Some Thoughts on Audiobooks

For a long time, I strictly stuck to physical books and ebooks for my reading. Audiobooks had always been kind of a mystery to me, and I never thought they were really for me. I tried with an audible subscription a few years ago but ultimately cancelled it because I didn't use it enough and it was too expensive for what I was getting out of it. These past few months, however, I have really discovered audiobooks for myself. And much like I did with my post about ebooks a while ago, I want to share  my thoughts on audiobooks today.

I am currently studying abroad and only a select few of my physical books made the journey here with me. This ultimately meant that I had to find new ways to read during the months I'd be staying away from home. At first, I was sure that ebooks would take centre stage because I've always loved ebooks as an addition to my physical books and I even got an e-reader for Christmas last year for this purpose. Turns out, though, that ebooks aren't playing as big of a role in my reading nowadays as I had anticipated.

Watching the Movie Before Reading the Book

I am here today to confess to a terrible bookish sin that I have committed. I know it's bad, but I hope that you can understand and show support even in these difficult times. So here it goes: sometimes, I watch the movie before reading the book. Please take as much time as you need to process this admission of guilt on my part, and know that I will deeply reflect on my behavior.

All failed attempts at humor aside, I know this is something that is pretty frowned upon in the bookish community or at least goes against what a lot of other readers like to do. So today I want to talk about the good and the bad when it comes to watching movie adaptations before reading the book.

Why Ebooks Are Great

You know what I think is severely underappreciated in the online book community? Ebooks. When I watch booktube videos, everyone alway stands/sits in front of their huge gorgeous bookcases filled with beautiful hardback books, and when I scroll through my bookstagram feed, I hardly ever come across pictures showing a phone or e-reader displaying book covers. And from personal experience (bookstagram-wise), I think I know why: every photo of an ebook - i.e. my phone displaying the book cover - I have ever posted has gained a lot less likes and comments than my other pictures. To me, this is understandable to some extent, since physical books are usually a lot nicer to look at than my cracked phone screen, and they're honestly also a much bigger pleasure to photograph. But I feel like this practice probably excludes a lot of people from bookstagram in particular, who may not be able to afford buying physical copies of books or just prefer reading ebooks, and therefore don't have stacks of physical books to photograph. So today, I want to talk about why I think ebooks are great and we should all appreciate them more.

On the Topic of My Incapability to Write Reviews

Remember back when I used to review every single book I read on my blog? Don't worry, I can barely recall that glorious time either. Today, I want to have a look at why that is. Of course, there are the 'obvious' answers, namely increased workload at uni, general stress, laziness, etc. These factors certainly had and still have a big influence on my decreasing frequency in blogging in general, but I feel like there are more distinct reasons for why I don't review the books I read as often anymore.

On the Topic of the Use of German in Wintersong

I have already uploaded my review for Wintersong, but it seems I'm not done talking about this book. This post has been in my drafts for about two months now, but I really want to upload it because I already put quite a bit of work into it, so better late than never, right?

I've read a number of books in the past where some words or little sentences in different languages were included, and I always wondered whether the author either spoke that language or just researched it really carefully. In other words: were those sentences actually correct? With Wintersong, the situation was a little different, as the foreign language used was German, my native language. So for the first time, I was actually able to understand those italic words and sentences. And that's what I want to talk about today.

On the Topic of Changing my Blog Name

Hello there. I'm here to discuss something dear to my heart today: I have been toying with the idea of changing the name of my blog, and I need to talk about it.

When I first started this blog at the beginning of 2014, I was absolutely clueless as to what I wanted to do with it. I had previously written another blog in order to keep my friends and family updated when I spent three months in Vancouver in 2012. But after I returned back home, there wasn't really a reason to keep the blog going, so I stopped uploading. I still missed the writing aspect of it, which is why (although only a year later) this blog was born. I didn't really think very hard about the name (clearly), and so I just meshed my first and last name together to create schakarin. 

I don't absolutely hate the name; it's my username for pretty much all social media sites, so it seemed fitting at the time to name my blog the same. But now that I've turned (or rather: it turned itself, because when did that even happen?) this into a full-on book blog, I keep thinking that the title of my blog needs to represent that.

