Is the Fierce Reads tour coming near you?
Check out the May and June cities and dates at
You can also read excerpts and watch trailers on the website.
Now normally, I'd only be really excited if they were coming to my area, and you may have noticed that Los Angeles is NOT on either list! However, I'm fairly certain that if you beg (i.e. Tweet and comment on Facebook) while the Spring Tours are going on, Macmillan might consider sending their Fierce authors to your neck of the woods in the Fall.
At least, I'm totally hoping it works that way, so I turned on notifications for both
Twitter and
Facebook, haha :) Make sure you
@Fiercereads #Fiercereads and *ahem*
#LosAngeles! (or, you know, wherever you are, but hopefully L.A. :P)
Stay tuned tomorrow for a review of Ava Dellaria's Love Letters to the Dead.
Stacked is our sister-site's weekly mailbox-sharing feature.
Crikey, it's been a while! I've only acquired a handful of books since last time, which is good for the hoard, but I do also have a ton of news.
I'll try to bullet-point it and use lots of photos so you don't get antsy :) Sorry, not going to happen. I have a lot to say, I guess!
First off, I finally started hitting the bookstores near my parents' place in Manila. Did you know that in a recent study by the World Culture Score Index, the Philippines is the top 4 country in the world in terms of time spent reading per person? The US is #22 on
that list, though only a couple hours less per week on average.
In the mall near my mom's house alone there are at least 4 bookstores, that I know of anyway. One is inside the supermarket. In some of the malls the bookstores take up 3 or more floors! There's even one mall where I was getting so confused because the same company would have a store on the ground level and one on the third floor. Not just one company, but two different ones with multiple locations in the same mall. It's pretty crazy.
Anyway, here's one shelf from a store called Book Sale. It's basically a used bookstore (they sell some new books from local presses as well as magazines and assorted stationery like gift wrap and notebooks) and they are freaking everywhere. I was too embarrassed to take a photo of the store to show you what one looks like (I was already kind of lurking and surreptitiously taking pics). They basically cram everything into a tiny space, pile books on the floor, triple-stack them on shelves and tables with no real order. You just have to pick through and find something you might want to read. I think it's pretty fun! I ended up with Joan Didion's
The Year of Magical Thinking and Ann Patchett's
Bel Canto for about $2 each.
I also went to
Fully Booked at the GreenHills Promenade. I like them because the interior is kind of cool, they face out a lot of their books (especially in arts and design, where it matters so much!) though this isn't one of their coolest locations. Their kids/YA section was in disappointing disarray, but at least they have some nice huge display tables for new and bestselling YA. I even found some sale books for half off!
The thing they really have going for them is their selection. I just have to stop myself from going in and re-organizing their shelves. I will be doing a Shop Hop post soon (yep, bringing that back) where I will go into more detail.
Next up, I finally freaking finished the
Pasadena Teen Book Festival website! PHEW. I hope you'll take a look when you're done here.
Also, next weekend is the 3rd Annual
Yarn Crawl LA--our friends at
Unwind in Burbank will be hosting
Salina Yoon on Sat, Apr 5 from 11am-1 pm. There will be storytime, crafting, and snacks. My cousin and epic-level cake popper
Adri P. is bringing Penguin and Bootsy pops! Our very own
Thuy is running the show. Salina will show kids how to do finger-knitting, even though she admits she doesn't know how to knit for reals, haha!
Once Upon a Time Bookstore will be selling Salina's books, including the
Penguin titles and her latest book,
Found! Awesome yarnista and knitwear designer Heather Walpole of
Ewe Ewe Yarns created a scarf and hat pattern inspired by
Penguin in Love. You can
peek at the samples here and pick up the kit at Unwind during the Yarn Crawl! Last but not least, our favorite photographer
Katie Ferguson will be on hand to document the event. I can't be there, sadly, but maybe I can eat some cake pops while I look at the photos afterwards!
This weekend, I headed out to Glorietta Mall to meet up with some of the Filipino book bloggers (find them
#PHYAbookbloggers on Twitter). Thanks
Louisse (@
louisse_ang),
Kate (@
BookishBlurber), and
Jesselle (@
_jessellev) for hanging out with me! They actually had to run off to
Becca Fitzpatrick's blogger forum and OMG you have to go look at their photos because Black. Ice. ARCs. Who do I have to beg, bribe, or bake for at Simon & Schuster to get a hold of one of those?
My selfie skills were strained to the max, haha! You can see the rest of our photos on
my Instagram feed @frootjoos. I totally missed
Kai (aka @
amaterasureads) but I still hope to meet up with her and get a #PHYAbookbloggers t-shirt because how cool is that?!
