Link Love: Friday Faves

Happy Friday, everyone! It's been a hell of a week, especially for those of us on college campuses where school for the Summer Quarter has started once again (No, I'm not taking classes, but now there's all of these pedestrians to contend with that weren't there before...). 

At least it's the weekend, now, and while I may not be able to go camping with my family like I might have wished, at least the Pre-Launch Party for the company I'm interning for is this upcoming Sunday. Wish me luck! 

Out of Print has plenty of awesome new releases for summer tee shirt season... and they're now selling plus-size, as well! 

I've found myself rewatching the Emma Approved web series for a little bit of confidence inspiration, and stumbled upon this article from last year, about why it didn't do as well as Pemberley Digital's much-lauded previous success, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. What do you think?

I have a NEED for books on my legs!

And an adorable street library somewhere in the Greek neighborhood!

Epic Reads just released an informative and inspiring history of YA books, that has me wanting to revisit some of the old favorites featured in it.

Ugh, what a sucky title. I was fully prepared to disparage Bustle's choices with this "Book Club Picks for Millenials (Yes, We Read)" nonsense... until I saw how great they were. And, of course, Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series should always be praised.

This interview with Queen of Everything S. J. Maas was published back in February, but I hadn't gotten around to really reading it until this past week! (Warning, contains spoilers for all published works thus far in the Throne of Glass series!)

And there's always time for one of my favorite passages from Sylvia Plath, especially in comic-book form.

QUICK HITS 

• What I'm listening to: When I'm at the gym, it's a two-song playlist of Life of Dillon's "Dreams" and ZZ Ward's "Put the Gun Down" for a full 20 minutes on the elliptical. 
• What I've been snacking on: GoPicnic is basically a grown up Lunchables, my favorite being complete with spreadable cheese, crackers, salami, trail mix and chocolate cookie bites. And yes, there's an activity on the inside of the box. 
• What I've been obsessing over: The Seattle startup I'm managing social media for, Tiviti, is basically like a Build-a-Bear for body lotion, and right now, there's little I love more than slathering on some of our Peach Vanilla flavor. (Got a teenage girl who'd be interested in coming to the Pre-Launch Party? RSVP here!) 

What good reads have you seen on the feeds this week? What are your plans for such a lovely summer weekend? Let me know, in the comments below! 

Planner Progress and a Mid-Year Checkin : Planner-ed Out Perfect, Part Three

The last time you heard me expostulating on all the reasons why owning a journal is vital to my life, was back in August, when I had whittled down the selection process to exactly which kind of journal I was going to be investing in for the coming year. 

Dissatisfaction with my first foray, resulted in the purchase of a Whitney English Day Designer the following December, and I've been giddy ever since.

(The last time you heard me talking about journals in general, was only a little while ago, when Finals Week had so finely riddle my brain capacity with holes like Swiss cheese that I found myself tumbling headfirst down the rabbit hole of the YouTube planner enthusiast community, instead of actually studying.)

I thought that since about half a year has past since I've had the planner, and therefore, I've had plenty of time to give it some use and figure out the ways I like to use it.

And unexpected water bottle explosions inside my backpack aside, it's held up super well!

That's right, my old Camelback flooded my backpack!
But it's still kicking. :) 

SO IN LOVE WITH YOU AM I 

There's a lot to be crazy about in the Day Designer. I don't know how I ever got along with just a weekly-spread planner, because the page-a-day layout is where it's at. No pesky to-do lists on my phone for me! I've got it all in one place, and plenty of room for adding in other things I'm thinking about. 

What I mean by "Quarter at a Glance."
I just fit everything important onto one page!
Thankfully, the Day Designer has a handy pocket in the front.

Two things I've started doing that I didn't think about before, was tracking my blog upload dates on the monthly calendar, and tracking my meals. 

