I have to be honest — I cringed when I saw this topic on the list for Top 5 Wednesdays. Fitness routines are not something that interest me much, and definitely not something that I pay much attention to while reading. I am not an athletic or coordinated person at all, and I tend not to enjoy fitness routines. I hate going to the gym or doing exercise for the sake of exercise. I prefer activities like soccer, yoga or swimming that are fun but active at the same time…not that I do any of these consistently. It was hard for me to think of characters whose routines I might want without putting myself in their shoes, and thinking about what they need those routines for.
I loved how Sam, in her video explaining this topic, specified that we are not limited to characters who are athletes. It can also incorporate characters who are good at a variety of skills, or even foodies! Personally, I think it is important for everyone to find a routine that works for them. Ideally, I would love to be able to eat whatever I want and not worry about burning off the calories, so it would be great to find some characters who can do that! The characters I’m choosing here, for the most part, are all ideal goals and definitely not realistic for me. I apologize for the lack of pictures this time!
Top 5 Wednesday is a meme created by Gingerreadslainey on Youtube, and is now hosted by Sam at ThoughtsOnTomes. The official GoodReads group with the weekly topics can be found here.
1) Buffy Summers from Buffy the Vampire Slayer
This was the first character who immediately came to mind when I saw this topic, but also one that I almost didn’t choose because of what Buffy’s fitness routine really means. It may actually be a bit of a cheat since Buffy, as a Slayer, is gifted with supernatural strength, speed and healing abilities, but she still goes through a lot of training to keep developing her skills with weapons, agility, and a variety of other abilities. I definitely would not want to be a Slayer with all the responsibilities that go along with that, but I would love to be able to handle Buffy’s fitness routine. I actually did a kickboxing class for a short time in high school, which seemed fairly similar to what Buffy was doing, and I loved it!
2) Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games
One of the things I enjoyed most about the Hunger Games was learning about how Tris and the other tributes got to train and hone their skills before being thrown into the arena. Katniss is a talented archer, but also got to learn a whole bunch of other survival skills that I think would be great to know. Actually, even if I could just have her archery abilities, I’d be pretty happy. Like Buffy, Katniss seems to be a character who is pretty well-rounded in terms of her abilities but in a way she is more impressive because she does not have the supernatural powers to help boost her. This is another case where I would love to have the skills, but not to be in Katniss’s situation!
3) Tris Pryor from The Divergent Series
I almost didn’t include this one because I was so strongly opposed to the idea of being in the Dauntless faction, but I think it would be really interesting to be trained to control fears the way Dauntless members are. Most of the rest of their lifestyle is much too intense for me and I actually would really hate to go through the training that they require in order to master your fears, but the ideal of being able to control them to that extent is pretty tempting. In theory, I think it would be very valuable to learn how to control your emotions in the most frightening situations, but I’m too much of a coward to actually go through with it.
4) Hermione Granger from The Harry Potter Series
This one probably seems like an unusual choice, but I think mental fitness is just as important as physical fitness. Hermione is definitely a character who keeps her mind active by reading and absorbing as much information as she possibly can. She also challenges herself to play chess, even though it is a game that she consistently loses at. Not only is chess a great mental exercise, but it is also good to push ourselves to do activities that are difficult for us and not win every time. Plus I’m sure Hermione gets some kind of a workout by lugging all those books around all the time!
5) Sunny Baudelaire from A Series of Unfortunate Events
Again, probably a bit of a weird choice but I picked Sunny because of her talent for cooking that develops at a ridiculously young age. For me, diet is an important part of a fitness routine and I especially think it is important to really enjoy what you’re eating. I don’t care how healthy a food is — if I don’t like the taste, I’m not eating it. Sunny develops amazing abilities to cook simple foods for herself and her siblings, eventually branching out to try new and more complex dishes. I would love to be able to cook simple, healthy and delicious food for myself (although I don’t think there is anything wrong with having treats sometimes!).
I will admit that this book is not the most realistic, but it was quite an entertaining read. This book is about a man named Lincoln who works as a security officer for a company, where his role is to monitor employee’s emails and ensure that they are being used appropriately for work purposes. In the course of his work, Lincoln becomes fascinated by conversations between two women, Beth and Jennifer, eventually falling in love with Beth through her messages. However, Lincoln struggles with what to do about his feelings since he and Beth have technically never met. Employees at this office know that their email accounts are monitored, but I don’t think anyone would assume their messages were being read fully. What I loved about this book is all the near-misses between Lincoln and Beth, where they could have met but didn’t. It was a fun book, although hardly the most realistic account of online relationships.
