A tale of fail and endless excuses.

Two months later, I am finally updating this blog to make more excuses and let anyone who reads this know that I plan to remain on this awkward hiatus until late May. This has been an incredibly difficult semester at school and rather than try to revive this place and put more on my overloaded plate, I’m going to officially give myself the time I need to sort things out before I return to blogging.

In the meantime, I’m reading as much as I can and following more blogs to inspire me. What is your favorite book blog? I need more on my reader page!

Thanks, and see you soon!

New Books! February 5, 2013

After working my way through the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series, I decided to reward myself with some new reads. Honestly, I don’t think I can go a month without getting new books, though I’m trying to hold off a little so I can catch up onall of the books I haven’t read yet. This is going to be a month of trying new things and hopefully liking them!

• Oryx and Crake is the first novel in a trilogy by Margaret Atwood, whose work I’ve been avoiding thanks to a minor high school reading trauma
• The Bone Season was published in the last couple of months by a brand new author. As with all YA novels, the reviews are mixed, but I decided to give it a try.
• Then there’s the Beautiful Creatures series, which also has very mixed reviews but it was recommended to me by a reader I respect so I’ve been excited to try it out. Hopefully I like it, since I couldn’t resist getting the whole set of for books!
• Last but not least I discovered The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms through Gabriella at Book Bound and was really, really intrigued. I’m always looking for a new fantasy series to start.

I’m super happy with this month’s haul because I’m giving YA books a try again (I tend to avoid them due to constant disappointment) and because all of these books are by female authors and I’m trying to make a conscious effort to discover and love more women writers.

Have you read any of these books/authors? Let me know what you thought of them!

Because two heads- or websites – are better than one.

Late last year I switched over from using Goodreads to track my reading to using Librarything, the reason being that I liked LT’s layout better and I found it easier to organize things there. While I’m still happily organizing my heart out over at LT and don’t intend to stop, I find that I miss the more social aspects of Goodreads. More people have Goodreads and it’s easier to track the progress of my reading there. As ridiculous as it may sound, I’ve decided to use both websites:

• Goodreads (kissthesea)
• LibraryThing (wangthat sea)

If you use either of those sites, please let me know your URL or add me and I’ll add you back!

New Books! December 30, 2013

This year I received a few books as Christmas presents and I thought I’d share them here. I love it when people buy me books and granted these were ones I requested specifically, I was really touched.

I’ve been wanting to read Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series for a long time now because I love Greek mythology. If I enjoy these I fully intend to read his Egyptian and Roman themed series as well!

A professor introduced me to House of Leaves years ago during my days in undergrad. I’m absolutely fascinated with the style and format of the writing and look forward to tackling this monster.

Okay, technically I bought myself these by they arrived around Christmas so we’ll call them presents to myself. I posted about these new additions to my Thai literature collection a few weeks ago and have already read and reviewed Many Lives.

I hope all of you out there enjoyed your holidays!

Welcome to Needs More Shelves!

After browsing and reading lots of blogs about reasing, I’ve decided to create my own in order to force myself to write more about what I read. I read a lot, but I’ve never been much into writing reviews and I’d like to change that. Here you’ll find my reviews and status updates as I take part in reading challenges.

Besides this blog I like to track my reading through LibraryThing and you can find a link to my profile in the sidebar. I’ve never taken part in a real reading challenge so I greatly look forward to what 2014 brings! For now I plan to use December as a month to get this blog set up and finish my 2013 reading.

Thanks for stopping by!