled the month, between buckling down to GRE studying, adjusting to a brand-new set of expectations at...

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"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast." - pg. 1, Everything I Never Told You I'm pretty sure that everyone and their pet cats have already reviewed this book, but, as some wise people once tweeted, you can spread book...

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A headline making the rounds on Twitter caught my eye last week: "Australian Parents Angry Over Books in Happy Meals." You can check out the article from GalleyCat (or the longer piece it cites) for more information, but the gist is this: an Australian children's health advocacy group is angry at McDonald's for its "Happy Readers" promotion. Instead of receiving a toy with...

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Good afternoon, class! I assume you're all here because you're ready to embark on the lifelong journey of learning how to Give a Shit™—or, in other words, how to care about what's going on in the world and what's happening to the people in it, particularly people who face inequality due to their gender, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, nationality, and more. Maybe...

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Bout of Books 14 has come and gone, and I did ALL of the reading last week. Pages read: 1,039 Books completed: The Book of Strange New Things (Michel Faber) and Everything I Never Told You (Celeste Ng) Books read from: Above + Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice (Adam Benforado), endnotes for Unfair (they're online-only, 300+ pages, and a psych nerd's dream), The Killing...

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Book images from Goodreads. Whoever says that social media is a waste of time and brain cells is dead wrong, because I got my last two book recommendations straight from Twitter: Station Eleven from a "what to read next?" poll I posted in a fit of indecision and The Book of Strange New Things from the fact that I was reading Station Eleven. At...

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All right, guys. You were so nice to me the last time I told you a bookish secret, and I've got another I need to unload. I was recently talking to a friend from college who's been doing stage management and light design since his graduation. He's about to start working on a new show: Me: What's the latest about? Him: Musical of...

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BoB button. All book images from Goodreads. Happy Monday, book buds! It's been another heck of a week in Shainaland. In the last seven days, I finally finished my first Jane Austen novel, Pride & Prejudice, for #AusteninAugust. There was sassy humor and unapologetic feminism galore, and I enjoyed it more than I expected I would. I also started and finished Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. I can't...

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The Austen in August event hosted by Adam over at Roof Beam Reader finally lit a fire under my butt and got me to pick up the very first novel on my Classics Club List, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Prior to this reading, the extent of my experience with the story was Colin Firth jumping in a lake and whatever this guy's...

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Rabbit Hayes is dying, and she's only got a few days left to sort out loose ends, the most important of which is the fate of her twelve-year-old daughter, Juliet. Thankfully, Rabbit isn't alone; her cheering squad includes her tough-as-nails ma, her frazzled but well-intentioned sister Grace, and her man-child of a brother named Davey, among others. To add to the mix, the...

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This is just a smattering of the list, so as not to irk the copyright police. Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and Bookish. Today's topic—top ten authors I've read the most—got me thinking about how I tend to give many authors a shake but rarely go back to read more by them, for better or for worse. I think this...

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Weekend Cooking is a weekly meme hosted over at Beth Fish Reads. Go check it out to see what else the blogosphere cooked up this week! Happy Sunday, everyone! About a week ago, I mentioned that my boyfriend would be going out of the country on a business trip soon. He left in the middle of the night on Wednesday, and I've been...

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Disclaimer: I received The Library at Mount Char from the publisher for review consideration. Thanks to Crown Publishing for giving me the chance to read it! "Carolyn, blood-drenched and barefoot, walked alone down the two-lane stretch of blacktop that the Americans called Highway 78. Most of the librarians, Carolyn included, had come to think of this road as the Path of Tacos, so-called...

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Fall reading is nearly upon us, and between NetGalley, Goodreads giveaways and publisher offerings, there's no shortage of awesome-sounding ARCs to choose from. Katie from Bookish Tendencies fell prey to all the shiny goodies and has no fewer than five review books for consideration this month. Just typing that sentence made me nervous; I've been trying to stick to no more than two ARCs per...

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I love it when a book surprises you. When I first started The Dust That Falls From Dreams, I worried that I was in for a bit of a slog. I like historical fiction well enough, but more than 500 pages about the nitty-gritty of the First World War and its consequences for three intertwined families sounded downright daunting—and it was, for the...

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