Guess who's back...back again...

Hi friends!

Guess who's getting back in the saddle and writing reviews again! After a long hiatus due to an awesome but stressful promotion at work, I have been gobbling up books left and right and am super excited to start sharing my recommendations with you all again.

In addition to posting here, I'll be reviewing books for a good friend who is starting up an indie book store. You can find those at https://www.blue-house-books.com/blue-house-blog. If you're a fan of comedy and true crime, definitely check out my recent review there of Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murdered by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark!

Lately, I have been loving contemporary romances (recent reads: Well Met by Jen DeLuca, The Bromance Book Club by Lyssa Kay Adams, Matchmaking for Beginners by Maddie Dawson, Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, anything by Jasmine Guillory), so be prepared to see more of that content in addition to all of my other favorite genres.

I'm excited to get back in the swing of things, so keep an eye out here for a new review soon!

Learning to Love Book to Movie Adaptations

I've challenged myself to a monumental task for the end of the summer: learn how to appreciate book-to-movie adaptations for what they are.

I used to be the person who felt personally betrayed when a movie adaptation of a book I loved deviated even the tiniest bit from the original plot. I went on a rage-filled tweet storm after leaving the midnight showing of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, because I could not comprehend how J.K. Rowling could allow someone to destroy her precious, iconic book. It got so bad that I couldn't enjoy the movie adaptation of any book I loved, because no matter how close it got to the original story, nothing was ever perfect.

This summer, one of my favorite books (The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows) was adapted for Netflix, and I decided I was going to put aside all of my expectations and enjoy it, dammit!

Abbie Reads Books in The New York Times

You guys! You guys! AHHH! My book recommendation is featured in The New York Times (or, at least in an online article for The New York Times)! Check out this awesome roundup of Best Books of 2017 from NYT readers (including yours truly!).

Reading is Not a Competitive Sport

Ok, we need to talk about something. I spend a lot of time on the internet, and I’ve been seeing a ton of content from a ton of book fans out there about what counts or doesn’t count as cheating when you’re reading a book.

The very idea that some people believe there’s cheating in reading is baffling to me, but I’ve seen a lot of articles about how audiobooks or graphic novels or short stories or rereading a book or reading middle grade as an adult somehow count as “cheating.” Apparently something about these choices makes them less literary or less important or just “less” than an 800-page hardcover classic novel for the first time?

I’m here with a groundbreaking announcement: Reading is not a competitive sport.

I Saw Myself in “Turtles All the Way Down” by John Green

A post shared by Abbie Ford (@abbiereadsbooks) on Nov 4, 2017 at 10:13am PDT

Last night I did something I haven’t done in months – I read for three hours straight. I was consumed by a book and couldn’t put it down until I’d finished. The book was Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages (and crying) because I’d never seen a book character with mental health issues that felt so real and so relatable.

Turtles All the Way Down is about a girl named Aza who has severe anxiety and obsessive/compulsive disorder. There’s more to the book – the action is driven by Aza’s friend Daisy and a quest to find a missing billionaire so they can collect the reward money – but at its heart, it’s a look inside Aza’s mind and what it’s like to live trapped inside your own thoughts.

When I was 18, I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. I missed almost a quarter of my senior year of high school due to constant panic attacks and overwhelming anxiety. Now, my anxiety is nothing as severe as Aza’s is in the book, and fortunately I don’t have any obsessive/compulsive behaviors, but Green’s descriptions of Aza’s “thought spirals” and anxieties were possibly the most relatable thing I’ve ever read.

Outlander Fan Theories

Ok, so, I’m a huge fan of the Outlander books. I’ve listened to the audiobooks probably four times each (which I personally think is impressive – I only started listening to them about two years ago, and they’re each 30+ hours long). Davina Porter is the most delightful narrator, and her character voices and accents totally make the story.

Anyway, I consider myself somewhat of an Outlander expert, and I’ve developed some theories about what we can expect in the last few books. Check out my top three below (I have done absolutely no research on these theories beyond reading the books, so I’m not sure if these are already widely accepted or already disproven, but hopefully you enjoy them anyway)!

*Spoiler Alert* - If you’re not caught up with the current Outlander books, you may encounter spoilers below!

Review: When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

A post shared by Abbie Ford (@abbiereadsbooks) on Aug 2, 2017 at 4:10pm PDT

What happens if you take a typical boy-meets-girl YA plot structure and give it a cultural twist? That’s exactly what we get in When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon, and it is absolutely delightful. When Indian-American teen Dimple Shah convinces her uber-traditional parents to send her to a co-ed computer coding camp for six weeks before she leaves for college, she can’t believe her luck. But when Rishi Patel approaches her at the camp and introduces himself as her future husband, she discovers that luck wasn’t the only force behind her good fortune.