About

Welcome!

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”

― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

This is my first real blog and the first post of said blog. My name is Meaghan and I am a 22-year-old girl?woman? I’ll go with lady sounds classier, living in Canada going to school and reading books. So far I have a B.Sc. in Psychology as well as half way through an B.Ed in Elementary Education. Eventually I want to pursue a Masters in School Counselling.   Currently I have way too many books to read and a lot of book on my bookshelf that have been read. I read about 2-3 books a week, depending on what’s going on (yesterday I read 3 books in two days so it fluctuates), and right now I am challenging myself to read 100 books in 2014 and keep track of them. For this I am using goodreads (goodreads.com/mamackin). On Goodreads I am more likely to keep track of my book progress, enter giveaways, and rate books on the stars rather than a full-blown review.

Because I have so many books that I am in the process of reading I thought it would be fun to share the reviews or thoughts I have about books. I like to think everyone views a book differently so I like to know what other people thought of a book and maybe give it a second chance read. In addition I know a lot of other readers can give me recommendations for future books to buy and read. There may also be stories/blurbs on here about things my cat Simba (see picture), because he likes to do weird things. We adopted him back in February from our local Humane Society and think he is the cutest cat ever. A little about Simba is that he is almost 2, according to his adoption papers he is a cream ginger tabby (we say he is blonde just to make things easier), and he absolutely loves boxes and papers, any new boxes we bring into the house have to be tested and papers must be shredded.

I have been reading books for as long as I can remember. My first ever favourite book was The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, which tells the story of a stuffed rabbit that struggles with the meaning of being real, I can remember any time we went on a vacation I would check this book out of my school library.
“When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”

― Margery Williams

I spent a lot of time reading as a child mostly Goosebumps, the Dear Canada journal series, and of course anything by Roald Dahl. By grade five I had read The Hobbit and was halfway through the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it was becoming a struggle for my parents to keep me entertained with books while still having them be grade appropriate, they let me read far above my age level because they knew it did no good to restrict me from books. In grade 12 I finished War and Peace and used knowledge from the book in a large paper for my English class. Books like War and Peace are generally what I read today, books that are going to challenge me with self-reflection or hundreds of characters that require a lot of concentration to keep track of. I still keep about 5 books started at a time and can put down any book and pick it up years later and still know what it was about.

The books I will be talking about on my blog will be a variety, I read everything; fantasy, adult contemporary, some young adult (YA), biographies, classics, and non fiction. I tend to stay away from science fiction unless its classic like H.G. Wells, as well as I usually stay away from YA unless it really interests me, I find I cannot relate to them as much (nor could I when I was the age of the characters in the books) however, there are a few YA that I could not stay away from and will include on this blog. So along with reviews I will also talk about book experiences or thoughts on book ideas, as well as share what books I buy (book hauls), and do monthly book wrap ups and TBR’s (to be read, which I may not stick to well). I will aim to upload three posts a week at minimum (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), and if I have more to talk about then I will add extra blog posts for that week. Right now I am on summer vacation from school so I for sure have the time, when my classes start back up I cannot see myself not having time so I do not think that will be an issue, but it can be redressed as need be.

“Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.”

― Mark Twain

Feel free to leave a comment with a recommendation, review or thoughts.

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”

― Carl Sagan