Social media is such a great tool for mysteries and thrillers, since so much of what we do online can be different from our “real” lives. In this book, Kate Baron receives a phone call from her daughter’s school claiming that her daughter, Amelia, has been caught cheating. By the time Kate arrives at the school, Amelia has died from an apparent suicide. Kate soon begins to receive anonymous texts telling her that Amelia did not jump, and she begins to look through Amelia’s texts and online messages to try to piece together what happened to her daughter. This was one of the first social media-heavy books that I read, and it was an excellent story.
This is a book I’ve mentioned a few times before because it was one that really surprised me. It is about an author named Abigail Donovan who is pressured by her publicist to develop more of a Twitter presence to keep her name out there while she struggles to write her next book. Abigail quickly begins to interact with one of her Twitter follows, a man named Mark, developing feelings for him. This is one of the fairly typical “online friend might not be what they say” stories, but it is handled very well. I loved how the author was able to develop her characters so well using mostly Tweets and direct messages, and the interactions between Abigail and Mark were great! This is a very quick read, but it was one of my favourite books of the year when I read it.
This is a book that I read more recently, and it was another one that really surprised me with how much I enjoyed it. Compared to other social media books, it has a bit more of a magical realism slant. This book is about a woman named Kate who was recently dumped by her fiance. Kate is obsessed with Facebook and she quickly discovers that the statuses she posts are affecting her real life, giving her the idea to use Facebook to go back and fix her relationship. I went into this book not expecting very much, and ended up absolutely loving it! It was a much stronger book than I expected, although the social media angle actually was not used quite as much as I thought it would be. I would still say it fits though, since it was a central plot point to set things in motion.
In a sense, this book is the YA version of The Status of All Things (and predates it by about five years). This book is about two teenage neighbours in 1996 who receive a free AOL CD in the mail. When they put it into the computer, they are automatically logged into Facebook, 8 years before the website even existed! The profiles they see are of themselves 15 years in the future, and the decisions they make today have consequences that can be seen when they refresh their pages. It’s been several years since I read this one, so it is hard for me to remember specifics. I just remember that I really enjoyed it, although not quite as much as Thirteen Reasons Why.
Honestly, this was such a weird book for me. It was one of the books that I was most strongly looking forward to reading this year, and it wasn’t quite what I expected. This book is about two young women who meet online because both are heavily involved in the fandom of one of their favourite TV shows. Gena, who is getting ready to go to college, keeps up a popular blog and writes fanfiction, and Finn is in a long-term relationship with a man who knows nothing about her online life. The two young women begin to interact online and develop a fast friendship, and even feelings for each other. I thought this book did an excellent job of developing the online friendship between the two characters and I loved the first half where this was the focus. The second half of the book took a bit of a strange turn toward a darker storyline, and the relationship between Gena and Finn became a bit weird. It honestly almost felt like an entirely different story that the authors were trying to fit in, but it didn’t quite match with the rest. It is still a great book and I enjoyed it though, and I think it is worth giving a chance.
This is another book that was a great depiction of developing an online relationship, including the risks. This book is about a teenage girl named Julie who moves in with her mother’s old college roommate and her family after her off-campus housing opportunity falls through. The family has three children: Finn, who is away travelling the world; Matt, the geeky middle child who is Julie’s age; and Celeste, an odd 13-year-old who carries around a life-size cutout of her oldest brother everywhere. Julie develops an online friendship with Finn, without ever meeting him, and soon develops feelings for him. However, she also tries to uncover what is really going on with the family, especially Celeste’s unusual behaviour. While the “twist” in this book was a little on the predictable side, I really enjoyed this book. I loved the online relationship development, and the very realistic way that it played out. Although Julie was an irritating main character at times, I thought it was a great book.
Aside from online relationships, another huge aspect of social media is fandom and online communities. In this book, Cath is a huge fan of Simon Snow (a Harry Potter type series) and has been heavily involved in the fandom, even writing her own very popular fanfiction. Cath is devastated to find her twin sister wants to branch out a bit more now that they are starting college, and that her professor does not consider fanfiction “real” writing. I really loved all the snippets of Cath’s fanfiction that were interspersed throughout the story, and the emphasis placed on how important the fandom was to her. Although I have never written any fanfiction, I do enjoy reading it and participating in online discussions about my favourite TV shows, music, etc. (and books of course!). I think it’s great that authors are starting to include online hobbies as a normal part of their character’s lives. This was an excellent book, and one of my favourites of the year so far.
This is another book where social media is not necessarily the main focus, but it plays a pretty significant role in the story. This book is about a gender-fluid teenager named Riley, who under the advice of a therapist, begins blogging anonymously about their feelings and experiences. When Riley’s blog goes viral, someone threatens to reveal who is behind it, forcing Riley to choose between giving up everything the blog has done to help, or risking everything by coming out. Aside from this book being a great introduction to gender-fluidity for people (like me) who are not familiar with it, I loved how it incorporated the blog and the idea of an online support group or community. I think it is important to show the variety of ways the Internet is used in our daily lives, and finding a supportive community is definitely an important one.