So I've pondered over what I would want to use as a new name for almost a year now, and besides the fact that I haven't yet come up with something I'm 100% happy with, I'm also still not entirely sure whether I really want to change the name at all.

One of the reasons for my indecisiveness is because I don't want to confuse people. To be honest, I don't think that there are that many people that even recognize my blog name, so I'm most likely unnecessarily worried. But somehow I'm still a little unsure. Do I have to change all my social media usernames afterwards? Are people going to unfollow me or something because they don't recognize this new name that I came up with? All these things are kind of keeping me back.

The other main reason why I'm hesitating is because of the whole issue with actually coming up with a new name. First of all, I don't have that many ideas. And now that I know and read quite a few book blogs, I'm scared that any name I come up with will be a rip off of some blog or another. That is the last thing that I want. Yet, there are so many book blogs that it's nearly impossible to find something I like that doesn't already exist, or isn't at least similar to something that already exists. This doesn't only concern the blogosphere. I would want to change my bookstagram account name as well so it's the same as my blog, but on Instagram the problem of finding something original that no one else already uses is even more difficult to solve. And don't get me started on twitter.

I also put a lot of pressure on myself to come up with something good. Well, not just good, but brilliant. I mean, I don't think schakarin is a very original and clever name for a blog, but then again I feel like I can get away with it because I literally had no clue what I was doing when I first started this blog. Choosing a stupid name was okay back then, but now that I've been doing this for two years - even though I'm definitely not a pro (yet – hah!) - I feel like people have expectations. You can't just go call yourself bookluvvahh_345 and expect people to applaud you. I mean, it has to at least be better than schakarin.

I also don't want to be limited to only bookish posts if I have a very clearly book-related blog name. I know that I can still post whatever I feel like even if the name suggests that this is a book-related blog but it has still crossed my mind that I might feel more restricted.

I could go on and on, but I guess what I really want to say is that I'm super scared and insecure about this, so I need your advice.

Do you think it's a bad idea to change blog names?

Have you maybe changed yours at some point?

On the Topic of Unhealthy Relationships in New Adult

Okay, so this is just going to be a quick rant about the portrayal of abusive/unhealthy relationships in New Adult in general and more specifically, Travis and Abby's relationship in Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire.

Beautiful Disaster was the very first New Adult book that I read, and I absolutely loved it. It completely got me hooked and I loved the relationship of Abby and Travis. At the time I just thought it was so overdramatic and unrealistic and over the top, but it didn't bother me or lessened my enjoyment of the story at all. I didn't really think further than that. But now today, I don't even know why, I deliberately started searching for negative reviews of the book and just for people who discuss the abusive relationship between Travis and Abby. It made me actively realize something that I've always known in the back of my mind but never really thought about, namely how very unhealthy the romance in this book is.

I'm not going to go into detail as to why the romance is unhealthy because I honestly don't think I know enough about emotional abuse and such, so I'm going to leave you with a video by Thoughts on Tomes and a blogpost I found by Molly over at Wrapped Up in Books.

I know that New Adult in general often portrays abusive and unhealthy relationships in a romantic way, and I know that there are tons of people who despise the genre because of that. And here I am, someone who reads lots of New Adult and enjoys most of those books. But I want to emphasize that I in no way support abusive relationships or think that they are okay. I just want to try to explain why I still read books like Beautiful Disaster.

So to begin with, I'd like to say that I've had a boyfriend for four years now (almost three years when I first read Beautiful Disaster and got into New Adult) and our relationship is absolutely nothing like the ones portrayed in Beautiful Disaster and such. I don't think a relationship should be like that and most of all I definitely don't want a relationship like that. I wouldn't want to know someone like Travis in real life and I could not stand to have someone so controlling and dictating as a boyfriend.

I definitely see how portraying emotionally abusive relationships in a romantic way in books is problematic. There are lots of girls who have probably never been in a (serious) relationship and don't really know what to expect. I know that I used to be one of those girls. Having them read books like Beautiful Disaster and wanting a boyfriend just like Travis worries me. That's not how it's supposed to be, everyone! It's important to emphasize that again and again. 