Beforehand, I just used a separate journal to figure out upload dates and blog posts for the month, but I would always end up forgetting it, and it wasn't laid out in a way that I could easily switch things around depending on the business of my schedule. I noticed that I wasn't utilizing my monthly spread for much of anything - because I like to be able to see my whole Quarter-At-A-Glance for that sort of thing - so I've just started keeping my update schedule there! It's made a world of difference in helping me decide what post to upload when, and seeing it all in one place has made it a lot easier to visualize what kinds of things I'm uploading each week. 

Tracking meals wasn't really a thing for me, until I saw YouTube user MaeBad using her Day Designer as a Fitness Journal. It's super effective, because it allows you to see at what times of day you're eating (about every three or four hours), and what kinds of stuff you're being tempted to eat at, say, 11pm (peanut butter and oreos). Now, I just scribble in a sort of meal plan in the mornings, and revise it throughout the day as needed. 

But yeah, the Day Designer is still the best thing ever, no matter how many YouTubers I watch exalting the holy grail of the Erin Condren planner. I'm a Whitney English groupie for life. 

Besides, you can always still use fun stickers and washi tape in your Day Designer, too!
(Don't be mean; it's not for you, it's for me. And I happen to like a lot of color. And tiny animals.)

... AND YET...

So, yeah, I'm in love. You'd think that I'd be happy and confident in my choice and that I'd never have to worry about picking out a new planner ever again, so long as Day Designers were still around? Unfortunately not. It's by no means a worry that they'll somehow fade away... it's that they're evolving.

That's right. A couple of days ago, just in time for this post, Whitney English and the rest of the Day Designer team made the grand announcement that they were entering into a new partnership with Blue Sky Planners, to release a special line for Target.

That's right! Now the planners that I love and cherish and have changed my life are now not just as adorable and functional as they have always been... but they're available at much cheaper prices and in twice as many cute styles and sizes.

DARN. IT. I guess that makes this to be continued...

What planner do you use? What did you think of Whitney's big announcement? Should I buy a Target  version of the Day Designer, or stick with my trusty Daily format? Let me know, in the comments below! 

Review: Belzhar (aka, WHAT.)

How could something so promising resolve itself so poorly? How can a narrative completely dismantle itself after the 80% mark? Who the hell edited this? Answers to these questions - and more! - I'd really like to have explained.... and here's why! 

Belzhar is the first young adult novel written by NYT Bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, who also wrote The Interestings. 

This novel follows the story of a girl named Jam - as in, Jamaica - Gallahue, who is sent to a boarding school for emotionally fragile teenagers in order to recover from the trauma of losing her boyfriend. There, she becomes a part of a five-person Special Topics in English class, which is said to be a transformative experience for the few students who are able to take part... only to realize shortly thereafter that it's because of the magical journals they're assigned to fill, which transport those writing in them to revisit the time just before their tragedy.

Boarding School? English Classes? Magical journals?! You'll notice a sharp disparity between the venom of my opener, and the sheer awesome that was that blurb. My sister certainly did, on our weekly tea date two weeks ago, after I opened the conversation with, "I just finished the worst book ever," and then proceeded to launch into a half an hour of lauding minutae of approximately 80% of the plot. As I paused to draw breath, she stopped me. "It sounds like you actually liked it!"

Oh, I did. I sat quietly on the floor of my room during a jam-packed Finals Week with one of my best friends sitting four feet away, studying dutifully at her desk, for a little over three hours. Well, strike that: I sat quietly for about two hours and forty minutes, until the silence was broken with a quick and disbelieving, "WHAT."

Let me make it perfectly clear: I was head-over-heels for this book. I am a firm believer in using journals as a therapeutic means of overcoming trauma, as well as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, which is central to the plot of the novel. The entire thing was one great, big, beautiful allegory for confronting the difficulties of your past by writing it out, and I was ready to start a religion on this thing. I was ready for a full week of allied posts, like how to start your own journal, and my own personal reflections on my lifetime of journaling. I was ready to GO.

