Liebster award

Tanya from A Book Paradise nominated me for a Liebster award, and to be honest I had no idea what it was until I looked at her blog post about it! Turns out it's where you get to ask and answer a bunch of questions and then spread the love so people have a chance to find new blogs.

The rules:

Here are the rules for this award:

1.  List 11 facts about yourself.

2.  Answer the 11 questions that the person who nominated you asked.

3.  Nominate 9 bloggers with less than 300 followers and leave them a comment letting them know they've been nominated.

4.  Ask 11 new questions for your nominees.

5.  No renominating the blog that nominated you!

(For a more extensive explanation click here)

While I like the idea of spreading the love and promoting fellow bloggers, I also feel like I'm spamming the people I'm nominating. I'm a little torn. So I've decided that I will respect this nomination and answer the questions, but I will not pass it on to more people. From now on my blog will be an award-free zone (I finally know what that means too! haha)

I am definitely not against promoting new blogs though! If I find a blog I love, I'll be sure to tell my blogger friends about it - I'll just do it on my own terms :)

11 facts about me

1. I can't go to sleep unless I read something. Some nights I'm dead tired so it's literally only a page or two, but it's usually more. I guess the childhood habit of a bedtime story just never went away!
2. My non-bookish loves in life are dance (I've been doing Bharatanatyam since I was five years old) and music (I've been singing Indian classical music for 15 years, and playing the clarinet in band for 8 years now)
3. I'm studying to be a bioengineer. A lot of people don't know what that is, so it's basically an engineer who makes everything you use in a hospital/medical setting (from sensors to sutures to regenerated tissue)
4. I never let my TBR get over 50 books, because then I know I won't ever read them all.
5. My family loves to travel, so I've been to 11 countries
6. I'm fluently bilingual, plus passable in French
7. My favorite color is orange. It's just so bright and happy and energetic! All things I aspire to be.
8. My favorite number is 256. I imagine a fractal made up of squares within squares (the engineer in me is showing...haha)
9. I'm vegetarian. 
10. Soccer/football is my favorite sport to watch. It moves slow enough that I know what's going on, and it has a lot more elegance and artistry than a lot of other sports. Loving the world cup happening right now!
11. I hate the smell of coffee. Blasphemous, I know.

Questions from Tanya:

1) Why did you start blogging?
 I'd been on goodreads for a couple of years, and I noticed a lot of my goodreads friends had blogs. I realized that I would love to discuss books with more people and talk about books outside of just reviews, so I decided to make a book blog.

2) Which one of your favourite characters would you choose to be and why?
Oooooo this is tough. I have a lot of characters I love to death, but I'm not sure I'd want to be them because they have such difficult lives. My gut is to say Liesel from the Book Thief, one of my favorite books. She loves books, I love books. I would love to be best friends with Rudy and Max, and have Papa Huberman play the accordion for me. I'm not so sure I'd want to live in Nazi Germany, but if I had to do it, I'd do it as her.
Another character I'd want to be is Maddie from Code Name Verity (what is it with me and WWII?). I would do anything to have a friendship like Maddie and "Verity", and no spoilers here but I'm not sure I'd have the strength to do what Maddie does towards the end of the book.

3) What is your favourite post to write about?
I really like writing my Way of Kings readalong posts - as I write, gears get turning and I make more connections than I had when I was just reading. They're also a lot of fun because I get to discuss theories with a bunch of fellow Sanderson lovers, and it's always fun to share the love of a favorite author!

4) Do you have any bookish pet peeves?
I HATE when people come back from the dead for no good reason. Dead people should stay dead. Don't make me grieve and be in shock and then 100 pages later say "whoops nevermind, I was magically saved/never died in the first place and you just didn't know it!"

5) When did you become an avid reader?
I have been an avid reader ever since I could read! I guess that puts it at 3 years old? I literally cannot go a day without reading something. I'm obsessed!

6) How do you organize your bookshelves?
This one's tricky. When I was little I went through phases where I'd want my bookshelf to be like a library and everything was in alphabetical order. Then I wanted to keep series together so I did that. Then the big books would fall over and crush the small books so I tried organizing by size. Now my bookshelf is double-stacked and there are piles and piles of books on the floor, so nothing is organized whatsoever.

7) Do you write stories or books? If so, which authors influence your writing?
I write short stories. I have most of them up on my writing blog, Inspiyered (which hasn't been updated in practically a year...you can see how well writing has been going). University got really busy over the past year so I haven't written anything since last summer, but hopefully I'll have more time this summer. Most of my stories have some element of sci-fi or fantasy. I'm proudest of Hall of Mirrors and Attaining Perfection.

I tried to write a novel in high school. It was crap. I decided the idea was worth pursuing and tried again last year, but I just didn't have time so I never got past the prologue. Someday...

8) How many book boyfriends do you have?
Uh...a lot? I'll just write down my most recent ones: Ahmad from The Golem and the Jinni, Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen (YES BOTH OF THEM) from The Gentleman Bastards series, Thorne from the Lunar Chronicles, and Froi from The Lumatere Chronicles.

9) Which fictional character do you most relate to?
There was this book where the main character was almost exactly like me when I read the description - seventeen years old (the age I was when I read it), knew French, "bookworm and band geek, plays second clarinet" and lost a sibling. The book was The Sky is Everywhere, and the main character was Lennie Walker.

10) What are some of your favourite TV shows and why?

My favorite TV shows right now are White Collar and Doctor Who. I just jumped on the Sherlock bandwagon - a tad late, I know ;) What I love about all these shows is that they are witty, the cinematography is excellent, and I love all the characters. The shows I get invested in are the ones where all the characters (even the minor ones) speak to me. I also like that they all have independent stories for each episode but also a story arc.

11) If you could turn back time to one memory in your life, what memory would you choose and why?

The happiest I have been is when I finished my 2 1/2 hour solo dance recital. It took a year and a half of practicing to learn everything and build stamina, and actually performing it was such a spiritual and exhilarating experience. I've never felt so proud or so happy!