This is probably the most unusual of all the books here, blending social media and zombies. This book takes place in a world where humans have cured cancer and the common cold, but in the process created an infection that takes turns people into zombies that are only driven to feed. Since the usual news channels are all controlled by the government, the public depends on bloggers to post the truth. This book focuses on three bloggers: Georgia, her brother Shaun, and their friend Buffy who are following a presidential candidate on his campaign to post honest updates about the elections. I am generally not a fan of zombie stories, but I loved the social media angle on this one. I thought it was a really interesting way of showing the importance of critical thinking about the media and how bloggers can help give an alternative view. I found the book a little long and repetitive, but it was still a pretty interesting read and definitely a unique take on social media.
This may be a controversial choice since this book is viewed as both the first and second book in the series, depending who you ask. It was the first to be published, and the first that most people read, but in terms of when the events take place chronologically, it should be second. It may be cheating a bit to select this one, but given the limited amount of series I have read, I’m making an exception for this one. I have not completed the whole Narnia series, but this is by far the strongest and most memorable of all the ones I have read. This book is one of my all-time favourites!
It is practically impossible for me to choose a favourite Harry Potter book, but I still remember being blown away by this one when I first read it. As much as I loved The Philosopher’s Stone, I enjoyed this book a lot more. I think the real brilliance of this book is how it is actually part of a much larger plotline throughout the later series, but works just as well as a standalone. This book also introduced Dobby, and led to many of the funniest moments in the series! I have no idea why, but I’ve always found Ron’s line “Of all the trees we could have hit, we had to get the one that hits back!” hilarious. This book was the perfect blend of creepy mystery, fantasy, and even a great story of the relationships between Harry and the people around him. I’m not sure if it is the strongest in the series, but it is definitely a very strong second book!
I can’t emphasize enough how much I love this series! The Bad Beginning was an amazing introduction, and I thought The Reptile Room was just as strong. This book is a great follow-up, with the Baudelaire children moving in with their eccentric Uncle Monty, a herpetologist with a room full of reptiles to study. I thought this book did a great job of establishing the children as self-sufficient and compelling characters, especially given their horrible circumstances. This was also our first introduction to Count Olaf’s many disguises and plots to capture the children away from their well-meaning relatives. It was a very strong addition to the series.
Again, I’m not 100% sure this is my favourite book in the series, but I thought it was a very strong follow-up to The Hunger Games. I loved how Katniss and Peeta had to try and keep up the charade they started in the first book, and this is a book that introduced some of my favourite characters (Finnick, for example). I was a bit worried when I first learned this book threw Katniss back into the arena, but I loved how it managed to create a different Hunger Games competition that was unique and just as compelling as the first. I was equally invested in this story as I was in Katniss’ fate in the first book. I often find the middle book in a trilogy is too much of a transitional book without much really going on, but that was definitely not the case in this series. All three books were equally strong for me.
Full disclosure: This was a 4-star book for me, and not my favourite in the series, but I still think it is a very strong book from an extremely underrated series. In this book, Bobby Pendragon visits a world called Cloral which is predominantly made of water, which has different islands responsible for different things to benefit the community. Like the other books in the series, this one does a great job of presenting real moral and ethical issues in the context of a fantasy world. In this case, the main issue had to do with food supply and crop contamination. Later books in the series deal with animal rights, overuse of technology, drought, etc. Although I have never found this book the most interesting or memorable of the series, it is still quite a strong addition and I think the series in general deserves more attention.
This book came out just a couple of months ago, and seems to be receiving quite a bit of attention recently. It is an LGBT retelling of The Little Mermaid that is also partly inspired by Norse mythology, which seems to be a very interesting mix. Lately, I’ve seen some pretty mixed reviews for this book for potentially problematic content that apparently goes unchallenged. Having not read the book myself, I have no idea how the representation is but this kind of retelling sounds very interesting. I never would have thought of combining The Little Mermaid with characters like Loki, so I really want to see how that will work.
I just finished reading 
I’ve kind of pre-emptively added this one to my list before I’ve read anything by this author. I have Mark Edwards’ The Magpies on order from the library to read later on this year, and a few of his other books recently came up when I was browsing recommendations. I love psychological thrillers, but I can’t read them too often because they tend to really creep me out. This book actually first caught my attention because of the very eerie cover design. It may be a while before I work up the nerve to actually try this one though.