And then it FELL APART so damn quickly I felt like it was a narrative device. You can honestly stake the exact point in the novel where I checked out, the shift in interest altering so violently I thunked my head against the wall behind me in sheer, unconscious frustration. The climax of this story so fully altered all of the beautiful plot it had been doing such a fantastic job constructing in the first 4/5ths of the novel, I almost DNF'd. Not a joke.

I'm going to try  and describe the ultimate point of meltdown as abstractly as I can, but hopefully those of you who have also suffered through the last bit of this novel will understand.

Here's the thing: you have a purportedly contemporary novel, with fantasy elements. Those fantasy elements are explored in the first person narration, and corroborated by other similar characters to agree with your narrator. It's a solid means of constructing weird stuff - like magical transportation journals - into an otherwise normal plot. That is, of course, until you do something that makes the narrator - the first-person narrator, primary point of contact for everything that happens in the novel - UNRELIABLE.

This shatters any believability that the fantasy element actually exists, because if the only person we know who can give us a complete description of the element is a crazy person (even if the existence of the element is agreed upon by others) there's no reason we have to believe them. This un-believability didn't just take me out of the narrative, it ripped me out backwards and threw me against the wall. I read the same page six times, trying to understand, because clearly, there was something wrong with my comprehension ability if something that was just so great wasn't making sense anymore.

But no, it wasn't me. It was the book. And I'm glad I read it... but I'm even more glad that I finished it, because for a little bit there at the end, I didn't think I'd manage.

Final Verdict: Really, I think everyone should read the first 80% of this book, because it's honestly awesome. Then just feel free to close it, and never read past your bookmark.

Summer 2015: What I'm Up To!

Every once in a while, it's easy to get wrapped up in all the news and demands of BookWorld, without taking the time to really appreciate what's going on in the RealWorld. So, just to give y'all a little insight into my daily doings, here's my plans for #Summer2K15! 

Itty bitty living space, but meh.
Harry Potter dealt with worse. 

Summer is here, and the time is right, for dancing in the streets! Or, reading books in the comfort of your new room. 

That's right: new digs. I've taken over my Big's room in Seattle, now that she's moved on to San Fran for an internship! My younger sister took a job in Yellowstone for the entire summer, so yes, I technically could have dealt my mother's heart a far worse blow than I did, but I'm a much higher percentage hermit crab than my sister, and this is a big deal for me.

I've also got both a job with UW's Student Calling program, as well as a social media internship with a Seattle bath and body startup company, named Tiviti. Beyond that, though, I'm still working with UW's Panhellenic Board, which means gearing up for the 2015 Formal Fall Recruitment season! It's going to be a busy next couple of weeks... just the way I love it. 

I'm also reading a ton of books, duh. I'm still behind on my 2015 Goodreads Challenge... but not for long! Like I mentioned in my Resolution Check-In, I'm trying to work more classics into my reader diet, but I'll still make plenty of room for the rest of my favorite genres, too. I've averaged about 25 titles within the past couple of years for summer, and I'm trying to step up my game, so buckle up for some quality content in the next couple of months. 

Selfie at the Gum Wall during Finals!
(Big that I was with, not pictured.)
#MissYouSara

And I'm trying to be more adventurous, and independent. That basically translates into trying at least a few new things a week! (Like, this week, it was riding in an Uber, and going to the gym, both by myself! I know, I know... baby steps). Some of the things I'm really looking forward to, are exploring Seattle more, partaking in some of the local summer festivities, and just making new opportunities for myself to feel comfortable and at home in my environment. 

Finally, I'm trying to edit my book. That's right, remember that novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo this past November? (No? Read my progress here --> here --> here!). I'm taking the first looks at it I've had since then... and who knows what'll happen after that, but at the very least, I'm hoping to have a semi-finished novel on my hands by the time September rolls around! 

Well, that's what I'm up to, for now. Sorry for the lack of review posts recently, but don't worry... we've got one coming up tomorrow morning! 

What have you been up to, so far this summer? Got any big plans, or adventures in store? Let me know, in the comments below! 