But there are also other types of readers. Of course I don't want to promote abusive relationships, and I'm not going to recommend Beautiful Disaster for its portrayal of love. But when someone can see that such relationships are not something to strive for and see the wrongness of it but still like the book, I don't think that's wrong either. Personally, I can distance myself from the characters and the relationship, overlook all the drama and not think too much about the book itself. I see it as strictly fictional and not something I connect to my daily life. It's a guilty pleasure. For me, New Adult is never going to be a genre I would pick up when I want something to think about. I don't think it's good literature and I don't think it's trying to convey important messages. But thought provoking, meaningful books aren't always what I'm looking for, and for when I just want to shut down my brain and read, I usually go for New Adult.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I just want to say that 1) yes, portraying emotionally abusive relationships in a romantic way is wrong and highly problematic, but 2) it's still okay to read and enjoy those books if you are aware of the problems and that it's a fictional and do not try to apply it to your own lives. 

Okay, so I'm just going to stop here because I'm having serious troubles getting my thoughts straight. I won't be able to explain why I enjoyed Beautiful Disaster because when I think about it rationally, it makes no sense to me either.

I would love to hear your opinion. If there are any other interesting posts etc. on this topic that you know of, please let me know. I really want to read/hear more about it and I'll definitely try to look out for signs of emotional abuse in the books I read in the future. I'm glad today has made me more aware of this problem.

On the Topic of Big Books

Hello there. As you might know, I'm currently reading the Mistborn trilogy and the fact that I've avoided picking these books up for several months, even though I've only heard the best things, has got me thinking. The only thing that kept me from reading the books sooner was their size. They're each about 600 to 800 pages long and that scared me.

I used to be the exact opposite. The longest books were always my favorites and I would think that the more pages, the better the book. But when I started to structure my reading more and tried to accomplish the goodreads reading challenge last year, I simply aimed to read as many books per month as possible. And therefore started to avoid longer books because they would obviously take more time to read. I'm getting more and more scared to commit to a big book or also a series and I really hate that.

This year, I intend to read several bigger books that might take me a while to get through - like the Mistborn series. But I keep putting it off. Somehow, I need to convince myself that I shouldn't be worried about getting through a specific amount of books per month. So I thought I would address this on here and maybe some of you struggle with similar problems?

I generally love how my reading habits have changed since I discovered the online book community - I read a lot more and most importantly, I'm loving it more than I ever have before. I've always been a reader but by discovering all these amazing books through goodreads and booktube and blogs, it's become a much bigger part of my life and I think that's fantastic. But unfortunately, I sometimes also feel pressured because I want to read as much as possible in order to keep up with everyone else - and considering some people manage to read 100 to 200 books a year, that's very hard to accomplish especially because I have university and work to focus on as well.

So, as I said, I started to avoid bigger books and I want to change that again. I want to go back to  when I read the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series, five books with around 800 pages each, and didn't worry about it at all. I just took as much time as I needed, about half a year at least, to get through all the books. At the moment, everything with more than 300 pages seems like a big deal and I tend to avoid those books.

I'm glad I decided to finally start the Mistborn trilogy - something I had avoided for almost half a year, even though the books have been sitting on my shelf - and I hope to continue on with this trend. Since I'm starting to get a little bored by all the YA I'm reading, I think it's the perfect time to start adult series that I want to read and the Mistborn books are hopefully only the first step in the right direction. I really want to read the Outlander series this year and I'm gonna have to come to terms with the fact that it's an eight book series with about 800 pages per book. Then I also want to read the Lord of the Rings books - maybe not as big but I'm sure it won't be an easy and quick read for me. And I just have to accept that it's going to take me longer to get through all these books than it would if I only read YA contemporaries. So don't judge me if I don't read as many books this year as other people (I don't actually think anyone would judge me but it still feels like I'm losing some sort of contest). 

Do you ever struggle with big books or 

are hesitant to start a new series?

On the Topic of Angels

Well, hi there. As you may or may not know, I'm currently reading the Daughter of Smoke & Bones trilogy by Laini Taylor. And it's got me thinking, so today I'm going to talk about something a little different on here (nothing deep or anything, don't worry).

Angels are these beautiful, elegant and graceful creatures and honestly, who wouldn't love a pair of wings for themselves? But when you start to think about it, wouldn't that just be the most inconvenient thing ever? Yes, the flying is great. And yes, they would look really cool. But here are some things I've thought about where I'm really glad there aren't two huge wings attached to my back: