Why You Should Pick Up A Victoria Schwab Book

The year was 2014. I was new to the BookTube community and JessetheReader was talking about The Archived, a series that he just discovered and loved. That was the first time I heard her name.

Later that year, PeruseProject started talking about a book called Vicious, which had anti-heroes with superpowers. It caught my attention. I loved superpowers. I loved anti-heroes. Why wouldn’t I love a book about both?

Both these books were written by the same person – Victoria Schwab. It took a few more years for me to pick up Vicious, but once I did, it solidified her as my favorite author. And here’s why I think you should pick up one of her books.

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NaNoWriMo 2020: Am I Doing It?

It’s getting close to that time of year again. No, I don’t mean Halloween or Thanksgiving. I mean NaNoWriMo.

If you’ve somehow missed all my previous blog posts about NaNoWriMo, I have a whole page dedicated to it. And if you’re new here or have managed to avoid my NaNoWriMo talk for the past six years, the gist is 50K words in 30 days, averaging at 1,667 words per day.

Since I first decided to do it in 2014, I’ve participated and won five times. Last year was the exception because I needed to focus on school and work, ending my five-year streak because I chose not to participate. As September drew to a close, I had to figure out if I was going to announce my novel or hold out for another year.

Long story short: I’m doing NaNoWriMo 2020.

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September Wrap-Up

I went into this month with a really ambitious goal of reading seven books, at least. After the slump I was in during August, a change of genres felt like the right move. Many people talk about how reading something they normally wouldn’t pick up helps cleanse the reading palette, which sounded exactly like what I needed.

With easy access to a library, I decided to make good use of it and borrowed six books and a graphic novel. Having only three weeks to finish my borrows also made me read faster, allowing me to squeeze in more books than I’ve read in previous months.

By the end of the month, I had squeezed in one last read, totaling at eight books for the month. It’s the most number of books I’ve read in a month and I’m super proud of that.

Classics That Have Stayed With Me

Most of us have probably read our fair share of classics in school. Whether you liked them or not, they’ve stuck with you. Quotes from Shakespeare, haunting memories of analyzing paragraphs, trying to figure out why they can’t write in shorter sentence, or falling in love with vast worlds that still feel relevant.

I read my first classic in third grade, and for a few years of my teenaged life, I read primarily in that category. Or rather, I read and re-read the same ones because I loved them so much. Once I got re-introduced to YA, I pretty much stopped reading classics. But my recent revisit to Green Gables inspired me to think about the ones that have stuck with me.

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Why You Should Read “Warcross” & Not “Ready Player One”

I’ve made no secret my love for Warcross or my disdain for Ready Player One. Both are sci-fi books that deal with virtual reality and gaming, but they have very different target audiences and entirely different approaches to talking about technology and gender roles.

For my Children’s Literature class – one of the last college I took in college – my final paper was about a book for youth that taught an important lesson. I chose Warcross because of the impact Marie Lu’s writing has had on me and because of what the book means.

Though both books are essentially about the same thing – a virtual reality world and game where everything is at stake – Warcross is the book you should read, not Ready Player One.

For the sake of the discussion, I will be discussing things that can be considered spoilers, though I will not outright reveal any major plot points unless they are pertinent to my point. If you’re completely against spoilers, I would suggest coming back to this blog post after you’ve read both books.

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