Anyway, about the signing. I didn't get to go because I was going to have to work at 11 pm (I know, time zone madness) and the signing was at 4 pm. So what, you say? That's plenty of time!
People, this was the line at
National Bookstore at 8 am for this 4 pm signing:
This was the bottom floor of the bookstore (which has 4 floors I think, I didn't get to them all) at 1 pm:
Scheiße! American YA fans, you don't even know. I think we sometimes take these events for granted, since so many YA authors actually live there. On the other hand, publishers, this is where you should send YA authors. Pinoys read! They read widely. We love fantasy as much as we love contemporary. We love Andrew Smith as much as we love Cassandra Clare--yes, they've read and loved
The Marbury Lens. We are equal-opportunity readers. We buy books (libraries aren't really a big thing here) and we wait patiently in massively mind-numbingly long lines. We fangirl like it's going out of style (you would know how over the top we go if you had been here the year Michael Jackson died--I swear I didn't enter a single mall, jeepney, or restaurant that didn't have MJ songs playing or being performed by avid karaoke singers).
In case you're wondering, here's who I heard they want to see the most: Rainbow Rowell, Jennifer E. Smith, and Leigh Bardugo.
I actually really wanted to see Kate Evangelista (
Til Death, Entangled Teen 2014) but I had to work that day, too. Bummer! Her launch party looked like it was a lot of fun. I did buy her book at National yesterday.
National actually books auditoriums for some visits, where they expect way more people than will fit in their store. Example:
Anyway, I'm sad I didn't get to see Becca, but I have already met her 3 times, and hopefully she'll tour in SoCal when
Black Ice when it hits the shelves on October 7, 2014.
Crap, I just thought of three more book-related things to tell you. But this post is way over tl;dr already so I'll just leave you with this:
Folks, I legit fell off a futon when I read the email telling me to expect one in the mail. Like I wasn't excited enough to get
Ruin & Rising when it releases on June 17! Anyway, my husband took a photo of the package contents with my lil' Darkling-wannabe John Carter, but he refused to read me the chapter sampler over FaceTime. *frowny-face*
Hello again! I hope everyone is having a great week. Today I am going to recap that awesome event that was the first tour stop of the Fierce Reads Tour. We were lucky enough to be able to attend the kickoff at Mrs. Nelson's over in La Verne. The store is quite a bit of a trek but it's so worth it. The store is seriously stocked with all kinds of children's, MG, and YA magic. I wanted to buy at least half the store and only managed to refrain slightly.
So we showed up and the store had a whole wall dedicated to the tour. Books from all 6 authors (Anna Banks, Emmy Laybourne. Jessica Brody, Marissa Meyer, Leigh Bardugo and Jennifer Bosworth) filled the walls.
We sat way in the back like the troublemakers that we are. :) The picture above was early on and it filled up considerably before the panel started. Let me just say right now that this is probably going to be mainly a recap told with pictures because, bad blogger, I didn't take any notes and I can't remember too much of what was said. Needless to say though, it was highly entertaining and fun.
Guess what finally came out this week? You guessed it - Shadow and Bone! I've been waiting all year for this book to come out and I finally have it in my hands (insert evil laugh here). Alethea and I are lucky enough to live pretty close to
Skylight Books where Leigh had her launch party on Monday night.
We arrived pretty early which was lucky because it got packed. Skylight did a fantastic job of organizing the party. Attendees were greeted at the door by a lovely candy and champagne table. There were all kinds of tasty treats including chocolate kisses, Jordan almonds, gumballs and cake pops. As you can see below, the tablescape was beautiful as well. We didn't get to eat too many snacks since we were staking out seats and later the food area was super crowded. But everyone else seemed to be enjoying their candy and champagne and it looked wonderful.
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| dreamy tablescape |
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| all kinds of candy |
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alethea wants to live under this tree
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After some mingling and hanging out the event officially started. Leigh got up and talked about the book. She actually started off with a story about how she found part of a book that she had written when she was in junior high. It was about two fraternal twins, Jareth (sorry I don't know if I am spelling that right) and Blood. Of course, with a name like Blood, the girl could only be an assassin. Leigh talked about how Blood was a badass and how that's what she wanted to be like at that age. She also talked about her writing process and how she had to kind of trick herself into writing the book. She had that nagging inner voice telling her that the book wasn't any good and she agreed with the voice, telling it that she was just writing it for fun
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Sounds like you had a great time, even causing trouble in the back row! Hot dogs vs. baguettes? Do tell!