You Can Rent EBooks from the Library and It's Changing My Life

Let's get one thing straight: one of the only reason that this Resolution isn't killing me slowly, is the fact that I can get books for free from my local library... and, as I figured out about two months into this especially awful form of self-denial, I can get them in ebook format, too.

That's right... it's called Overdrive, and its a special program for libraries that enables patrons to rent ebooks remotely, through their Amazon account, and have it downloaded directly into their preferred Internet-connected platform, including your web browser (for those of you more used to reading fanfiction, lol. Just kidding).

Here's just a handful of the perks of such a great service:

• You can rent them remotely, ie, comfortably from your desk in Seattle. Like, I can be laying in bed with no makeup on and yoga pants on a Wednesday morning, or dead-tired after a long day of running around on a Thursday night, and I'm easily able to pick up a couple of new titles in either case. 
• You can get access to new, in-demand fiction quicker than in-person. Because it's in an ebook format, and the online platform still isn't as popular as checking out books in-person, there's a greater chance of you snagging that hot new title. 
• And if you can't manage to be the first to snag it? No one will judge you for the fact that you've just placed twelve different holds on various titles (which, as it turns out, is pretty necessary). 
• They've got audiobooks on file for download, as well, which is super convenient if you've got an iPhone or an Android phone, with their accompanying app! Need knew listening material before you go on a run? Download it instantly! 

That doesn't mean that there aren't any drawbacks, however...

• There are still a limited amount of copies to be checked out at any one time, in terms of what's available in the ebook pool for everyone's enjoyment... which are usually all the titles you want to read. Most of the new stuff, you have to pick up just as soon as its made available, or you have to place a hold (which is how the aforementioned "12 of them" comes in handy). 
• There's also a more restrained amount of books that are actually available for checkout, because they can't make the full catalog available for readers, but, like the library stock itself, keep things pretty carefully curated. A lot of classic titles are up for grabs, but the newer stuff... you may have to wait a little while. 

But really, that's it. That's all the drawbacks.

It is, for the most part, an incredibly useful service, and I've already used it several times, with both Katie Cotugno's 99 Days, as well as a couple of titles that'll be popping up on the blog in the near future (and one that I really can't wait to hear more opinions on... you'll see what I mean).

(PS. Somewhat belatedly, I realize this honestly sounds like an endorsement. It is - in the means that I effing love this program - but judging from the fact that this is available for free to literally everyone, I don't think I'm enjoying anything from it that anyone else isn't also able to get... so it's not. Get it?)

Does your library have Overdrive, or a similar kind of service? Do you use a different kind of rental service, like Oyster, for your ebook reading? Let me know, in the comments below! 

2015 Resolution Check-In: I Haven't Broken, but that Doesn't Mean I Don't Want To

So, by now you've all heard about my daringly difficult choice in New Year's Resolution for 2015... and since we're already over halfway through the year, I thought it was the perfect time for a bit of a check-in, don't ya think?

Well, then let's get the obvious out of the way first: I hate it. It sucks seeing so many new and pretty books coming through the year, from the books everyone got over Holiday Break back in January, to all of these "Best Beach Reads 2015" lists we're seeing now, and all I want to do is tear every title I see out of the computer screen and read it myself. I've been dying to read everything from Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train and other hot-novels-of-the-moment, to random books haphazardly piled in stacks outside of the local thrift stores boasting a $2 price tag.

My friends have had to put up with a lot of tweets from me much like the above.
Damnit, TWaTD, why are you so pretty???

But even $2 per book qualifies as spending money, and I've decided not to do that this year (like an IDIOT).

That being said, I'm feeling pretty good about the fact that I've been so good about saving money so far this year. I don't even want to know how much I spend on books on a normal annual basis, but I know that the amount of money I've been spending on things like my rent for my Summer digs, or a gym membership for the next couple of months, probably doesn't even come close to the stacks I've racked up for the stacks on my shelves at home.