This book has been out for quite a while, but I had never heard of it until it showed up on my recommendations page. It was another one that caught my attention with the cover art. This book is about a young woman who abducts a child from the hospital. The synopsis did not say much, but it is a plotline that I don’t think I have read much before so it will be interesting to see how it turns out. The book is also on the relatively short side (just under 300 pages), which doesn’t necessarily leave a ton of room for the story to develop. However, it received a pretty high average rating on Goodreads (3.85 stars overall), so I think it will be worth a try.
Just to move away from some of the darker books, I also recently added this one after hearing one of my favourite Youtube channels talking about it. This book was recently mentioned by CeCe at Problems of a Book Nerd (in 
Is it too early to start adding books from 2018 to my TBR? To be fair, I started doing that well over a month ago. I actually have not read anything by Nicola Moriarty yet, but her sister Liane Moriarty has quickly become one of my favourite authors. This book is about two women who decide to create a Facebook group dedicated to women who don’t want to have children, setting tasks for the group to make sure they receive the same kinds of “benefits” that parents get (ie. leaving work early). It seems like it has the potential to be a very interesting book, but also has the potential to upset a lot of people depending how the story is handled.
It seems to be rare for YA books to tackle issues about getting into college or university, which is a bit surprising since that is often such an issue for people that age. This book is due out at the end of August, and although it is also tagged as a romance, it also seems to focus quite a bit on planning for the future, and what happens when those plans don’t go as expected. Although I am well past the college stage myself, and honestly never had much worry about whether I would get in, I think it’s nice to see a book addressing the topic. We definitely need more YA books where the characters aren’t stuck at age 16 or 17, but actually manage to graduate and move past high school!
This is the type of book that I usually would not be very motivated to pick up, but I’ve actually been enjoying some of the “Women’s Fiction” that I’ve read, although I hate that term. This book is about two best friends, Tom and Natalie. When Natalie’s boyfriend suddenly leaves her, Tom convinces her to spend 26 weekends with him, participating in different activities for each letter of the alphabet, believing that by the end they will have fallen in love. I’m not usually very interested in these kinds of stories, but I loved the alphabet concept and I think it can be very creatively done if it is done well. It definitely seems like a very cute story.
It wasn’t until just now as I started writing this that I realized this book follows a character from Brigid Kemmerer’s 
This is another book that is due out a bit later on this year, and it sounds really creepy! This book combines two of my interests: social media, and psychological thrillers. It is about a woman who discovers that someone has been keeping a Facebook profile with her name and with recent photos of her and her family and friends. It seems like a very creepy story. I have all three books by this author on my TBR, and all of them sound very interesting but also quite scary for me to read. Hopefully I will eventually be brave enough to try them.
I have not read this book or any other of Kate Morton’s books, although I have several of them on my TBR. I chose this book because the cover art was stunning. Even though you can’t see the house itself, the image on the cover hints at a beautiful, elaborate home. It’s the kind of house I might dream of one day living in, but probably actually would not like very much if I actually had to live there. I don’t mind bigger houses, but sometimes they seem a bit silly unless there are a lot of people living there.
This is a cover that seems a little more realistic in a sense. The cover art depicts some of London, England with an old-fashioned feel to it. I have not read this book yet either, but it is set in two time periods — 1960, and 2003. If I had to guess, I would assume the cover art is from the 1960 storyline, but I’m not sure how much London has changed since then. I actually think I would prefer the cover art without the couple in bottom corner, but it still looks like a beautiful setting.
This book has not even been released yet, but I’m already loving the cover art. According to Goodreads, this book is due out in January 2018. Because Goodreads is being extremely glitchy today, I’ve been having trouble figuring out whether this book is in any way connected to The Book Jumper by the same author, which has an equally beautiful cover. Either of these would actually be book covers that I would like to live in, and both seem to involve literally living in books. I think it would be amazing to be able to enter books and live in them, at least sometimes. Some of the worlds created in books are pretty scary!
I honestly can’t figure out what it is about this cover that makes me think I would like to live in it, but it was one of the few that really strongly jumped out at me and that I kept coming back to. I originally excluded it because I couldn’t see how to “live” in it, but the more covers I looked at, the more this one appealed to me. I think it helps that the colours on the cover are all basically my favourites, and I absolutely love the design. Actually, if I remember correctly, the cover art was the first thing that caught my attention about this book in general and made me decide to add it to my TBR (well, after checking the synopsis at least).
This cover reminds me quite a bit of Peter Pan, and the plot reminds me of Ella Minnow Pea. This is a middle grade book due out later this month, but it was another book where the cover art first caught my attention. I love the emphasis on the moon and the starry sky, but even the village across the bottom seems like it could be an interesting place to live. The buildings are all a little different and kind of cartoonish. Looking at the plot summary, which involves restrictions on speech and language, it is definitely not a world I would like to live in, but the cover makes it seem so peaceful!