Snowflakes and Spider Silk

It's been a while, but here I am! Grad school has been really intense, and I've had so many panic attacks/super anxious days because I've been so stressed and overwhelmed while I adjusted, so blogging took a backseat. Despite the mental health challenges, I am really glad I'm here, I'm learning so much, and I've made really great friends! I just set up a blog post reminder alarm on my phone so every week I get a nudge to put something up :) Honestly half the reason I haven't posted in over a month is because I was so overwhelmed with school and research that I just completely forgot about setting aside time for blogging. I'm really excited about #RRSciFiMonth though, so here I am! I'm gonna try and keep commitment low and have 1 sci-fi post per week so I don't add to my stress level, but if I get really excited and have more ideas I'll put them up! I really want to do a buzzfeed-style quiz, we'll see if I have time to put one...

I moved to Ann Arbor a couple of weeks ago for grad school, and it's so different here compared to LA (where I've lived for the last 5 years). Everything is so much quieter in Ann Arbor...well, except the freight trains that insist on honking as they go past. I like that it's a smaller town, and obviously because it's such a college town there are plenty of coffee shops and bookstores :) Last weekend was the annual Kerrytown book festival, which I found out about quite on accident as I walked down Main street. It was a really cute little festival, with about 50 booths ranging from indie bookstores to stationary/journal booths to art prints to bookish swag. I guess that's actually quite a bit, but having been to the LA Times Festival of Books in the spring, this one seemed tiny by comparison!   I got some awesome bookish magnets and bookmarks, and business cards from people who make bookish stuff. One of the business cards was stylized as a library due...

The Reading Quest ends tonight! I don't think I'll be binge-reading anything before the night is out, so I figured I would put up my final stats now! So I ended up at Level 5 with 200 XP! I also had 330 HP by the end of the challenge. I finished the Mage quest, just like I planned, but I only finished 1 book of the Knight quest. I did read a couple of books for side quests though. Here's a list of all the books I completed for the challenge: MAGE One word title: Foundation by Isaac Asimov Contains Magic: Flame in the Mist by Renee Adieh Mythology: Library of Fates by Aditi Khorana First Book in a series: Persepolis (part 1) by Marjane Satrapi Different World: ACOWAR by SJ Maas KNIGHT Verb in title: When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon SIDE QUESTS Respawn (previously DNF) - The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi Animal Companion (animal in title) - The Tiger's Daughter by K. Arsenault Rivera Mini-Game (poetry/graphic novel) - The Complete W...

I was on vacation for about a week, so that's why I haven't posted anything in a little while! Now that I'm back, I wanted to give you all an update on my first week of The Reading Quest. I ended up shuffling the books that I picked for the Mage, some of them I replaced and some I moved to side quests. I got a bunch of library books off of holds all at once, so I was trying to make most of them count towards the Reading Quest! And as always, I want to try to read more stuff by marginalized authors/about diverse MCs so I might end up shuffling some more if I can find more diverse books to read :) I also made a spreadsheet to keep track of points: Definitely spent waaaaaaaaaay too much time picking the perfect fonts for my headers HAHA So far I've finished two books for side quests and I'm currently reading two more for the Mage. The ones I've finished are The Star-Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi (which was okay), and The Tiger's Daughter by K....

Hello readers, I'm still alive! I realized that it had nearly been two months since I updated my blog...ooops. This was me for the last month: It's been a busy last few weeks, with everything from quitting my job, moving, having surgery, and getting ready to go to grad school! I am finally ready to get back into the swing of things, we'll see how well I keep up my blog now that things have calmed down :) I have been reading a lot of books even though I haven't been updating the blog, and I have read so many amazing ones in the last week or two. I have also decided that this will be the summer of re-reads ; I am making an effort to reread books that I loved when I was younger but have totally forgotten the details of, but I'm also rereading books I didn't like so much the first time around because I think things might have changed. After all, when I gave Name of the Wind a second chance, I liked it a lot more since I had a better idea of what to...

Sorry I've been AWOL for a couple weeks, I've been flying out all over the country for grad school interviews. This week is my last one (thank goodness, all the traveling and meeting new people is so tiring  even though it's a lot of fun), so hopefully I'll get back into the rhythm of updating the blog regularly. I also have to decide where I'm going soon...that's gonna be tough o.O I wasn't flying around this past weekend, but I did go to my first author event! I've been trying to meet at least one of my favorite authors for 5 years now but something always comes up last minute or I'm not able to get to where the signing is because it's 2 hours away on a Tuesday night and I'm a broke college student without a car. But this year, I'm no longer a college student and  I have a car! Double jackpot. I went down to Huntington Beach on Saturday to see Victoria Schwab on her A Conjuring of Light Tour, and I had such an amazing time. I wa...