It's also allowing me to take a good, hard look at some of my typical reading habits. For instance, the inspiration for the Resolution came partially as a result of categorizing my bookshelves - like I do every Winter Break... or whenever I feel like it - and I realized that I had over 250 titles I had never even attempted. Most of these were "classics," or "things I bought mainly because my Mom told me to and then let sit on my shelf."

The thing is, I love saying I'm well-read... but physically possessing a novel is not the same as mental comprehension. Instead of dusting off these tomes for perusal, I usually rely on a steady stream of YA and contemporary fiction from the library, my Kindle, or whatever publishers send my way, to occupy my time. I still read a lot of that, of course, but the Resolution has made me a lot more conscious of where I'm dedicating my time, reading-wise, and I'm hoping the downtime of summer will give me more of an opportunity to explore the books I already have on my shelf more in-depth.

And, of course, I've become great pals with my local library once again. Even though I live in Seattle now, it's always a good feeling to go back to my home base every once in a while, and pick up the titles I've reserved. I'm thinking about getting a Seattle Public Library pass, though, just to keep things a little more local... and, of course, give me an excuse to do a little more exploring in this big ol' beautiful city.

One of my absolute favorite things, and the one that keeps all of my reading material in one place!

One of the best things about Tacoma Public Libraries, though, is their Overdrive platform, which allows for me to check out titles directly onto my Kindle or iPhone... perfect for indulging in those YA and contemp. novels I just can't wait for, or listening to audiobooks while I'm on the elliptical at the gym. This program is definitely something I couldn't have gotten this far in my Resolution without... if only because I'm a massive Kindle junkie, known for purchasing multiple titles at a time in an hour-long bend (just ask my Little). Now I can keep up with my self-indulging ebook ways, but for free!

How about y'all? How are your 2015 Resolutions holding up? Have you ever found yourself in a similarly bookish position? Let me know, in the comments below! 

Review: 99 Days

It's one thing to have a character make a bad decision that sets in motion the string of events that leads the plot of the novel. It's another thing to have a character who leads the narration through deliberately antagonistic choices. And it's quite another to have a lead like this... 

99 Days, by Katie Cotugno, tells the story of Molly, who returns after a year hiding away at boarding school, to find that the reverberations of one bad decision are still being felt throughout her sleepy home town. From her ex-boyfriend Patrick - the boy she cheated on - to his older brother, Gabe - the boy she cheated on him with - it seems like everywhere she turns, there's yet another reminder of the past she tried so hard to leave behind. However, it seems like Gabe might just be willing to take the chance to make things right. Can one summer really change everything?

The premise intrigued me. Going into it, I was kind of rationalizing with myself, this is going to be a book about redemption, and this is how Molly turns things around. Everyone loves a good comeback story, right?

It all comes down to whether you can effectively make the actions of the character - no matter how bad they were - understandable to the reader. In that case, 99 Days is a success, because it does a good job at weaving the complexities of the relationships Molly has with both Gabe and Patrick, as well as their sister, Julia, and her own mother, into an organic environment that could have lead to the jaw-droppingly awful environment she lives in.

However, that still didn't make it good enough. It wasn't just that Molly made one bad decision... there were things she did as a character that made me grind my teeth and flinch. Bad, Molly! I have a seriously hard time thinking anyone could think a character like this was realistic, because I've never met anyone who makes this level of terrible decisions in my life.

The writing style was fairly general for YA contemporary. so that wasn't much of a redeeming factor. The characters were fairly well flushed-out, but then again, that was kind of one of the problems, wasn't it?

And final nail in the coffin, the ending was also a little too ambiguous for my taste, and it ended in such a way that I didn't feel like any of the characters were either redeemed or had learned anything. But hey, at least I finished it, right?

Final Verdict: This study in moral relativity wasn't exactly a great read, but from a technical standpoint, it was fairly well-written, aside from the lackluster ending. Maybe pass on this one, and find yourself a better summer read in Dessen.