books

Book Gig: Headline Blogger Night 2017

13th February 2017 by Gemma 4 Comments

I was very lucky to be invited and be part of Headline‘s Blogger Night last Thursday the 9th, organised by their brilliant marketing team.

I’m going to be honest — I had to pause and think whether this deserves a blog post. I’ve been to a few book marketing events before and have never blogged about them, so why now? And then I remember the time I attended Jessie Burton‘s talk about her sophomore book, The Muse (out now in paperback!), on its publishing day at Waterstones Hampstead, and I so badly wanted to tell someone about what she related to the audience but never thought to blog about it! Doh.

So this is post is going to be the first of a “series”. I put that in quotation marks because I do not plan to blog about everything, but when I do wish to write about a brilliant author event or bookish event, it’ll be under the book gig tag/category!
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Bibliophile Fridays: 5 Books That Made My Heart Flutter

10th February 2017 by Gemma 9 Comments

Bibliophile Fridays is a weekly meme hosted by Whoo Gives A Hoot and Foxes and Fairy Tale. More information on the Goodreads group. This week was ‘five books that made your heart flutter’!.

I was moaning on Twitter about this prompt because I couldn’t get past three books! I read romances from time to time, but not enough to make an impression, the way the first three on this list did.

I was trying to make a post for #BFridayPosts but I can't think of 5 books that made my heart seriously flutter. Um…

— Gemma (@gemkarita) February 4, 2017

I already gave up and shelved the idea — I don’t have a lot of time to make posts, so when I don’t have a concrete idea, I move on to something I can put together quicker. But then an email made me think of books from the past: the ones that never made a dent in the bestseller list, or the ones known as guilty pleasures. So that is what this list is made up of, with the book covers when I first read them.
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From The Publisher’s Desk: Caraval

30th January 2017 by Gemma 4 Comments

Scarlett and Tella are sisters living on Trisda, a tiny island in the far corners of the Meridian Empire, with dreams of escaping their miserable life of being with their harsh and unloving father. It’s not exactly easy when he’s the most powerful man and the governor of their little isle, and despite being arranged to marry a man she has never met, Scarlett believes it’s the only way to become free from their father.

Not until she gets an invitation to come to Caraval, the carnival-slash-game-slash-show, where the audience is not just a group of sitting guests, but can active participants in the spectacle. Scarlett has always dreamed of going, especially since whoever wins the game gets granted a wish as a prize, and this is her only alternative for freedom — or she can get married. With the help of a mysterious man, Tella gets Scarlett and herself off from Trisda only to be kidnapped by Caraval’s gamemaster, Legend. The game, it turns out, is a race to find Tella, and Scarlett has to be an active participant, or risk losing her sister. It can get very immersive in Caraval, and Scarlett is finding it difficult to delineate between game and reality. Is it truly all just for show, or are the stakes for real?
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2017 Reading & Blogging Resolutions

19th January 2017 by Gemma 9 Comments

A mishmash of topics in this post, which is why it took forever to make up a title for it!
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Top Ten Tuesday: 2016 Releases I Meant To Read (But Didn’t Get To)

10th January 2017 by Gemma 4 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. More information, plus future topics can be found on this page. This week was ‘2016 Releases I Meant To Read’.

I thought I’d do these prompts at least once (or twice?) a month since I seem to fare better at having one on instagram. Maybe it’ll make me a more regular blogger!

So I kept my ears quite close to the ground last year when it came to new book releases, and I have more than a handful of books published in 2016. Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out how to balance reading with bookstagram and blogging, so I didn’t manage to read most of them (although I’m sure most readers always feel they haven’t read as much as they would have wanted in a year). I have to re-think my book purchases for this year, which is a post for another day!

Anyway, here are some of the books that were published in 2016, and I will hopefully get to tick them off the TBR list before the end of this year. …