It's been a couple of months since the last update, and we're just about halfway through the year. Thankfully I'm more than halfway through the alphabet! Unfortunately this means I'm hitting a lot more letters that are difficult to find at the beginnings of titles, so fingers crossed that I'll actually be able to get to them all :D A: And I Darken by Kiersten White (2/26) B: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson (2/8) C: Court of Thieves by Kate Elliott (1/12) D: The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater (4/3) G: A Great Hunt by Robert Jordan (1/22) H: His Majesty's Dragon (3/30) I: The Immortal Heights (1/5) M: Me Before You by JoJo Moyes (3/21) N: Nevernight by Jay Kristoff (6/18) O: Of Metal and Wishes by Sarah Fine (3/12) P: Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov (6/15) Q: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a world that cannot stop talking by Susan Cain (3/27) R: Rook by Sharon Cameron (3/7) S: Shadows of Self (1/3) T...

I finally graduated! I'm officially done with college! I'm a real adult now! AAAAAAAAAAH Okay so I just finished my first week of work! A lot of the work I'm doing right now is testing all sorts of things and that involves a lot of mindless preparation of different samples and waiting for things to dry or react or heat up. I was bored out of my mind until I realized I could listen to an audiobook while I was just waiting around. It was a fantastic idea...except that I'm going through audiobooks way faster than I expected. I finished a 12 hour audiobook in 3 days. Now I'm working on Way of Kings because it's over 40 hours long and will hopefully get me through a week or two :) I didn't realize how tired I'd be when I got home, because I'm used to a crazy-packed schedule with multiple 12-hour days when I was still a student and involved with different clubs and a dance team and research and all that good stuff outside of class. I figured that ...

Hello blogosphere, It's been a crazy couple of weeks (as usual), but things are finally getting back to normal and I'll have time to actually write more than one blog post per week! I just got my first real job, which is really exciting. I'm working part time until I graduate next month, and then I'll be full time and a real adult and I'll get to do real adult things...like sitting at home with a mug of tea and an excellent book. Or maybe a glass of wine and a really good book? Who knows? :) One thing I'm really going to miss about being a student is reading on campus...these benches were an awesome spot to relax between classes or get lost in another world. To commemorate my favorite reading spot, me pretending my graduation sash is a book :) The tricky thing has been adjusting to the additional 10-15 hours of work on top of being a student still, which is why I've been so bad about writing my blog posts. Also when I do have downtime I...

It's been a couple of months since I updated my A-Z challenge, so here's how I've been doing! I've made quite a bit of progress without consciously trying to read certain letters, and I even managed to knock out a particularly difficult one (Q)! I'm just a little under halfway through, which is great because I still have 2/3 of the year to get to the other half :D If anyone has recommendations for books that start with E, J, U, V, Y, or Z, please let me know! A: And I Darken by Kiersten White (2/26) B: The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson (2/8) C: Court of Thieves by Kate Elliott (1/12) D: The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater (4/3) G: A Great Hunt by Robert Jordan (1/22) H: His Majesty's Dragon (3/30) I: The Immortal Heights (1/5) M: Me Before You by JoJo Moyes (3/21) O: Of Metal and Wishes by Sarah Fine (3/12) Q: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a world that cannot stop talking by Susan Cain (3/27) R: Rook by Sha...

Sorry I've been AWOL for a bit! It's finals week now and I was hardcore studying last week. We also had a lot of final presentations, including a symposium where we presented our bioengineering senior design projects to a panel of judges. It was really intimidating because these judges were professors, physicians, and entrepreneurs, but my group ended up winning in our category so that was really exciting! The nice thing about finals week is that I use books as my study break, so I actually end up reading a lot more than usual. I just don't have time to write many reviews, but I will crank those out over spring break :) Anyways, here are the awesome books that are getting me through finals. I'll have full reviews of them up soon! And I Darken This book was so, so  good. It's a historical novel with absolutely no fantasy in it, so don't be tricked by Kiersten White's usual fantasy/paranormal books. I'm a little confused as to why it's...